Classical and electric guitar

The body of a high-quality concert guitar is usually made of rosewood for the sides and back and spruce or red cedar for the top. The protected Rio rosewood was particularly sought after for the back and sides. Today, various types of mahogany, ovangkol, but also domestic woods such as maple or cherry are used for the construction of the back and sides. The neck is usually made of cedro, maple or mahogany, the fingerboard of ebony or rosewood.
The guitar strings are made of nylon silk on the bass side (D, A and E strings, occasionally also the g string) and wound with copper or silver wire, and of solid nylon on the treble side. For some time now polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) has also been used (so-called carbon strings). This material has a higher density than nylon, so the strings are thinner with the same pitch and therefore "livelier" and more responsive. Historic guitars are sometimes still played with gut strings, which are nowadays made from sheep gut.
The first concert guitars of today's size and design are found in Spain from the middle of the 19th century. The neck of these instruments was no longer inserted after the soundbox was completed, as is still customary today with stringed instruments. The most important guitar makers of that era were Antonio de Torres and Gaetano Guadagnini, a relative of the famous violin maker. In Germany, Hermann Hauser (I) was the main person to implement and spread the Torres design.

An electric guitar (also called electric guitar or electric guitar) is a guitar developed for electric sound pickup. In contrast to the acoustic guitar, it does not primarily rely on an acoustic sound box to amplify the string vibrations. This makes it possible to achieve different designs, which among other things give many electric guitars a particularly easy playability.
The development of the electric guitar was driven by the desire to give the instrument greater volume. This became necessary because guitarists in jazz with purely acoustic instruments had difficulty asserting themselves against wind instruments or even a single piano. Thus, the electric guitar gradually evolved from the well-known acoustic guitar. Therefore, the term electric guitar is understood in a broader sense to cover the entire range of acoustic (jazz) guitars with attached pickups on the one hand and guitars without resonators on the other. Between these two extremes, there are numerous hybrid forms that have persisted to this day and are usually referred to as "semi-acoustic" electric guitars or semi-resonant guitars.

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