Electric Guitar Body Anatomy


Anatomy of an electric Guitar

The electric guitar is not complex, but the pieces of the electric guitar must fit together and match each other perfectly or the guitar will never reach its potential.

Here are some of the most important ingredients:

1. Electric Guitar Fingerboard

Guitar wood- maple tree The fingerboard covers the face of the neck and provides a playing surface for the guitarist The fingerboard can be made of any suitable material but they are usually made of rosewood or maple. Frets are set into the fingerboard to enable the guitarist to find and stop the string at the desired point quickly.

The fingerboard can have 21. 22 or 24 frets, depending on the model of guitar. Fingerboard material also influences the tone of the guitar. Maple and ebony produce a brighter tone while rosewood has a darker tone. These days, some manufacturers are making fingerboards from synthetic materials such as graphite.

2. Electric Guitar Body

Guitar wood- maple tree

This is usually wooden, made of ash. elder or basswood depending on the origin of the instrument. Expensive US- produced guitars are made of rare hardwoods such as mahogany and maple. As good-quality wood becomes harder to obtain, guitars are nearly always made of one or more pieces of wood sandwiched together to create a body of the required depth. Modern guitar manufacturers such as Ibanez have created guitars with no wooden parts, while Gibson has a range of Smart Wood' guitars made from wood cut from sustainable forests.

3. Electric Guitar Nut and Frets

The nut of the guitar is placed at the end of the fingerboard just below the headstock. where it provides one of the two anchor points (the other being the bridge saddle) for the string. Nickel silver frets are fitted to the fingerboard underneath the strings. The frets are placed at precise points on the fingerboard to enable the guitarist to play in tune. Frets wear down over time and change the tone of the guitar. The distance between the nut and the bridge saddle is extremely important and dictates the scale of the guitar. Fender instruments have a 25-in (63.5-cm) scale while Gibson instruments have a slightly smaller 24-in (61-cm) scale.

4. Electric Guitar Hardware

Pickups, bridge and electronics are fundamental to the tone of the electric guitar. Single-coil pickups produce a very bnght sound: twin-coil pickups have a warmer, less defined sound. Bridges are usually adjustable, which lets you adjust the action (height) of the strings and help keep the guitar's intonation true. Bridge assemblies may be either fixed or vibrato (tremolo) models Vibrato models enable the player to produce amazing sounds by pressing on the vibrato arm to lower the tension in the strings. Tension is returned when the player releases the arm and springs pull the bridge back into place. Certain guitars also have a hardware tailpiece, where the strings terminate, rather than a string-through design, in which strings are fed through the back of the guitar and over the bridge before being stretched to the tuners on the headstock.

5. Electric Guitar Neck

The neck of the guitar is often made from dense maple or ash. The wood needs to be hard and stable as the neck is under tension. Depending on the model of guitar the neck may either be joined to the body with three or four long screws, or by a traditional wood joint and string glue. If the neck is screwed to the body it is called a bolt-on neck-. Necks that are jointed to the body are called set-in' Bolted and jointed necks have different tonal characteristics: bolted necks are thought to be brighter, while set-in neck guitars have a rounded tone.