Guitar
Being a plucked, fretted string instrument, the guitar can trace its ancestry from the citole/cittern/lute type instruments.
In Renaissance Spain, the vihuella was more popular than the lute to such an extent that the lute was never an instrument associated with that country. The vihuella was closely related to the lute and shared similar sound-production and playing-action techniques with it but in appearance they were totally different. Unlike the half-pear shaped lute, the vihuella had the flat back that was to become a characteristic of the guitar and there were also signs of the beginnings of the distinctive waist but, in the vihuella, this was but a gentle incurving.
The vihuella was the instrument of the Spanish nobility but already by the fourteenth century an instrument recognisable as a guitar was becoming established. The nobility remained happily aloof in their exclusive use of the vihuella as the common folk began to adopt the guitar as their own. This fifteenth and sixteenth century guitar had four courses of strings with the bottom three being double courses and the highest being a single string. (The vihuella was strung with six double courses.)
Eventually, the guitar replaced the vihuella in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century. As the guitar grew in popularity its original four courses of strings gained another double course tuned and situated beneath the existing arrangement of strings. By the mid-eighteenth century the four double courses were converted to single strings and an additional single string was introduced above the existing highest course. The six-string guitar had arrived! (It is usual for the top three strings to be gut or nylon and the remainder to be metal-wound.)
Other changes took place. Notable amongst them were those associated with the peg box, the tuning pegs, the frets and the body.
In earlier guitars the peg box resembled that of the violin but sometime around the beginning of the seventeenth century this style was abandoned and replaced by the flat peg box recognisable in the modern-day guitar.
During the eighteenth century the gut-tied frets were replaced by ivory, horn or metal and metal screws replaced the wooden tuning pegs.
The earlier guitars had narrow, deep resonance chambers but in the nineteenth century, makers adopted the practice of making broader, shallower sound boxes with a thinner belly (sound board) than previously. Improvements were also made to the way in which the neck was secured to the body with a consequential beneficial effect upon string tensioning. A guitar from that period would be easily recognised as the modern "Spanish" or "Classical" guitar; either name is acceptable.
Not recognised as an orchestral instrument, the guitar does have a repertoire containing concerti and other orchestral work. The guitar is hardly ever used in chamber music and it is as a solo instrument that the guitar is justifiably renowned. Artists such as Andres Segovia, Julian Bream and John Williams have all presented the guitar as a significant instrument in the twentieth century.
Also in the twentieth century, the guitar has been a constant and important member of jazz, rock and pop ensembles. In this context, the guitar body is sometimes solid with no need for resonance since the sound is created and amplified electronically.