This is a sort of a shorcut page... part of the tunings heirarchy to help navigate the enormous number of instruments and tunings that go by the name of guitar. See Guitar tunings and its subpages for tunings.

 

Intro

The modern guitar has six strings tuned

 

• E-A-d-g-b-e'

 

and has a scale length of 24" to 25.5" and we'll consider all other guitars relative to this.

 

Variations include:

 

• Longer and shorter scale lengths
• Courses of two or more rarely three strings rather than single strings
• Fewer or more strings or courses, from four to thirteen and possibly more
• Variant tunings of the six strings or courses
• Combinations of the above. 

 

Some of these are probably far more distantly related to the modern six-string guitar than are other instruments that aren't commonly called guitars. So what's in a name? This page is concerned with all instruments called guitars and no others. Normally there's a good reason for this, but we're mainly interested in the tunings, rather than what things are called and why.

 

Scale length variations

 

There are two main reasons for varying the scale length of the six-string instrument: