Guitar Styles

The best sentence to define a guitar may be ‘the ultimate crowd puller’. Of course, guitar is a musical instrument with huge number of fans and guitarists often use various tricks to make you cheer till the end of each show. But, did anyone know about the various styles of playing guitar?

There are several genres of music which is used to play guitar and each guitarists may be an expert in any one of those genres. While playing guitar, you need to keep focus on the effects that are generally used with various genre of music. One of the most difficult genres is ‘Rock’ because it uses almost all the effects. Most of the effects like distortion, overdrive, delay, reverb, chorus etc. are often used with rock. On the other hand, the blues genre is less complicated compared to rock because blues players always tries to make things clean. Other genres of music in which guitars mainly used are Jazz, Country, Pop and Metal.

Few of the important and widely used genres are listed below:

• Blues: The blues style is one of the exclusive style in the American music. It is often the most affluent style among rest of the others. All the other styles like Jazz, Rock, Country, Bluegrass etc. are extracted from the blues style.

• Metal: Metal guitar style is originated from the rock style during 70’s. They are very loud, altered and produce heavy bass and drum sound.

• Rock: Rock guitar music emerged from the famous rock ‘n’ roll concept and has transformed to different styles during 1960’s. Basically, rock is associated with electric guitars in rock bands along with electric bass guitars and drums. There are many sub-genres for rock guitar like folk rock, country rock, jazz-rock fusion, blues rock, raga rock, etc.

• Country: It is a style of American popular music and is mainly used with acoustic guitars. Country music originated from the southern part of United States. It contains dance tunes, chants etc. and are used with string instruments.

•  Classical: Classical style of guitar uses fingerstyle technique along with nylon strings. In classical style, the guitarist uses his finger instead of a pick for plucking the strings. Hence, steel strings are never used in classical guitars.

• Jazz: Jazz guitar style was developed due to the use of amplification techniques in order to boost the sound of acoustic guitars. Jazz guitar playing style include comping and blowing with jazz chords and most jazz guitarists use archtop guitars.

• Folk: They are considered as the basic style of music since folk guitar style give birth to many other styles.

• Gospel: Gospel genre is a style of Christian music. There are different styles of gospel music using bass guitars, electric guitars, pianos etc.

• Pop Rock: It is a combination of pop guitar music and rock guitar style. Pop guitar style normally include very dull sounds and they are combined with rock styles to create the pop-rock style.

Apart from all these, there are certain other guitar styles like Bluegrass, Celtic, Surf, Funk, Flamenco, Reggae etc. which are used by many famous guitarists.