Today, we gathered around and listened to Blue Boy play his guitar. It was very beautiful. He's VERY talented.
We were a little curious and wanted to learn to play as pretty as he does, so we asked him if he could teach us. Boy, you should have seen his face light up at that!
He said he had to teach us the basics of guitar first, but we would get to play soon enough.
Here's the diagram he showed us:
The guitar is made up of three parts: Head, Neck, and Body.
The Head is the part above the neck where the Tuners are. Depending on the guitar, the number of tuners vary. Some guitars have six, some have twelve. You turn the tuners to tune the strings on your guitar.
The Nut is a piece of material that holds the strings in place. If you were to take the strings off of a guitar and look at a Nut, you would see little grooves where the strings should go.
Below the nut is the Neck, sometimes called the Fretboard/Fingerboard. The Neck extends down to the Sound Hole. On the Neck, you will notice that there are little piece of metal all the way down. These are called Frets. You place your finger near them, but not on them to play a note. The closer to the body you get, the higher the note.
The big fat part of the guitar is called the Body. The Body can be made out of many different types of wood and comes in many shapes. Toward the middle of the body and at the end of the neck is the Sound Hole. The sound hole is where the sound is projected out. Next to the sound hole is the Pick Guard. The pick guard is there to protect the finish of a guitar from being scratched up while playing with a pick.
At the end of all the strings is the Bridge. The Bridge is attached to the guitar and the strings go into it by using Bridge Pins to hold them in. Above the Bridge Pins is the Saddle. This acts just like the nut does and has grooves in it to hold the strings in place.
After we finished with the anatomy of the guitar, Blue Boy decided it would be best if we talked about guitar picks too. He dumped out his bag of guitar picks and showed us how there were many different colors, designs, and brands of guitar picks.
Blue Boy also told us that the picks vary in thickness. The white one of the left is only .38 millimeters thick, the yellow .73 millimeters, the black one at 1 millimeter thick, and the purple at 1.14 millimeters thick. He said the thickness of the pick is up to the guitar players preference. He said that he likes to play with ones about the width of the yellow one, but we were free to choose.
Sometimes, the picks don't give a number of the thickness and just give you a word. For example, the three picks in the top row say L, M, and X-H. The L stands for Light, the M stands for Medium, and the X-H stands for Extra Heavy. The bottom two were much simpler and said Medium and Heavy.
Once we all had this information floating around in our heads, it was time to start learning how to play a real guitar.
Well, almost time. Blue Boy decided to explain to us what a Capo is. A capo is placed on the fretboard directly behind a fret. It raises the pitch of the guitar without having to tune it.
NOW, we were ready to play guitar! I was up after Mystery finished his turn. I grabbed my pick of choice and got up to play. I thought I did an excellent job, though it was a pretty difficult to play since I'm just a little pineapple.
Blue Boy noticed that the guitar was a little bit too big for all of us, so he went back to his room and came back with a surprise for us. He had a little electric guitar for us to play! It was the perfect size for all of us!
Well, Mom, it looks like I've completed my first mission!!!! I'm very proud of myself and all I want to do is play guitar now. Maybe I'll join a ToyVoyager band! That'd make me so cool!