Types of Jazz Guitars

Types of Jazz Guitars
Hello! My name is Dustin, and I am going to talk about the traditional jazz guitar, often referred to as the jazz box, the jazz arch top or hollow body guitar. The traditional jazz guitar comes in one or two styles: the wide body or the hollow body jazz arch top and the thinner semi-hollow or 335 style jazz arch top. The wide body or the hollow body guitar uses the same principles as your standard acoustic guitar, where you have a broad, somewhat thin top with a sound hole of some kind; and in jazz guitars you usually see this F hole style sound hole; you will also see those types of sound holes in violins and upright basses. These sound holes help to project the sound of the string vibrations that resonates through the body of the guitar. In your standard acoustic guitar, the sound holes often are larger and more predominant, because natural resonants is often the only way to sound to the string vibration gets from here to the ears. In jazz guitars you will also see usually one or two pickups, these pickups actually help to pick up the vibration of the strings and transfer it out, your output to an amplifier. Now you’re probably wondering why have a resonating top and projecting sound holes when the vibration of the string is going out your pickup here out to an amplifier. Well, the resonating body of these guitars actually helps to give the way the string vibrates a subtle character or tone. So this tone is actually captured by the pickup and sent out to the amplifier. One important thing to note about the wide body jazz guitar is that, with such broad resonating surfaces in such a thick pocket of air inside of it, it often falls prey to the feedback problems, so you usually see these guitars used in small combo settings or solo jazz guitar settings, where competing with other members of the band for volume is not as much of an issue. Now the thinner 335 style semi-hollow, arch top uses the same resonating principles as the wide body hollow body, except it usually has a thick solid piece of wood running down the middle of the guitar between front and back resonating surfaces. This along with a smaller pocket of air inside the guitar makes it less susceptible to feedback problems and a better choice for louder jazz performances like big band, fusion, or bop.