Tenor guitar
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| String instrument | |
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| Other names | Four-string guitar |
| Classification | String instrument (plucked, stringed instrument usually played with a plectrum) |
| Hornbostel–Sachs classification | 321.322-4 (Composite chordophone) |
| Developed | ca. 1927 |
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The tenor guitar or four-string guitar is a slightly smaller, four-string relative of the steel-string acoustic guitar or electric guitar. The instrument was initially developed in its acoustic form by Gibson Guitar Company and C. F. Martin & Company so that players of the four-string tenor banjo could double on guitar.
Tenor guitars are four-stringed instruments normally made in the shape of a guitar, or sometimes with a lute-like pear shaped body or, more rarely, with a round banjo-like wooden body. They can be acoustic and/or electric and they can come in the form of flat top, archtop, wood-bodied or metal-bodied resonator or solid-bodied instruments. Tenor guitars normally have a scale length similar to that of the tenor banjo of between 21 and 23 inches (53 and 58 cm).
The earliest origins of the tenor guitar are not yet fully clear but it now seems very unlikely that a true four-stringed guitar-shaped tenor guitar appeared before the late 1920s. Gibson built the tenor lute TL-4 in 1924, which had a lute-like pear-shaped body, four strings and a tenor banjo neck. It is possible that similar instruments were made by other makers such as Lyon and Healy and banjo makers, such as Bacon. In the same period, banjo makers, such as Paramount, built transitional round banjo-like wood-bodied instruments with four strings and tenor banjo necks called tenor harps. From 1927 onwards, the very first true wood-bodied acoustic tenor guitars appeared as production instruments made by both Gibson and Martin.
Almost all the major guitar makers, including Epiphone, Kay, Gretsch, Guild and National, have manufactured tenor (and plectrum) guitars as production instruments at various times. In collaboration with Cliff Edwards, Dobro built the four-stringed round-bodied resonator tenor scale length instrument called the Tenortrope in the early 1930s. Makers such as Gibson even used to offer the tenor (or plectrum) models as a custom option for their six string guitar models at no extra charge. Gibson also had a line of tenor guitars under their "budget" brand name of Kalamazoo. Budget tenor guitars by makers such as Harmony, Regal and Stella, were made in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s and are still widely available.
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