How many starry nights did you spend learning chords, listening to hit songs repeatedly until you could finally play it with confidence?
Did your fingers bleed like Bryan Adams claimed in the hit Summer of ’69? When did you finally give up and set your guitar aside to gather dust and faded memories?
You miss it, don’t you? Admit it, you dreamed of standing in that stadium under the lights soaking in the adoration of millions! It’s ok, I did too! But we all grow up…right? Well, not totally and that’s why you should turn the lights up! It’s National Get Out Your Guitar Day!
Also known as National Guitar Day, it celebrates the magic of guitar music and its powerful impact on our lives. This day invites everyone, from beginners to experts, to pick up their guitars and play.
National Get Out Your Guitar Day Timeline
Rise of the Spanish Vihuela
In Renaissance Spain, the six-course vihuela becomes the leading plucked, fretted instrument, with a guitar-like body and rich solo repertoire that helps establish Spain as a center of guitar-family development.
Five‑Course Baroque Guitar Spreads Across Europe
The Spanish five‑course guitar (guitarra española de cinco órdenes) replaces earlier four‑course models and gains popularity for strummed accompaniment, laying groundwork for the modern six‑string guitar.
Antonio Torres Defines the Modern Classical Guitar
Spanish luthier Antonio Torres Jurado enlarges the body and perfects fan bracing, creating a louder, more balanced instrument whose proportions become the standard template for the modern classical guitar.
Rickenbacker “Frying Pan” Pioneers Electric Guitar
George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker develop the Rickenbacker Electro A‑22 “Frying Pan,” the first commercially successful electric guitar, proving that electromagnetic pickups can amplify plucked strings.
Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster Launch the Solid‑Body Era
Leo Fender introduces the Broadcaster/Telecaster and later the Stratocaster, mass‑produced solid‑body electric guitars that revolutionize tone, playability, and stage volume for country, rock, and blues players.
Gibson Les Paul Brings Sustain to Mainstream Rock
Gibson releases the solid‑body Les Paul model, based on concepts championed by guitarist‑inventor Les Paul, whose thick, carved body and humbucking pickups become iconic for fat, sustaining rock tones.
Guitar Becomes the Voice of Protest and Rock Culture
Folk and rock musicians such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Jimi Hendrix use acoustic and electric guitars to anchor protest songs and electrified rock, cementing the instrument as a symbol of youth and social change.
How to Celebrate National Get Out Your Guitar Day
Get Out Your Guitar!
Back from the attic? Ready to get started? Ok! Great! Let’s get rockin’. The first way I recommend that you celebrate is to get all your friends together.
Tell them to grab their guitars (air or hero version) and come over. Order some pizza, pour some drinks and rock away! No, you don’t need to practice for a month beforehand, the mistake will make memories!
Host a Guitar Playing Get-Together
If you can’t get your friends or family to join you, have your own celebration. Take that guitar and just sit with your eyes closed and think of all the dreams, all the fun, all the ups and downs that you have gone through together.
Relive those moments of glory. Turn all of your stress and worries off for now and just strum those strings and let the music take you to a place where you can be anything you want!
Make a Recording
Take advantage of the technology we have today and make a record of your time out of the day. Get your phone ready and record your songs.
Share what you can do with those who couldn’t come over for your celebration on YouTube, Facebook, and other social media.
Let them see how great you are! Maybe next year they will join you instead of staying away! While you are posting that video to your favorite social media (or all of them!), don’t forget to share it with us as well!
Take Guitar Lessons
But what if you’re new to guitar? What if you’ve never picked one up before in your life? How are you supposed to “get it out,” so to speak?
Well, one of the things you can do is commit to guitar lessons. You can pick National Get Out Your Guitar Day as the first day of a life-long love affair with the instrument.
If you don’t have a guitar, you can also venture out of the house to your local music store and try some out for yourself, both acoustic and electric.
Bring on the Nostalgia
National Get Out Your Guitar Day is also an opportunity for you to be a little nostalgic. If you used to play the instrument in your youth, you might want to strum a few of your favorite tunes, just for old time’s sake.
You can take yourself back decades and relive what life was like when your favorite bands ruled the airwaves.
History of National Get Out Your Guitar Day
The history of Get Out Your Guitar day is simply unable to be recorded. Ever since the first version of a guitar was created, man has desired to escape the mundane and take some time to dream. Bards and storytellers of old became the pop stars of today.
All with the ability to make music and take us along on their adventures. Whether it is the heartache of relationships or the ringing anthems of those who seek for change, the music sweeps us up and gathers us along.
Remember that joy that you had the first time someone heard you playing and recognized the song? Yeah, that is what today is about. That pure, sweet, joy in the moment. So run up to the attic or down into the basement and get that guitar out of hiding!
The guitar probably made its first appearance in 16th century Spain. These early models only had four strings and were much slimmer than the full-bodied acoustics that we enjoy today. The instrument was probably the descendent of the Spain-specific vihuela, which was a kind of local version of the lute.
Over the following three centuries, the guitar’s basic design underwent an evolution, slowly improving it from decade to decade. In the seventeenth century, artisans added a fifth string. And by the eighteenth century, we got the sixth string we know and love today.
The shape of the pegbox changed too. In the early days, it was similar to a viola. But people realized that they could get a slightly better sound out of it if they flattered and widened it, a development that led to the modern design.
There were improvements to the tuning options too. In the 1600s, musicians had to rely on clumsy metal tuning pegs to get the right pitch. But by the turn of the 19th century, engineers had replaced them with pins, often made of ivory, which could make tiny adjustments to the tone.
Early guitars didn’t have frets either. Performers would create notes by merely pushing the strings into the wooden board. However, designers noticed that they could improve the sound with the addition of metal strips placed crosswise on the neck, corresponding to various frequencies.
The guitar was a bit of a curiosity when it first appeared. People weren’t sure what to make of it. The lute and the vihuela were far more popular. However, during the 17th century, tradition string instruments went into decline. And by the start of the 19th century, they had mostly fallen out of circulation.
Part of the shift towards guitar was undoubtedly driven by early virtuoso soloists, including Fernando Sor and Joseph Kaspar Mertz. Before long, the guitar had become a staple of modern music and the instrument of choice for bringing people together for a good old-fashioned singalong.
National Get Your Guitar Out Day is dedicated to making sure that everyone can benefit from the humble guitar. The instrument has an uncanny ability to get people pumped about music.
Facts About Get Your Guitar Out Day
Ancient Ancestors of the Modern Guitar
The modern guitar descends from several Renaissance plucked instruments rather than a single invention.
In 16th‑century Spain, the flat‑backed, guitar‑shaped vihuela and small four‑ and five‑course “guitars” coexisted with the bowl‑back lute; over time, the multi‑string “courses” were abandoned in favor of six single strings by the late 18th century, creating the configuration still standard today.
How Antonio de Torres Super‑Sized the Classical Guitar
Nineteenth‑century Spanish luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado is widely credited with giving the classical guitar its modern form.
By enlarging the body, standardizing its proportions, and perfecting fan‑bracing on the soundboard, Torres dramatically increased volume and tonal balance, and nearly all modern classical guitars still follow his basic design.
Why Steel‑String Acoustics Needed a New Skeleton
Steel‑string flat‑top acoustics evolved in the U.S. when builders like C.F. Martin began using X‑bracing under the soundboard in the 19th century.
This crossed‑brace pattern was strong enough to withstand the far higher tension of steel strings while keeping the top responsive, and it remains the structural foundation of most modern steel‑string acoustic guitars.
How a Guitar String Actually Makes Sound
On its own, a plucked guitar string is too quiet to be heard clearly; most of the sound comes from the vibrating top (soundboard) and the air in the body.
Experiments in musical acoustics show that the string’s vibrations are transmitted through the bridge into the soundboard, whose resonant modes—coupled with the air cavity’s Helmholtz resonance—largely determine the instrument’s loudness and characteristic tone.
The Physics Hiding Inside Electric Guitar Pickups
Most electric guitar pickups are electromagnetic transducers: a permanent magnet wrapped in thousands of turns of fine wire.
When a steel string vibrates in the magnetic field, it changes the magnetic flux and induces a voltage in the coil (Faraday’s law), and the pickup’s inductance, resistance, and capacitance together shape the guitar’s frequency response and “voice.”
From Nano‑Guitar to Giant Ax: Extreme Engineering Experiments
Engineers at Cornell University fabricated a “nanoguitar” about 10 micrometers long—roughly the size of a human cell—out of silicon to demonstrate nanofabrication and resonant mechanics, while a Texas high‑school class built a 43.5‑foot, 2,200‑pound instrument certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest playable guitar, both turning the instrument into a platform for science and engineering outreach.
Teaching STEM by Building Guitars
The National STEM Guitar Project, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, runs intensive “Guitar Building Institutes” where educators construct electric and acoustic guitars while learning to teach physics, electronics, materials science, and CNC manufacturing through the instrument.
According to the project, more than 450 instructors and an estimated 20,000 students have been reached using guitar building as a hands‑on gateway to STEM.
