60 free Guitar trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
51 free guitar trivia questions with answers. From a fireplace mantel that became Brian May's Red Special to the black Stratocaster David Gilmour played on "Comfortably Numb", the guitar has some of the best backstories in music. This quiz runs through all of it: the anatomy and standard tuning, the luthiers who invented the modern instrument, the Fender and Gibson models that shaped rock and roll, and the individual guitars with names and legends of their own. It is built for guitar players, music-trivia nights and anyone who has argued about Fender versus Gibson. Roughly a third of the questions are gentle warm-ups (how many strings, which two companies made the Stratocaster and the Les Paul); the rest reward people who know their korina from their mahogany, who designed the Telecaster, and why B.B. King named every guitar Lucille. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the instrument, the makers and the specific guitars, and the source sentence appears under each question so you can win the argument on the spot.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many strings does a standard guitar have?
Six
Twelve-string guitars pair the strings into six courses, the top two in unison and the rest in octaves.
Q 02What are the notes of standard guitar tuning, from the lowest string to the highest?
E A D G B E
A common mnemonic is "Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie".
Q 03Which fret divides a guitar's scale length exactly in half, sounding an octave above the open string?
The 12th
Each block of twelve frets represents one octave.
Q 04In "drop D" tuning, which of the six is lowered a whole step?
The sixth
It creates an open power chord on the bottom three strings, which is why it is a metal staple.
Q 05Keith Richards plays "Honky Tonk Women" and "Brown Sugar" in which five-string tuning?
Open G
He removes the lowest string entirely, playing G-D-G-B-D.
Q 06The 19th-century Spanish maker who set the size and fan-bracing of the modern classical guitar was whom?
Antonio de Torres
He enlarged the body and invented the fan-braced top, around 1850.
Q 07The robust X-bracing of flat-top steel-string guitars is credited to which German-American luthier?
C.F. Martin
His firm, founded in 1833, is the oldest surviving American guitar maker.
Q 08In what year was the oldest surviving US guitar maker, known for the D-28 and D-18, founded?
1833
It began in New York City and moved to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where it has stayed ever since.
Q 09The violin-like carved-top archtop guitar is usually credited to which American?
Orville Gibson
His company's Lloyd Loar later added the violin-style f-holes now associated with archtops.
Q 10Which Spanish virtuoso did the most to establish the guitar as a serious concert instrument?
Andrés Segovia
He was among the first to endorse nylon strings after World War II.
Q 11After World War II, which material for classical guitar strings, replacing catgut, was popularised?
Nylon
Nylon gave the classical guitar a more stable tone and helped standardise the instrument.
Q 12The first commercially sold electric stringed instrument, from 1931, was nicknamed what?
The Frying Pan
Its long neck and small round body gave it the name; Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker went on to found Rickenbacker.
Q 13Which company did Adolph Rickenbacker and George Beauchamp found in 1931 to sell electric lap steels?
The Ro-Pat-In Corporation
The name eventually morphed into Rickenbacher and then Rickenbacker.
Q 21Remarkably, Fender founder Leo Fender could not do what?
Play the guitar
He started out running a radio repair shop in Fullerton, California.
Q 22To which company did Leo Fender sell Fender in 1965?
CBS
He later co-founded Music Man and then G&L; the "CBS" era Strats have a larger headstock.
Q 23After leaving Fender, Leo Fender co-founded Music Man and then which other guitar company?
G&L
He kept designing instruments almost until his death from Parkinson's disease in 1991.
Q 24Fender's 1951 four-string electric, named for its fretted neck's accuracy, was called what?
Q 14Whose prototype solid-body guitar, nicknamed "the Log", inspired a famous Gibson model?
Les Paul
He built it in 1940 from a 4-by-4 fir post with two archtop halves bolted on for looks.
Q 15Besides guitars, Les Paul pioneered which studio technique?
Multitrack overdubbing
He is the only person in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Q 16The Telecaster and Esquire were the first commercially successful mass-produced what?
Solid-body electric
Its single-pickup sister model was the Esquire.
Q 17The Fender Telecaster was first distributed in 1950 under which name?
The Broadcaster
A trademark clash with Gretsch's Broadkaster drum kit forced the 1951 rename.
Q 18Fender had to rename its new Telecaster in 1951 after a trademark clash with Gretsch over what product?
A drum kit
Guitars made in the interim had the name simply snipped off the label, and are now called "Nocasters".
Q 19In which year did Fender begin manufacturing the Stratocaster?
1954
It was designed between 1952 and 1954 by Leo Fender, Bill Carson, George Fullerton and Freddie Tavares.
Q 20How many pickups does a standard Fender Stratocaster have?
Three
It was the first Fender with three pickups and the first with a contoured body.
The Precision Bass
It was the first widely successful electric bass and shipped with the Fender Bassman amplifier.
Q 25The Gibson Les Paul went on sale in which year?
1952
Gibson president Ted McCarty brought in Les Paul as a consultant to answer Fender's solid-body guitars.
Q 26The original 1952 Les Paul had a gold top and which type of single-coil pickups?
P-90s
The prized 1958-60 "Burst" was actually a commercial flop at the time.
Q 27When the Les Paul was redesigned in 1961, it became which now-separate Gibson model?
The SG
The single-cutaway carved-top Les Paul was reintroduced in 1968.
Q 28Which radically shaped 1958 Gibson was originally built from a pale wood the company branded "korina"?
The Flying V
Fewer than 100 sold at first; Albert King and Dave Davies later made the shape famous.
Q 29Which angular sibling model did Gibson release in 1958 alongside its V-shaped guitar?
The Explorer
The Moderne was designed in 1957 but shelved until 1982.
Q 30What name did B.B. King give to every one of his guitars?
Lucille
They were usually black Gibson ES-355-style guitars; Gibson made an official B.B. King Lucille model in 1980.