Guitar Trivia
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110 free Guitar trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 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 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many strings does a standard guitar have?
Six
A standard guitar has six strings; classical, steel-string acoustic and most electric models all share that count, with the lowest and highest strings tuned two octaves apart.
Q 02What are the notes of standard guitar tuning, from the lowest string to the highest?
E A D G B E
Standard tuning is E A D G B E from low to high: perfect fourths between each pair of strings except the major third from G to B, remembered as '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 string is lowered a whole step?
The sixth
The sixth (lowest) string drops a whole step from E to D, so the lowest strings sound a D power chord when strummed open, a staple of metal and grunge riffs.
Q 05Keith Richards plays "Honky Tonk Women" and "Brown Sugar" in which five-string tuning?
Open G
Keith Richards' five-string open G tuning, G-D-G-B-D with the lowest string removed, powers 'Honky Tonk Women', 'Brown Sugar' and 'Start Me Up'.
Q 06The 19th-century Spanish maker who set the size and fan-bracing of the modern classical guitar was whom?
Antonio de Torres
Antonio de Torres Jurado, working in Seville from the 1850s, enlarged the body and refined the fan-braced soundboard, fixing the proportions that define the modern classical guitar.
Q 07The robust X-bracing of flat-top steel-string guitars is credited to which German-American luthier?
C.F. Martin
C.F. Martin, a Saxon immigrant to New York, developed X-bracing in the 1840s; its two crossed struts give a flat top the strength to bear steel strings.
Q 08In what year was the oldest surviving US guitar maker, known for the D-28 and D-18, founded?
1833
The firm was founded in 1833 in New York City by a Saxon immigrant and moved to Nazareth, Pennsylvania, in 1839; its D-28 dreadnought arrived in 1931.
Q 09The violin-like carved-top archtop guitar is usually credited to which American?
Orville Gibson
Orville Gibson, a Kalamazoo, Michigan, luthier, carved guitar and mandolin tops like a violin's from the 1890s and patented the construction in 1898; the company bearing his name formed in 1902.
Q 10Which Spanish virtuoso did the most to establish the guitar as a serious concert instrument?
Andrés Segovia
Andrés Segovia, born in Linares in 1893, played the world's concert halls for seven decades, commissioned works from Ponce, Turina and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and taught generations of players.
Q 11After World War II, which material for classical guitar strings, replacing catgut, was popularised?
Nylon
Nylon strings, developed by Albert Augustine with DuPont in the 1940s, held their pitch and resisted humidity far better than gut, and leading concert players adopted them within a few years.
Q 12What nickname did the first commercially successful electric guitar, a 1930s lap steel, carry?
The Frying Pan
The Frying Pan, George Beauchamp's cast-aluminium lap steel with a horseshoe-magnet pickup, took its nickname from its long neck and small round body; the first ones were sold in 1932.
Q 13Which company did Adolph Rickenbacker and George Beauchamp found in 1931 to sell electric lap steels?
The Ro-Pat-In Corporation
Q 21Remarkably, Fender founder Leo Fender could not do what?
Play the guitar
Leo Fender never learned to play the guitar; trained in accounting and self-taught in electronics, he ran a radio repair shop in Fullerton, California, and relied on working musicians to test his designs.
Q 22To which company did Leo Fender sell Fender in 1965?
CBS
Leo Fender sold his companies to CBS in January 1965 for about $13 million; the CBS-era Stratocasters that followed are recognisable by their larger headstock.
Q 23After leaving Fender, Leo Fender co-founded Music Man and then which other guitar company?
G&L
G&L, named for George Fullerton and Leo Fender, started in Fullerton in 1979 after Leo's Music Man years; he kept designing there until his death from Parkinson's disease in 1991.
The Ro-Pat-In Corporation, short for Electro-Patent-Instruments, was set up in 1931 by Beauchamp, Rickenbacker and Paul Barth; it was later renamed the Electro String Instrument Corporation and sold under the Rickenbacher, then Rickenbacker, brand.
Q 14Which Texas bluesman played a battered sunburst Stratocaster he called 'Number One'?
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Stevie Ray Vaughan found Number One in an Austin music shop in the early 1970s and played it until his death in 1990; its worn sunburst body, 'SRV' stickers and left-handed tremolo made it instantly recognisable.
Q 15Besides guitars, Les Paul pioneered which studio technique?
Multitrack overdubbing
He pioneered multitrack overdubbing, layering parts by recording sound-on-sound to disc and then tape; the 1951 hit 'How High the Moon' with Mary Ford stacked many overdubbed guitar and vocal parts.
Q 16The Telecaster and Esquire were the first commercially successful mass-produced what?
Solid-body electric
The Telecaster, with its single-pickup sibling the Esquire, was the first commercially successful mass-produced solid-body electric guitar: a bolt-on maple neck on a plank-like ash body, built from 1950.
Q 17The Fender Telecaster was first distributed in 1950 under which name?
The Broadcaster
Fender shipped the model as the Broadcaster from autumn 1950; Gretsch objected to the name, it was dropped early in 1951 and Telecaster decals appeared later that year.
Q 18Fender had to rename its new Telecaster in 1951 after a trademark clash with Gretsch over what product?
A drum kit
Gretsch already sold a drum kit under a near-identical name and objected; for some months in 1951 Fender clipped the model name from the headstock decal, and those guitars are nicknamed Nocasters.
Q 19In which year did Fender begin manufacturing the Stratocaster?
1954
Fender put the Stratocaster into production in 1954, after Leo Fender, Bill Carson, George Fullerton and Freddie Tavares worked up its contoured double-cutaway body and synchronised tremolo bridge.
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.
Q 24Fender's 1951 four-string electric, named for its fretted neck's accuracy, was called what?
The Precision Bass
The Precision Bass, launched in 1951, took its name from the fretted neck that let players hit exact pitches; it was the first widely successful electric bass, and Fender built the Bassman amplifier to go with it the following year.
Q 25The Gibson Les Paul went on sale in which year?
1952
The model went on sale in 1952, after company president Ted McCarty signed the guitarist as endorser and consultant to answer Fender's new electrics; the first ones carried a gold-finished top.
Q 26The original gold-top Les Paul carried which type of pickups?
P-90s
The first gold-tops carried P-90s, the single-coil pickups of the day; the model switched to Seth Lover's humbuckers in 1957, and the sunburst 'Burst' followed in 1958.
Q 27When the Les Paul was redesigned in 1961, it became which now-separate Gibson model?
The SG
The thin double-cutaway 1961 redesign kept the Les Paul name until 1963, when the endorsement lapsed and the company renamed it the SG, for Solid Guitar; the original carved-top shape returned in 1968.
Q 28Which radically shaped 1958 Gibson was originally built from a pale wood the company branded "korina"?
The Flying V
The Flying V's arrow-shaped korina body sold fewer than 100 units in 1958-59; Albert King, Dave Davies and Lonnie Mack later made the shape famous, and it was reissued in 1967.
Q 29Which angular 1958 Gibson flopped at launch, then was revived in 1976?
The Explorer
The Explorer, a futuristic korina design, sold only a few dozen in 1958-59; it was reissued in 1976, and players like James Hetfield and the Edge later made it famous.
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.