Guitar Trivia
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107 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 107 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which effect pedal gives the opening riff of Jimi Hendrix's 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)' its sound?
A wah-wah
A wah-wah: rocking the pedal sweeps the guitar's tone so it seems to cry 'wah', an effect brass players had been getting since the 1920s by moving a mute in and out of the bell.
Q 02What is standard guitar tuning, from the lowest string to the highest?
E A D G B E
E A D G B E: the strings rise in fourths with one major third, between G and B, which leaves the two outer strings both on E, two octaves apart.
Q 03Which fret divides a guitar's scale length exactly in half, sounding an octave above the open string?
The 12th
The 12th fret sits at the midpoint of the string, and halving a string's vibrating length doubles its frequency, which the ear hears as the same note an octave higher.
Q 04In "drop D" tuning, which string is lowered a whole step from E to D?
The sixth
The sixth (lowest) string drops to D, so the lowest strings ring as a D power chord and one finger laid across them plays any other, which is why metal bands love it.
Q 05Keith Richards plays "Honky Tonk Women" and "Brown Sugar" in which five-string tuning?
Open G
Open G: Keith Richards takes off the lowest string, which he says just gets in the way, tunes the other five G-D-G-B-D and leaves the low notes to the band's bass player.
Q 06Which 19th-century Spanish maker set the body size and fan-bracing of the modern classical guitar?
Antonio de Torres
Antonio de Torres wanted more sound, so he made the body larger and the soundboard thinner, with struts fanned out beneath to keep the light top strong.
Q 07The X-bracing of flat-top steel-string guitars is usually credited to which American luthier?
C.F. Martin
C.F. Martin, a German-born maker, crossed two struts under the top of his gut-strung guitars; decades later the same X proved strong enough to take the pull of steel strings.
Q 08What does the 'D' stand for in the D-28 and D-18, two classic American acoustic guitars?
Dreadnought
Dreadnought: the maker borrowed the name of the British battleship HMS Dreadnought for its big, deep body of 1916, now one of the most copied acoustic shapes.
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 is credited with re-establishing the guitar as a concert instrument in the 20th century?
Andrés Segovia
Andrés Segovia taught himself because no good teacher was at hand, then widened the guitar's thin repertoire with his own Bach transcriptions and new works he coaxed from composers.
Q 11Which material replaced gut for classical guitar strings after World War II?
Nylon
Nylon: wartime restrictions cut off the supply of gut, so New York maker Albert Augustine tried nylon line instead, and concert players soon took up his strings.
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 Texas bluesman played a battered sunburst Stratocaster he called 'Number One'?
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Q 21After leaving Fender, Leo Fender co-founded Music Man and then which other guitar company?
G&L
G&L stands for George and Leo: Leo Fender set it up with his old colleague George Fullerton and went on designing guitars there through the 1980s.
Q 22Which Fender model of 1951 became the first commercially successful electric bass guitar?
The Precision Bass
The Precision Bass was named for the accurate pitch its frets gave, and its low notes overwhelmed guitar amplifiers so badly that Fender built the Bassman for it in 1952.
Q 23The 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.
Stevie Ray Vaughan got Number One from an Austin music shop and always called it a 1959 model, the date on its pickups, though the body is stamped 1963 and the neck 1962.
Q 14Besides 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 15The Fender Telecaster and Esquire were the first mass-produced, commercially successful guitars of which type?
Solid-body electric
Solid-body electric: Leo Fender bolted a maple neck to a flat wooden body, and the guitar caught on so quickly that older makers hurried out solid designs of their own.
Q 16Under which name did Fender launch the two-pickup Telecaster for national distribution in autumn 1950?
The Broadcaster
The Broadcaster: Fender shipped the two-pickup guitar under that name from autumn 1950, dropped it within months when Gretsch objected, and settled on Telecaster later in 1951.
Q 17Fender renamed its new guitar the 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 18How many pickups does a standard Fender Stratocaster have?
Three
Three pickups, wired at first to a three-way switch: players found that wedging it between positions blended two pickups, and Fender later built those in-between sounds into a five-way switch.
Q 19Which skill did Fender founder Leo Fender famously never learn?
Play the guitar
Play the guitar: Leo Fender trained in accounting and ran a radio repair shop, where fixing musicians' amplifiers led him to design his own gear for an instrument he never learned.
Q 20To which company did Leo Fender sell Fender in 1965?
CBS
CBS bought Leo Fender's companies in 1965, when his health was failing; he later recovered and went back to designing instruments.
Q 24Before humbuckers arrived in 1957, the original gold-top Les Paul carried which pickups?
P-90s
P-90s: these single-coil pickups hummed, so Gibson's Seth Lover designed the humbucker in 1955 to cancel the noise, and it replaced them on the Les Paul two years later.
Q 25When 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 26Which radically shaped 1958 Gibson was originally built from a pale wood the company branded "korina"?
The Flying V
The Flying V flopped in 1958, with fewer than 100 made, and was soon dropped; bluesman Albert King and the Kinks' Dave Davies later made its arrow shape famous, and it returned in 1967.
Q 27Which angular 1958 Gibson flopped at launch, then was revived in 1976?
The Explorer
The Explorer shipped only 22 guitars in 1958 and 1959 before it was dropped; the 1976 reissue came after a rival maker had success selling guitars in the same angular shape.
Q 28What name did B.B. King give to every one of his guitars?
Lucille
Lucille was usually a black Gibson; the signature model of 1980 has no f-holes because King asked for a sealed top to cut feedback.
Q 29Which incident at an Arkansas dance hall inspired the name B.B. King gave his guitars?
A fire
A fire: two brawling men knocked over a barrel of burning kerosene in Twist, Arkansas; King ran back into the blaze to save his guitar, and named it as a reminder never to do anything so foolish again.
Q 30What is the name of Willie Nelson's battered classical guitar?
Trigger
Trigger, bought in 1969, is named after Roy Rogers's horse; decades of hard playing have worn a gaping hole clean through its top beside the bridge.