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The guitar's structural ancestor was the lute: a stringed instrument with a pear-shaped body, a neck with a fretted fingerboard, and a head with tuning pegs.

The first guitars borrowed acoustic design principles from the French crota, an instrument which in the 13th century found its way across the Pyrenees to northern Spain, where cross-breeding of lutes and crotas occured. This was probably the birth of the guitar as it is recognized today.