In guitar

Guitar

The guitar is a plucked string instrument, usually played with fingers or a pick. The guitar consists of a body with a rigid neck to which the strings, generally six in number, are attached. Guitars are traditionally constructed of various woods and strung with animal gut or, more recently, with...

 construction, a cutaway is an indentation in the body of the instrument adjacent to the neck

Neck (music)

The neck is the part of certain string instruments that projects from the main body and is the base of the fingerboard, where the fingers are placed to stop the strings at different pitches. Guitars, lutes, the violin family, and the mandolin family are examples of instruments which have necks.The...

 of the instrument, designed to allow easier access to the upper fret

Fret

A fret is a raised portion on the neck of a stringed instrument, that extends generally across the full width of the neck. On most modern western instruments, frets are metal strips inserted into the fingerboard...

s.

Some manufacturers denote instrument models with cutaway using the suffix C, such as the Gibson L5C or the Maton CW80C.

There are two main types of cutaways: Venetian and Florentine. A Venetian cutaway has a rounded bout. A Florentine cutaway has a sharp bout. The picture shows a Venetian cutaway.
(The terms probably originate with the Gibson Guitar Corporation

Gibson Guitar Corporation

The Gibson Guitar Corporation, formerly of Kalamazoo, Michigan and currently of Nashville, Tennessee, manufactures guitars and other instruments which sell under a variety of brand names...

 and probably do not reflect historic
instrument-making practices of Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 and Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

).
A less common third type is the squared-off cutaway used on the Selmer-Maccaferri guitar

Selmer-Maccaferri Guitar

The Selmer Guitar is an unusual acoustic guitar best known as the favored instrument of Django Reinhardt...

 and some nylon-string guitars.

As well as the more common lower cutaway, many instruments have an upper cutaway, sometimes smaller than the lower one, or sometimes about the same size. This is mainly seen on electric guitars, as the reduction in body size resulting from a double cutaway would be detrimental to the sound quality of an acoustic guitar. Double cutaways allow the thumb as well as the fingers to move past the neck-body join. Symmetrical ones also facilitate
left-handed use of right-handed instruments.

Instruments with only a lower cutaway are known as single cutaway instruments, and guitars with both are called "double cutaway." These terms are sometimes shortened to "single cut" (such as in the model name for a solidbody electric guitar called the "PRS Singlecut," produced by the Paul Reed Smith company) or "double cut." In some Gibson guitars, models with two cutaways are abbreviated with a "DC" after the name, such as in the Les Paul Studio DC, the Les Paul Standard DC, the Les Paul Special DC, and the Les Paul Junior DC. Since more single cut versions of these guitars are produced than the doublecut versions, if the model name of these guitars is not followed by "DC," "double cut," or "double cutaway," the assumed reference is to the single cutaway models.

Cutaway bodies are mainly of interest when discussing acoustic guitar

Acoustic guitar

An acoustic guitar is a guitar that uses only an acoustic sound board. The air in this cavity resonates with the vibrational modes of the string and at low frequencies, which depend on the size of the box, the chamber acts like a Helmholtz resonator, increasing or decreasing the volume of the sound...

s and semi-acoustic guitar

Semi-acoustic guitar

A semi-acoustic guitar or hollow-body electric is a type of electric guitar with both a sound box and one or more electric pickups. This is not the same as an electric acoustic guitar, which is an acoustic guitar with the addition of pickups or other means of amplification, either added by the...

s; virtually all solid body

Solid body

A solid-body instrument is a string instrument such as a guitar, bass or violin built without its normal sound box and relying on an electric pickup system to directly receive the vibrations of the strings....

 guitars either have at least one cutaway, or have a body shape (such as the flying V guitar) which does not intrude into the upper neck area

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