The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I have a neck, a body and a waist, and I am not alive.
My ancestors were plucked in Mesopotamia four thousand years ago.
I went electric in the 1930s and music never recovered.
Almost everyone who has tried to learn me gave up on the F.
Six strings, frets, and a pick.
Guitar
The F chord asks one finger to hold six strings at once. It is where roughly half of everyone who ever picked one up stopped.
The instrument as we know it was standardised by one maker: Antonio de Torres in 1850s Spain enlarged the body, thinned the top and worked out the fan bracing beneath it, and classical guitars have followed his proportions ever since. Electricity arrived because guitarists could not be heard over horn sections; the first commercial electric, in 1932, was an aluminium lap steel nicknamed the frying pan. The solid body followed in the fifties. The F chord is the usual point of surrender because it demands a barre — one finger flattened across all six strings, with no open string to help.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #29 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #28. Next: mystery #30. Or try #43, #44, #45, #46, #47, #48.