Cogent point, harry. But Martin is right.

"Early music" generally encompasses Renaissance and Baroque music, "Classical" is the word generally used to refer to music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although that morphs into the Romantics toward the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth. "Classical" is a sort of blanket term that people use for all of this, but invariably in reference to European music and music that sprang from the European culture. These are broad generalities, and one can (and some folks often do) argue 'til Sunday breakfast about when this period ended and that period began. Picky, picky, picky. . . .

It depends on how widely you wish to define "classical." Is there a "classical" rock-and-roll? Some folks would say so. I tend to think of the Child ballads as the "classical" ballads. But the word can really get fuzzy around the edges.

I was looking for some poop on classic guitar fingerboard measurements some time back, and I put "classic guitar" and "fingerboard dimensions" in the search boxes in Google. I turned up a lot of the information I was looking for about wide-necked nylon-string guitars (upon which one usually plays "classical" music, even if one is more interested in using a guitar to play lute pieces, which are usually categorized as Renaissance or Baroque music), but I also got a lot of hits about "classic" guitars such as the Fender Stratocaster.

Some words can be applied so widely that they no longer have much practical meaning. But at least it's a place to start.

Don Firth