Guitar Emoji

An electric or acoustic guitar, typically shown in red or orange. 🎸 represents rock music, guitar playing, musicians, and the entire cultural identity that comes with picking up six strings.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010). The guitar is arguably the most culturally loaded instrument in modern music. It's the sound of rock and roll, blues, country, flamenco, and indie. It produced some of the most iconic moments in music history: Jimi Hendrix setting his Stratocaster on fire at Monterey Pop (1967), Slash) emerging from a church in the 'November Rain' video, Pete Townshend smashing his guitar at the end of a Who concert. The guitar is the instrument that transcended music to become a lifestyle symbol.

The Air Guitar World Championships, held annually in Oulu, Finland since 1996, prove that you don't even need a real guitar to participate in guitar culture. Their motto is 'Make Air Not War' and the purpose is literally to promote world peace through invisible instruments. The 2025 champion, Finnish native Aapo 'The Angus' Rautio, won after an air-off to Guns N' Roses' 'Sweet Child of Mine.' Meanwhile, Guitar Hero (2005-2015) and Rock Band turned air guitar into a video game franchise that sold over 40 million copies and introduced an entire generation to classic rock.

🎸 is the musician's identity emoji. On Instagram, it appears in band promotion, concert photos, guitar collection posts, and 'practice session' stories. Musicians put 🎸 in their bios as shorthand for 'I play guitar.' On TikTok, 🎸 drives guitar cover content, riff tutorials, and the 'name that song from the first note' challenge genre.

In texting, 🎸 means 'that rocks' or 'you're killing it', the guitar has become a metaphor for excellence and excitement beyond music. 'You got the job 🎸🔥' uses the guitar as pure energy. On Twitter/X, 🎸 appears in concert announcements, musician discourse, and nostalgia posts about Guitar Hero nights and air guitar competitions.

The guitar didn't get invented in one place or by one person. It accumulated. The direct ancestor is the oud, a fretless Arabic lute that came to Spain with the Moorish conquest around 711 CE. Over the next five centuries, Spanish instrument makers added frets, flattened the back, and reshaped the body into something recognizably guitar-like. By 1200, two guitar-style instruments were in use in Spain: the guitarra latina and the guitarra morisca. The 15th-century Spanish vihuela, guitar-shaped but tuned like a lute, was the single most important step toward the baroque guitar. By the 1700s the six-string Spanish guitar had crystallized into the classical form we still play today.

The 20th century rebuilt the instrument again. Solid-body electric guitars made it possible to play loud enough to front a band without amplification trick-shots. Leo Fender released the Telecaster in 1950 and then, designed between 1952 and 1954 with Bill Carson and Freddie Tavares, the Stratocaster in 1954. Gibson released the Les Paul in 1952, designed with input from and endorsed by guitarist Les Paul. Those two guitars, the Strat and the Les Paul, are the two shapes your brain sees when you think "electric guitar." They've barely changed in 70 years.

The emoji is part of the Unicode 6.0 (2010) music-instrument batch. Shipped on iPhones with iOS 5 in October 2011. Apple draws it red, Google orange, Samsung a cream-and-sunburst. All three lean toward the Les Paul silhouette rather than the Strat.

1. 711The Moors bring the oud to Spain during the Islamic conquest, seeding the lineage that leads to the guitar↗
2. 1450The vihuela emerges in the Kingdom of Aragon, the 15th-century guitar-shaped Spanish string instrument that most directly precedes the modern guitar↗
3. 1950Leo Fender releases the Telecaster, the first mass-produced solid-body electric guitar↗
4. 1952Gibson releases the Les Paul, designed with input from and endorsed by guitarist Les Paul↗
5. 1954Fender releases the Stratocaster, designed between 1952 and 1954 by Leo Fender, Bill Carson, George Fullerton, and Freddie Tavares↗
6. 1967Jimi Hendrix sets his Fender Stratocaster on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival, one of the most iconic rock moments ever recorded↗
7. 1996First Air Guitar World Championships held in Oulu, Finland, on a mission of "Make Air Not War"↗
8. 2005Guitar Hero releases, kicking off a franchise that would sell 40+ million copies and reintroduce a generation to classic rock↗
9. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves 🎸 guitar (U+1F3B8) in the first music-instrument emoji batch↗
10. 2020Kurt Cobain's 1959 Martin D-18E from MTV Unplugged sells for $6 million, becoming the most expensive guitar ever auctioned↗

🎸 is unusually universal, but the genre association shifts sharply.

In the US and UK, 🎸 defaults to rock: Hendrix, Page, Clapton, Slash, the whole classic-rock canon. The emoji in a bio still reads mostly as "I play electric guitar in a rock or indie context."

In Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, 🎸 more often means classical, flamenco, or the bolero/tango-nuevo acoustic tradition. The association lines up with the instrument's actual Spanish origin.

In Brazil, 🎸 overlaps with bossa nova and samba, where the classical-guitar-style nylon-string (violão) is foundational. João Gilberto, Baden Powell, Toquinho come to mind.

In country-music contexts (US South, Canadian prairies, Australia), 🎸 sits alongside 🪕 and reads as acoustic-country/bluegrass, particularly for Nashville-aligned artists.

In metal and hard-rock scenes globally, 🎸 is heavier content. Japanese and Finnish metal fans use it alongside 🤘 for genre signaling. Finland is the air-guitar-championships home for a reason: there's a real metal and air-guitar culture density per capita there.

In K-pop and J-pop, the guitar is the session-instrument that sits behind the vocals, and 🎸 is less a badge of identity and more a production mention. The emoji shows up in producer credits and liner-note-style posts rather than performer bios.

• •The Air Guitar World Championships have been held annually in Oulu, Finland since 1996. Their motto is 'Make Air Not War' and the stated purpose is promoting world peace through invisible instruments.
• •Guitar Hero sold over 40 million copies and introduced an entire generation to classic rock. Songs featured in the game saw measurable increases in downloads and streaming plays.
• •Jimi Hendrix set his Stratocaster on fire at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. The charred guitar later sold at auction for nearly $500,000.
• •Kurt Cobain's 1959 Martin D-18E from Nirvana's MTV Unplugged went for $6 million at auction in 2020, a Guinness world record at the time.
• •In March 2026, David Gilmour's Black Strat sold for $14.55 million at the Jim Irsay Collection auction, smashing the all-time record. Jerry Garcia's 'Tiger' guitar sold at the same auction for $11.5 million.
• •Jimmy Page's 'Stairway to Heaven' solo was voted Guitar World's greatest guitar solo of all time and is still the most recognized guitar solo in rock history per a 2023 Rolling Stone poll.
• •Babatunde Olatunji's 'Drums of Passion' (1959) sold over 5 million copies and was arguably the first 'world music' album, it directly inspired Carlos Santana's 1969 hit 'Jingo.'
• •The emoji skews red because Apple's design used a cherry-red solid-body from iOS 5 (2011) onward. Samsung's version has always leaned sunburst. Google's has always been orange.

• •Jimi Hendrix's Monterey Pop fire (1967), still the single most reproduced rock image in history
• •Stairway to Heaven solo by Jimmy Page, voted Guitar World's #1 solo of all time
• •Prince's 2004 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' solo at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the clip that went on to soundtrack every tribute video ever made
• •Guitar Hero (2005-2015), 40+ million copies, the plastic-guitar franchise that taught a generation to air-solo
• •Slash in the November Rain) video, emerging from a church, still the defining image of hair-metal excess
• •Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter (2024), featuring banjo and guitar in a country reframe that reopened debate about who owns these instruments
• •Olivia Rodrigo's 'brutal' and 'bad idea right?', the pop-punk revival records that put guitar solos back in Top-40 rotation
• •Chappell Roan's 'Pink Pony Club' and 'Red Wine Supernova', which brought '80s lead-guitar energy to queer pop