Thinking guitar being played as the fool is walking.
From the late middle ages at least (e.g., in Chaucer) and through the renaissance and beyond (e.g., in The Ship of Fools) an instrument long associated with the fool is the bagpipes (= a windbag).
The guitar (or more specifically/accurately in olden times a lute, lyre or harp) was usually used in contrast to the bagpipes, e.g., in The Ship of Fools the softness of the harp and lute (ancestor to the more modern acoustic guitar) is used in contrast to the loudness and harshness of the fool's bagpipes. Thus the guitar (in as much it is comparable to string instruments such as the lute, lyre or harp) represents symbolically the opposite to that which the fool would use. The lyre is the instrument of the poets and philosophers (e.g., Ficino) and lovers (carnal and divine).
Think of Ficino playing the lyre and singing the Hymns of Orpheus. The guitar/lute (or stringed instrument in general) for me conjures to my mind the music theories of people like Ficino,* Agrippa and Pythagoras -- and thus IMHO would be better suited to the magician (as a type of Magus rather than trickster) in contrast to the Fool.
The bagpipes in contrast to the lute also represents country life, peasants, shepherds, the pastoral, simple rustic life in contrast to urban city life and the courts, e.g., :
"I like the sound of the rustic bagpipe better than the quavers of the courtly lutes..." (Says Panurge in Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel.)
As another example -- and as you are using the Sola Busca as a source -- you may have already noted the Matto in that deck is playing bagpipes!?
Plus the fool is an outcast, an oddball -- and is more likely to make an oddball decision, ask people what instrument they would like to play and guitar would be among the most popular - very few would choose bagpipes, excepting the oddball, or a crazy Scot
If using old decks for inspiration, I might also go for the Lyre on the Moon card, as in the Tarot de Paris, which has a guy playing the lyre, serenading a naked woman looking out from a window: Or on the Sun card, as a symbol of Apollo (in which case one might choose the Aulos for the Fool, the double reed wind instrument of the Satyr Marsyas, which makes a sound akin to the bagpipes, and was a symbol of 'madness' in contrast to the Lyre or Kithara of Apollo as a symbol of 'reason', or perhaps on the Hanged Man, as Marsyas was hung on a tree and flayed alive) ; drums for La Maison Deiu (again after TdP - and for the connotation with thunder), Pan Pipes for the Devil? And a trumpet for Judgement, of course.
Kwaw
* quote:
"Ficino, the leading exponent of the revival of Platonism in Renaissance Italy had many strings on his lyre. He was not only a leading philosopher, an apt translator, a devout priest, a trained physician but also, and more importantly for my talk today, a practicing musical magus
"Amongst his Florentine friends, it was well known that Ficino was a skilled musician who enjoyed playing the lyre and singing his Orphic hymns. Ficino’s interest in these poems reflected his deep belief that the hymns of Orpheus could serve as a powerful tool for divine inspiration. Ficino and his fellow
platonici believed that in performing these hymns, the musician transformed himself into a medium for the divine. Enraptured in this way, the musician’s soul was lifted beyond its earthly condition and aligned with the sounding harmonies of the cosmos (also known as the musica mundana)."
end quote from:
Ficino's Musical Therapy: The Power of Aerial Songs by Cecilia Maier-Kapoor.
