The IDMT-SMT-GUITAR database is a large database for automatic guitar transcription. Seven different guitars in standard tuning were used with varying pick-up settings and different string measures to ensure a sufficient diversification in the field of electric and acoustic guitars. The recording setup consisted of appropriate audio interfaces, which were directly connected to the guitar output or in one case to a condenser microphone. The recordings are provided in one channel RIFF WAVE format with 44100 Hz sample rate. The dataset consists of four subsets. The first contains all introduced playing techniques (plucking styles: finger-style, muted, picked; expression styles: normal, bending, slide, vibrato, harmonics, dead-notes) and is provided with a bit depth of 24 Bit. It has been recorded using three different guitars and consists of about 4700 note events with monophonic and polyphonic structure. As a particularity the recorded files contain realistic guitar licks ranging from monophonic to polyphonic instrument tracks. The second subset of data consists of 400 monophonic and polyphonic note events each played with two different guitars. No expression styles were applied here and each note event was recorded and stored in a separate file with a bit depth of 16 Bit. The parameter annotations for the first and second subset are stored in XML format. The third subset is made up of five short monophonic and polyphonic guitar recordings. All five pieces have been recorded with the same instrument and no special expression styles were applied. The files are stored with a bit depth of 16 Bit and each file is accompanied by a parameter annotation in XML format. Additionally, a fourth subset is included, which was created for evaluation purposes in the context of chord recognition and rhythm style estimation tasks. This set contains recordings of 64 short musical pieces grouped by genre. Each piece has been recorded at two different tempi with three different guitars and is provided with a bit depth of 16 Bit. Annotations regarding onset positions, chords, rhythmic pattern length, and texture (monophony/polyphony) are included in various file formats.