An electronically amplified guitar.
There are two main kinds of electric guitar: the hollow-bodied or semi-acoustic; and the solid-bodied, in which the body provides little resonance but simply serves as a mounting-block to accommodate the bridge and the electronic apparatus, and to bear the strings under tension. Standard electric guitars have six strings (normally tuned E–A–d–g–b–e') and the Electric bass guitar usually has four (E'–A'–D–G); there are 12-string instruments (in which the top two strings are doubled in unison, the rest being doubled at the upper octave) and other variants with different numbers of strings, as well as hybrid instruments with two necks (for example, one with six and the other with 12 strings, or one standard and one bass neck). Electric steel guitars for the lap and free-standing electric steel guitars, both designed for Hawaiian-style playing, have also been made (see §3 below; see also Hawaiian guitar and Pedal steel guitar).
The electric guitar has found a place in virtually all forms of popular music. The early instrument was introduced or popularized by players such as T-Bone Walker (blues), Charlie Christian (jazz), Chuck Berry (rhythm and blues), Merle Travis (country and western) and Buddy Holly (rock and roll). Today it enjoys widespread use in these forms and in modern Western popular hybrids, including pop, rock, jazz-rock and reggae. Since the 1950s the art of electric guitar playing has been taken forward by a number of talented and musically gifted performers, including Chet Atkins, who defined the sounds of Nashville country picking through work with Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers, as well as on his own abundant recordings; Wes Montgomery, whose affecting 1960s Riverside recordings amount to some of the finest jazz playing; Jimi Hendrix, who in his brief career combined rock, blues and soul into the most astonishing and influential electric guitar playing; John McLaughlin, probably the most influential jazz guitarist since Montgomery; and Eddie Van Halen, whose playing in the 1980s contained a range of fresh styles and a lucid flamboyance.
Outside popular music the electric guitar has been little used, with certain notable exceptions, such as Tippett’s The Knot Garden (1966–9), Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–7), Previn’s Guitar Concerto (1971, which uses electric guitars in the orchestra), Berio’s Allelujah II (1956–7) and Boulez’s Domaines (1968); it has a solo role in David Bedford’s Star’s End (1974) and Proença (1977) by John Buller.
The electric guitar is an essentially simple device: the energy of the vibrating strings, struck by the player with plectrum or fingers, is transferred into electrical energy by the pickup or pickups; this energy is in turn amplified by an external amplifier and loudspeaker.
A guitar pickup usually has six magnetic polepieces surrounded by a coil of wire, or two such coils wired for hum rejection. The pickup is a transducer, converting one form of energy (the vibrations of strings) into another form of energy (an electrical signal). The guitar’s metal strings vibrating in the pickup’s magnetic field induce a current in the coil of wire in that field, the voltage of the current varying according to the frequency at which the strings vibrate.
The degree and type of amplification of the electric guitar depends largely on musical idiom. Amplification equipment ranges from small combination or ‘combo’ units, which house amplifier and loudspeakers in one cabinet, to large ‘stacks’ of separate loudspeaker cabinets and amplifier units. Amplifiers are based either on valves or transistors, and can produce output power ranging from a few watts to many hundreds of watts rms. In rock music electric guitarists often ‘overdrive’ valve amplifiers to distort the signal; such distortion, together with the uneven frequency response of valve amplifiers, gives the instrument a characteristic sound quality. The first transistorized amplifiers had a ‘cleaner’ sound, less well liked by most rock musicians. In response to their requirements, some manufacturers introduced transistorized circuitry that emulated the behaviour of valve amplifiers.
Some amplification units incorporate devices for special effects, but more often such devices – developed chiefly for use in rock and pop music – are contained in purpose-built boxes or ‘pedals’, plugged between the instrument and the amplifier, and sometimes interconnected within ‘racks’ or ‘pedalboards’. They are designed to enhance, distort or change the electrical signal to produce the desired effects on the sound. A ‘wah-wah’ pedal modifies the tone of the sound by boosting a particular band of frequencies, which changes according to the degree to which the pedal is depressed. ‘Fuzz’ or distortion (and more recently the ‘pre-amp’ pedal) is the electronic simulation of the sound from an overdriven amplifier, achieved by feeding the signal from the guitar pickup through a unit that alters the waveform, usually to an approximation of a ‘square wave’. Echo or ‘delay’ is produced by electronic means, or mechanically by slightly delayed playback of taped sounds. ‘Phasing’ is the electronic re-creation of the sweeping effect produced mechanically by running two tape recorders with the same programme slightly in and out of time with each other; ‘flanging’ is an enhanced version of phasing. The ‘chorus’ effect, which makes a single instrument sound like a group of instruments, is produced by time-delay electronics. ‘Octave dividers’ divide or multiply the frequency of a signal by a factor of two, to give parallel octaves below or above the note being played on the instrument; more sophisticated possibilities of this effect are given by the ‘harmonizer’. In addition to special devices, units found in the recording studio have been adapted for use with the electric guitar: for example, the ‘compressor’, which smoothes out sound peaks, the ‘noise gate’, which reduces the noise content of the signal supplied to the amplifier, and ‘parametric’ and ‘graphic’ equalizers, which are sophisticated forms of tone controllers. The amplifier itself often includes a ‘reverb’ effect that simulates natural acoustic reverberation by mechanical or electronic means.
The first experiments with the electrical amplification of guitars took place in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. Guitarists were looking for ways of making their instruments match the volume of the ensembles in which they played, especially big dance bands. The principal problem was to find a suitable pickup.
The engineer and musician Lloyd Loar, who worked for the Gibson company, began in the 1920s to try out crude magnetic pickups; he left Gibson in 1924 and, with Lewis Williams, started the Vivi Tone Co. (and a sister company, Acousti-Lectric) in 1934, which manufactured electric violin-family instruments as well as electric fretted instruments. Other Americans experimenting with magnetic instrument pickups at the time included Rowe and DeArmond, who formed an eponymous company early in the 1930s to manufacture them, and George Beauchamp and Paul Barth who joined forces with the Californian businessman Adolph Rickenbacker to form the Ro-Pat-In Company (see Rickenbacker). In 1932 their company produced some of the very first commercially made electric guitars, the Rickenbacker A22 and A25 models. These guitars, nicknamed ‘Frying Pans’ because of their circular bodies and long necks, were ‘lap steel’ (or Hawaiian) guitars – that is, instruments played resting on the guitarist’s lap, the strings being stopped by a steel bar held in the left hand. Around this time the National company (see Resonator guitar) produced one of the earliest electric Spanish-style (as opposed to lap steel) guitars, followed shortly by Rickenbacker with the Electro Spanish model. The Gibson company, by now a well-established name, entered the electric guitar market in 1935 with an Electric Hawaiian guitar, the EH–150, and an electric Spanish guitar, the ES–150. The latter had a spruce top with f-holes, a maple body and a mahogany neck; it featured a distinctive pickup designed by Walt Fuller, later called the Charlie Christian pickup after the pioneering electric jazz guitarist had used it.
It was in the late 1940s that one of the most significant developments for the future of the electric guitar was made, leading to the introduction of the solid-bodied electric guitar. The Californian engineer Paul Bigsby built a solid-bodied electric guitar for the country guitarist Merle Travis in 1948 (this instrument is now in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee), but the first commercially manufactured solid electric guitar was the Fender Broadcaster, designed by Leo Fender and others and introduced in 1950. The Broadcaster’s body was a solid plank of ash with rounded corners; a cutaway underneath the joint with the solid maple neck aided access to the high frets. At the top of the neck was a stylish peghead with machine heads ranged along one side only, while on the body there were two single-coil pickups, one close to the neck join, the other built into the simple bridge assembly and slanted to accentuate the treble frequencies of the higher strings. (An early prototype called the Esquire had only the bridge pickup.) A brass plate supported two control knobs – for volume and tone (originally volume and pickup ‘blend’) – and a three-way switch that allowed the player to select either of the two pickups individually or both together. The Broadcaster was renamed the Telecaster in 1951. It initially found favour with country-and-western players, but it has continued to be popular in various musical forms and is still made virtually unchanged.
The next important solid-bodied electric guitar was Gibson’s Les Paul guitar, introduced in 1952 (fig.1). Paul, a well-known country, jazz and pop guitarist, had approached Gibson some years earlier, having experimented with solid electric guitar designs over a long period. The guitar that was eventually marketed under his name was developed by Gibson designers and endorsed by Paul. Various models including the ‘Gold-top’, Custom and Standard have been produced, and are still made.
In 1954 Fender introduced the Stratocaster, the first solid-bodied electric guitar to have three pickups, the first with Fender’s ‘tremolo arm’ system for vibrato effects, and the first Fender guitar to have a contoured body (fig.2). It also had a double cutaway where the body joined the neck, to allow even easier access to the upper frets. It is still made.
These three 1950s designs – the Telecaster, the Les Paul and the Stratocaster – formed the basis for much that was to follow from other electric guitar makers in the USA, Europe and Japan. Countless copies and variants have been produced since the 1950s and, particularly, following the pop music boom in the early 1960s, which established the electric guitar as the basis of the pop sound.
The principal features of the electric guitar have remained unchanged, but several refinements and developments have been introduced since the early 1950s. In 1955 Gibson’s Seth Lover patented the ‘humbucking’ pickup, which uses two coils to eliminate noise and interference; it also affects the sound by reducing response to high frequencies. Humbucking pickups have been used on most Gibson electric guitars since the mid-1950s and are largely responsible for the difference in sound between these and Fender guitars, which have largely continued to use single-coil pickups. Gibson introduced their first twin-necked electric guitar – one neck with six strings and the other with 12 – in 1958, and in the same year launched the Flying-V, which was at the time unsuccessful but has given rise to many outlandishly shaped models. Also that year, Gretsch were the first to offer stereo guitars, achieved by splitting the output of the strings and feeding them to two separate amplifiers. The first Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar was made in 1963 and was used effectively by Geroge Harrison of The Beatles and Roger McGuinn of The Byrds.
Experiments with materials other than wood have occurred sporadically. Rickenbacker made an electric guitar from Bakelite in the 1930s, while National produced a series of models with fibreglass bodies in the 1960s. In 1971 Ovation created an electric-acoustic hybrid by adding a bridge-mounted peizo pickup assembly to their plastic-backed acoustic guitar. Carbon graphite has been used occasionally for necks.
Attempts have been made to link guitars with synthesizers, primarily by the Japanese company Roland, since the late 1970s, but without widespread success. ‘Locking’ vibrato systems appeared in the 1980s, largely due to the efforts of Floyd Rose in the USA. They were designed primarily to improve on Fender’s original tremolo system and to enable a more extreme use of the effect by the strings being locked into position at the nut and the bridge. These systems often appeared on a new breed of instrument nicknamed the ‘superstrat’, a slimmed-down, 24-fret, Stratocaster-inspired design with a distinctive ‘pointed’ headstock, popularized by US makers Jackson and Charvel. Ibanez emerged as the leading Japanese manufacturer at this time.
In the 1990s there was a return to simpler, backward-looking ‘retro’ designs, and the classic 1950s trio of Telecaster, Les Paul and Stratocaster remained as popular as ever.
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K. Achard: The History and Development of the American Guitar (London, 1979)
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T. Bacon and P. Day: The Rickenbacker Book (London, 1994)
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T. Bacon, ed.: Classic Guitars of the Fifties (London, 1996)
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TONY BACON