Today’s guitar is much different in look, sound and use than the guitars of old. Much of today’s popular music contains an electric guitar at the forefront. Less than a century ago there was no such thing as an electric guitar. The guitar has gone through a long series of changes and developments. As the years progressed, different artists and luthiers, a luthier is a professional guitar maker, added their own personal flavor to the mixing bowl. These changes resulted in the modern solid-body electric guitar.
There were a wide variety and large number of stringed instruments that pre-date the guitar. Some of these instruments had mythic origins. One of the earliest predecessors was the lute. The ancient Greeks believed that Hermes invented the lute by stretching three cow-gut strings on a bow, over the shell of a turtle. The lute played several small roles in Greek mythology; it was used not just for its musical beauty but as a musical weapon.
Guitar-like instruments have been around for several thousand years. There were so many variations on stringed instruments that it is virtually impossible to trace the lineage of the guitar directly. It is possible though to examine some of the many early strings.
The earliest single string instruments, much like the lute made by Hermes, utilized a bow to hold the string. This string was stretched over a gourd used as a sound chamber. The pitch could be modified by bending the bow. Some African cultures still use instruments of this type. Similar early Mesopotamian stringed instruments used animal skin stretched over the chamber and were called a tanbur.
The first known stringed instrument that met all of the “requirements” to be considered a guitar was used by the Hittites near the Aegean Sea. Archeologists discovered a carving outside the city of Alaja Huyuk that depicted this instrument. It had the standard long fretted neck, a flat top and a curved body. It also had about five sound holes in the body to release more volume. This carving was dated at about 3,300 years.
It was late in the 17th century when the guitar first started to take a shape more like the modern acoustic instrument. Around the same time as the American Revolution the sixth string was added, this gave the guitar its current EADGBE tuning. Shortly thereafter a standard string length was set at 650mm. Also, the fretboard was shrunk to only two inches in width to allow better playability. The guitars of this era made by luthier Antonio Torres Jurado look largely like the classical guitar of today.
The guitar, though around for centuries, was not considered anything more than a vulgar barroom instrument. This image was changed with the advent of Andres Segovia and the classical guitar. Prior to his musical genius there was no real concept of a classical guitar. As a child, Segovia studied piano and cello but later disappointed his parents by opting for the guitar. Segovia managed to bring respect to the guitar by performing adaptations of classical music written for other instruments. Later, many original scores would be composed strictly with the guitar in mind.
It was a battle for the guitar itself to ever win respect in the musical community. Even though the classical guitar was eventually accepted, its electrical counterpart still faced much criticism. Segovia himself despises the modern electric guitar. He refers to it by saying, “And all this rock and roll is so much garbage. It does not even belong to the art of music. The electric guitar should not even be called a guitar.”(Crockett, 223)
By at least the beginning of the 20th century, the guitar was possibly more well known to the general public for its use in jazz and blues. An acoustic guitar was an integral part of many jazz and dance bands. The guitar solo emerged as a popular part of these types of music. There was a problem though, the acoustic guitar had a hard time being heard over the volume of the rest of the band. It was only sensible to include a guitar in smaller ensembles because it was virtually impossible to be heard with larger bands.
There were many early attempts to increase the volume of the standard acoustic guitar. Of course, increasing the size of the echo chamber would allow for more volume, but a guitar can only get so large before it becomes unplayable. Some manufacturers experimented with things like aluminum resonating panels to increase the sound. These and other ideas helped some, but still did not have the ability to overcome the volume of large bands.
Many companies then, began to experiment with electrical amplification systems for stringed instruments. The first one to put out an electrical string was the Ro-Pat-In company. In 1931, they released the “frying pan.” It was a lap-steel guitar with a pair of large horseshoe magnet pickups to forward the sound to the amplifiers. The pickups worked by creating a magnetic field that is disturbed when the string above it vibrates. This is translated into an electrical signal that can later be amplified to produce the volume needed in a band situation. These frying pans were not the same as standard guitars; they had small round bodies and were designed to be played while laying flat, as across one’s lap.
Two years later, the same company put out the first true “electric guitar.” They took a conventional acoustic Spanish guitar and outfitted it with the same horseshoe pickups used on the frying pan. This guitar was not a commercial success back in the 1930's, but its innovation led to the more widely known Gibson guitars.
Many of the acoustic guitar makers attempted to produce their own electric guitars by adding magnetic pickups to their flat-top acoustic guitars. The first one of these hollow-body electric guitars to become a commercial success was the Gibson ES-150. Gibson took one of their most popular acoustic models, and added their pickups to it. Luckily for Gibson, this caught the attention of Charlie Christian, a popular Jazz guitarist. Charlie Christian is known as one of the fathers of electric jazz guitar. The innovative styling of his playing led many people to take notice of this still infant instrument.
The electric guitar was solidly in place as an accepted instrument, not just a curious oddity, by the early 1940's. It was now used, not just for jazz and dance bands, but for an assortment of other music styles. Even though they had achieved wide use, these early electric guitars were far from perfect. The overall guitar design had not changed much from the acoustic guitars. The main difference was merely the addition of the pickup. At high volumes, the body tended to vibrate from the outside sound creating a feedback that, at that time anyway, was very undesirable. Feedback does become a popular effect later in the century.
Many people experimented with designs to try and eliminate this feedback. Les Paul, one of the worlds most famous guitarists, was one of the early experimenters. Engineer Paul Bigsby also did his part to influence guitar history. He helped produce a solid-body electric guitar in 1948. Some of his body and headstock designs can still be seen in Fender guitars today.
The man credited with truly bringing out the electric solid-body we know of today is Leo Fender. He was born in 1909 in Anaheim, California. He worked with electronics in his early life; then, in the 40's he formed a company with another designer to produce amplifiers and lap guitars like the early “frying pan.” He broke with his partner in 1946 to form his own company; the company still bears his name to this day.
It was 1950 before his first solid-body electric guitar would see a production line. It went through many names before settling on the Fender Telecaster. Even with its revolutionary design, like its predecessors, it was not an immediate commercial success. Originally, like the other solid-body guitars, it was more of a novelty than a serious instrument. It would become one of the three most classic designs in electric guitar history.
Gibson saw the potential of the solid-body guitar and the company worked with guitar legend Les Paul to build a solid-body guitar to his specifications. This guitar would become known as the Les Paul, which would be the second of the three most classic designs. 1952 saw the release of the Les Paul Goldtop guitar. It was a much more fancy instrument than the Fender Telecaster.
Fender then released the third of the three most classic designs, the Stratocaster. This would be the Fender “luxury” model. The Stratocaster, the Telecaster and the Les Paul, though not always with the overly fancy gold top, are all still in production to this day. The original guitars are considered by many to be the prize guitars to own. They are heavily sought by both players and collectors.
Although nowadays there are a number of new, more unusual guitar designs available, the old ones will not go away. Even much of the “new” designs tend to mimic the Stratocaster at least in shape. Some, though, like a Gibson Explorer or a Gibson Flying “V” have very radically different designs. Still, the basic concept of the pickup is still the same, a magnetic field generated by a magnetic coil. Different guitars use different locations and types of pickups to achieve different tonal qualities. The spacing of the frets in a guitar remains constant, as does EADGBE as the standard tuning. Some heavy metal guitarists tune down one-half step to start with E-flat to thicken up their sound.
The classical guitarist was very concerned with trueness of sound. The acoustic nature of their instrument allowed for no real effects. Each note would be heard distinctly. Andres Segovia, the greatest of the classical guitarists feels this is very important, “...my nails are very hard to break, but have a softness so that you don’t hear them on the strings, only the sound of the notes.”(Crockett, 224) This clarity is not a concern to most modern rock musicians.
There is a great variety of effects that can be used with guitars to produce different sounds. The most popular effect is probably distortion, this creates a fuzz around all of the notes, muddying up the clarity of each note. This allows notes to bleed onto each other and flow differently. Jimi Hendrix combined distortion with a wah-wah pedal to create his distinct sound. A wah-wah bends the notes and changes the tone of the sound as a whole. Echo effects, reverberation effects and sound doubling are just some of the effects employed by modern guitarists. No guitarists uses every effect, or even combines a very large number at any one time, but merely chooses the effects that best suit “their” sound.
At the beginning of the century the main use of the guitar was jazz and dance. The early electrics were created to help the jazz guitarist overcome the volume of the rest of the band. With the advent of the new guitar came new music. No longer is the electric guitar used primarily for jazz and/or dance; it is used for various forms of rock, country, R&B, and even rap. We hear guitars everywhere, from the radio, to movie soundtracks, to the Muzak in elevators, and even in our TV ad jingles. The uses of the electric guitar are as varied as the number of guitars available to play.
The modern guitar
is a much different beast than the guitars of old. The type of music that it plays, the volume
of the sound, the “qualities” of the sound, and even the look of the guitars
have all evolved. The classical guitar and
the modern electric guitar are so different that they seem almost to be totally
different instruments. This could give
one the ability to agree with
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