Electric guitar

• 1. Introduction

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  The electric guitar was invented in 1932, and the first one ever sold to the public was a cast aluminium lap steel nicknamed the "Frying Pan". It does not make much audible sound on its own. Pluck its strings and you hear almost nothing. Its voice lives somewhere else entirely, in a magnet wound with very fine wire, in a current measured at one to nine millivolts, in a loudspeaker across the room. This is an instrument that cannot be heard at performance volume without electricity. How did a near-silent object become the most important instrument in popular music during the 1950s and 1960s? Why did jazz players want it before anyone else? And how does a vibrating steel string become sound you can feel in your chest?

• 2. The Frying Pan

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  George Beauchamp was the general manager of the National Stringed Instrument Corporation when, in 1931, he designed a cast aluminium lap steel guitar that people nicknamed the "Frying Pan". His partner Paul Barth served as vice president. Together with Adolph Rickenbacker, Beauchamp worked out the electromagnetic pickups that made the instrument possible. Coils wrapped around a magnet created an electromagnetic field. That field converted the vibrations of the strings into electrical signals, which could then be amplified.

  Commercial production began in the late summer of 1932 in Los Angeles, run by the Ro-Pat-In Corporation, whose full name was the Electro-Patent-Instrument Company. It was a partnership of Beauchamp, Adolph Rickenbacker, and Paul Barth. Rickenbacker's surname was originally spelled Rickenbacher. The "Frying Pan" earned its place in history beyond the workshop. Gage Brewer played it in a publicly promoted performance in Wichita, Kansas in October 1932, the first time an electric guitar was used that way.

  In 1934, the company was renamed the Rickenbacker Electro Stringed Instrument Company. That same year Beauchamp applied for a United States patent for an Electrical Stringed Musical Instrument. The patent was not issued until 1937. By then the secret was out. Other manufacturers were already building their own electric guitar designs, and Beauchamp's filing arrived in a crowded field.

• 3. A Crowded Field

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  Dobro entered in 1933. National, AudioVox, and Volu-tone followed in 1934. By 1935 the list grew to include Vega, Epiphone with its Electrophone and Electar lines, and Gibson, with many others arriving by 1936. The demand had a clear cause: the big band era. As orchestras grew larger, guitar players realized they needed amplification and electrification to be heard at all. The first electric guitars used in jazz were hollow archtop acoustic bodies fitted with electromagnetic transducers.

  By early to mid 1935, the Electro String Instrument Corporation pushed past the lap steel with two new releases. The Electro-Spanish Model B and the Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts reached for a new audience. The Ken Roberts was the first full 25-inch scale electric guitar ever produced, giving players easy access to 17 frets free of the body. Unlike the lap-steel instruments of the day, it was built to play standing upright, on a strap, as with an acoustic guitar.

  The Ken Roberts carried another first. It featured a hand-operated vibrato as a standard arrangement, a device called the "Vibrola", invented by Doc Kauffman. Almost none survive. It is estimated that fewer than 50 were constructed between 1933 and 1937, and fewer than 10 are known to exist today.

• 4. Hollow To Solid

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  The solid-body electric guitar is made of solid wood, without functionally resonating air spaces. Vivi-Tone offered the first solid-body Spanish standard guitar no later than 1934, a guitar-shaped body of a single sheet of plywood affixed to a wood frame. In 1935 Rickenbacker marketed the Electro Spanish, made of Bakelite. By 1936 the Slingerland company introduced a wooden solid-body model, the Slingerland Songster 401, with a lap steel counterpart called the Songster 400.

  Gibson's first production electric guitar arrived in 1936 as the ES-150. The "ES" stood for "Electric Spanish", and the "150" reflected the $150 price, which also covered a matching amplifier. Its single-coil, hexagonally shaped "bar" pickup was designed by Walt Fuller. It became known as the "Charlie Christian" pickup, named for the jazz guitarist among the first to perform with the instrument. The ES-150 found some popularity but suffered from unequal loudness across its six strings.

  Les Paul built a functioning solid-body electric in 1940 from an Epiphone acoustic archtop, as an experiment. His "log guitar" was a wood post with a neck attached and two hollow-body halves bolted to the sides for appearance only. Gibson rejected the idea at first. O.W. Appleton of Nogales, Arizona developed a similar Spanish-style solid-body in 1941, his "App" guitar, but could not sell it to Gibson or Fender. In 1946, Merle Travis commissioned steel guitar builder Paul Bigsby to make him a solid-body Spanish-style electric, delivered in 1948.

  The first mass-produced solid-body guitar belonged to Fender. The Esquire and the Broadcaster, later renamed the Telecaster, first appeared in 1950, five years after Les Paul made his prototype. The Gibson Les Paul followed soon after to compete, designed by Ted McCarty and released in 1952. The Fender Stratocaster arrived in 1954 and became extremely popular among musicians in the 1960s and 1970s for its wide tonal range and comfortable ergonomics. The Stratocaster is a triple single-coil guitar, one of the design families that would carry the instrument into rock and roll.

• 5. Hollow Voices

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  Semi-acoustic guitars keep a hollow body like an acoustic guitar, with electromagnetic pickups mounted directly into it. Because the hollow body vibrates too, the pickups convert a combination of string and body vibration into one signal. Many models, called semi-hollow bodies, run a solid block through the middle of the soundbox to reduce acoustic feedback. They cannot produce enough volume for live performance unplugged, but they serve well for quiet practice. Players prize their sweet, plaintive, or funky tone across jazz, blues, funk, sixties pop, and indie rock.

  These instruments usually carry cello-style F-shaped sound holes, which can be blocked off to reduce feedback further. Their bodies are built from multiple pieces of wood in an archtop form, unlike the typical steel-string acoustic. The top is a moderately thick piece of wood carved into a thin outward-curving shape. Conventional acoustic guitars, by contrast, use a thin, flat top.

  Some otherwise solid guitars hide hollow chambers inside, like the Gibson Les Paul Supreme, the PRS Singlecut, and the Fender Telecaster Thinline. Gibson and PRS call these chambered bodies. The chambers are placed so they do not interfere with the bridge and string anchor point. Builders use them to reduce weight, to chase a semi-acoustic tone, or both. The electric acoustic is a different animal again, an acoustic guitar with piezoelectric pickups under the bridge or a low-mass microphone inside the body, amplifying the body's vibration to raise volume without altering tone.

• 6. Catching The Hum

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  Magnetic pickups have a flaw built into their nature. They tend to pick up ambient, usually unwanted electromagnetic interference. This mains hum produces a tone of 50 or 60 cycles per second, depending on the powerline frequency of the local alternating current supply. The hum is particularly strong with single-coil pickups, the same kind that gave the Stratocaster its character.

  The double-coil pickup answered this problem and got its name from it. Called the "humbucker", it was invented to "buck" the hum, in the sense of opposing or resisting it. Two coils, wired to cancel the interference, also carry a side effect. Their high combined inductance leads to the richer, "fatter" tone associated with humbucking pickups.

  The signal itself begins with motion. String movement induces a small electric current in the magnetic pickups, magnets wound with coils of very fine wire. The current is proportional to factors such as string density and the amount of movement over the pickups. It passes through the tone and volume circuits to the output jack, then through a cable to an amplifier. That cable usually carries a high-impedance mono plug with a tip and sleeve configuration, a TS phone connector, at a voltage around one to nine millivolts.

• 7. Bridges And Necks

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  There are four basic types of bridge and tailpiece systems on the electric guitar. A hard-tail bridge anchors the strings at or directly behind the bridge, fastened securely to the top, common on the Gibson Les Paul and Paul Reed Smith models. A floating or trapeze tailpiece, similar to a violin's, fastens at the base of the guitar and appears on Rickenbackers, Gretsches, Epiphones, and the 1952 Gibson Les Paul. The whammy bar, or vibrato tailpiece, uses a lever attached to the bridge to slacken or tighten the strings and bend their pitch.

  Early vibrato systems were often unreliable and made guitars go out of tune easily, with a limited pitch range. Later Fender designs improved on this, but Fender held the patent, so rival companies used older designs for years. In the late 1970s, Floyd Rose experimented with "locking" nuts and bridges that prevent the guitar from losing tuning even under heavy vibrato use. The fourth system, string-through body anchoring, passes the strings through holes in the body to the back, where metal ferrules hold them. Many believe this improves sustain and timbre.

  The neck's primary metric is scale length, the vibrating length of the strings from nut to bridge. A typical Fender uses a 25.5-inch scale, while Gibson uses 24.75 inches in the Les Paul, a figure that has varied over the years by as much as half an inch. Leo Fender pioneered bolt-on necks to make adjustment and replacement easy. Set-in necks are glued at the factory, the traditional joint, while neck-through instruments extend the neck to form the center of the body. A neck-through design is difficult or even impossible to repair.

  Materials reach far beyond standard wood. Hardwoods like maple, mahogany, and ash top the list, but in the 1970s designers turned to aircraft-grade aluminum, carbon fiber, and ebonol. Makers known for these unusual materials include John Veleno, Travis Bean, Geoff Gould, and Alembic. Roger C. Field designed a folding-neck guitar called the "Foldaxe" for Chet Atkins. Steinberger built headless carbon fiber instruments with tuning done on the bridge, and the Gittler guitar abandoned the neck in the traditional sense altogether.