Scribd
Upload
567 views2 pages

Brief History of The Electric Guitar

The electric guitar was developed to be louder than acoustic guitars playing in big bands. Early electric guitars used electromagnetic pickups added to acoustic guitars or steel guitars to amplify the sound. Solid body electric guitars then emerged to eliminate unwanted vibration from guitar bodies, including Les Paul's pioneering "Log" guitar of the 1940s and Leo Fender's solid body designs like the Telecaster. The solid body electric guitar became popularized by Fender's commercial success and Gibson's endorsement deal with Les Paul for their Les Paul Standard model, cementing the solid body electric guitar as the standard design.

Uploaded by

Rory Johnston
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
567 views2 pages

Brief History of The Electric Guitar

The electric guitar was developed to be louder than acoustic guitars playing in big bands. Early electric guitars used electromagnetic pickups added to acoustic guitars or steel guitars to amplify the sound. Solid body electric guitars then emerged to eliminate unwanted vibration from guitar bodies, including Les Paul's pioneering "Log" guitar of the 1940s and Leo Fender's solid body designs like the Telecaster. The solid body electric guitar became popularized by Fender's commercial success and Gibson's endorsement deal with Les Paul for their Les Paul Standard model, cementing the solid body electric guitar as the standard design.

Uploaded by

Rory Johnston
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

Brief History of the Electric Guitar

The Electric Guitar is the token instrument of 20th and 21st century
music, not only is it used in almost every single band in existence, but
it is one of the main causes for musical evolution in the past century.

The need for louder guitars came from the ‘Big Band’ era of Jazz,
where guitars were having to compete with the rest of the band
whilst doing solos. The first types of electric guitars in jazz were
hollow archtop acoustic guitar bodies with electromagnetic
transducers. By 1932 electrically amplified guitars were
commercially available.

The first types of electric guitars were acoustics with


tungsten pickups. These guitars were used by people like
Charlie Christian, using the Gibson ES150, the ‘ES’ standing
for Electro Spanish and the ‘150’ standing for the fact that it
cost $150 along with the EH-150 Amplifier, which included 1
mic jack, 3 instrument jacks, volume controls and a bass
expander. This guitar is was the first commercially successful
Spanish-style electric guitar.
The problem with it was that the vibration from the guitar
body amplifying the strings vibration and the stings vibrating, made
the pick up quite in-effective, resulting it an irregular signal, leading
to extremes in dynamics.

The solution to this problem was for the guitar to


have a solid body. This meant that the guitar had
no functionally resonating air spaces. The
Rickenbacker ‘Frying Pan’ as it was known, was a
cast aluminium electric steel guitar. This had no
functionally resonating air spaces, and was
therefore a solid body guitar. It was
used by a lot of Hawaian guitar players
who used metal bottlenecks to create a
sliding sound.

In 1940 Les Paul, an American Jazz and Country Guitarist


and Songwriter, created what would eventually become one
of the most iconic guitars of all time. Les Paul created ‘The
Log’ in the Epiphone guitar facoy, and it was one of the first
solid body electric guitars. Paul approached the Gibson Guitar
Corporation with his invension,but they turned him down, showing
no interest in the guitar.

At the same time as this, Leo Fender was creating


electric guitars aswell. Having teamed up with
Claton Orr “Doc” Kauffman, and invertor and lap
steel player who had worked for Rickenbacker,
during WWII, they stared designing and building
Hawaiian guitars and amplifiers. Fender later went
on to develop the ‘Esquire’ and the ‘Broadcaster’
later renamed the ‘Telecaster’ due to naming rights.

In the end, after Fenders


huge success with the solid body electric
guitar, Gibson started to make a guitar to
compete with it, but realised they needed
some endorcement from a famous artist.
So Gibson President Ted McCarty
approached Paul with an endorcement
opportunity. Pail signed, and Gibson started manufacturing what
became the Gibson “Les Paul Standard”.

You might also like