Episode 6: The Electric Guitar, Voice of Rock and Roll

The electric guitar is the instrument most associated with rock. When we think of rock guitar, we often conjure images of wild solos, loud riffs, and even smashed instruments, but that's just a sliver of the guitar's history.  In this episode, we explore the guitar's humble origins, transformations and innovations during its rich history. 

Check out each guitarist discussed in the episode on our Spotify playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4HytZpAozzT1Kir1vHmpwI?si=19928204b1344954

A special thanks to Joel Mabus and his contribution of finger style guitar. Be sure to check out Joel and his album "Parlor Guitar'  on his site, http://www.joelmabus.com.  

Transcript

Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page… It’s hard to imagine rock music without the electric guitar. While piano players like little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino brought their own key-thumping style, nothing was quite as raucous and revolutionary as the electric guitar. Tonight, we turn up the volume knob and dive down into why it became the weapon of choice for rock music. Welcome to the music scope. 

Early rock N roll was dominated by the sounds of the piano and the electric guitar. In fact, on many recordings, the guitar sits in the background while the piano drives the song home. But as rock’s popularity grew, so did the electric guitar’s prominence in American popular music. Thanks in large part to innovators such as Charlie Christian, Les Paul, and Chet Atkins, the electric guitar was a new and unique sound to music. Plus, with performers like T-Bone Walker and Chuck Berry, the guitar was also used as a stage prop, adding to the wild nature of the performance. This visual element of performance would be carried on by performers like Jimi Hendrix, Ace Frehley of Kiss and of course Pete Townshend of The Who. 

The guitar has a very long history – much of which is rooted in classical and Spanish music. The first guitars evolved from the oud which influenced the lute which eventually became the guitar. The Oud is a gourd-shaped instrument with 9 strings that originated in the middle east and was introduced to Spain when the moors invaded. The Oud would evolve into the lute, which shared its gourd-shaped body but introduced frets and generally a larger body that could accommodate more strings. The neck of the lute and oud generally had a 90-degree angle at the headstock to maintain string tension. Both were used extensively throughout the Middle Ages – the oud in the middle east, and the lute in Europe.  Around the 15th century, we first start seeing the first guitars in spain. It’s neck was straight, with a smaller headstock. The first guitars were teardrop or hourglass shaped and had 5 sets of strings – sometimes 2 or 3 strings per set. By the late 1700s, guitars were fairly consistent in design – with a standard small body and six courses of strings. These looked very similar to modern guitars, but were much smaller. 

In the mid-1800s, a Spanish guitar player and builder named Antonio de Torres Jurardo introduced a concert-style guitar. It had a widened body, with a thinner ‘waist’ and instead of wooden pegs like you see on a violin, he incorporated tuning machines. He also used a type of reinforcement inside the guitar called fan bracing, which allowed the guitar’s larger body to resonate while maintaining strength.  Andres Segovia, one of the most influential guitarists in history, adopted and popularized this design, which is still used today in classical guitars. 

These innovations changed the course of guitar design and were rapidly adopted by guitar makers the world over. Steel string guitars became popular in Europe, though chiefly as a parlor instrument favored by women. Manufacturer Christian Frederick Martin became disenchanted with the strict policies of the guild system in his native Germany, so he moved to America, where he opened a guitar shop in New York City in 1833, eventually moving to Nazareth, Pennsylvania. There he helped further refine the steel string guitar’s shape and function. He modified the fan-bracing preferred by classical guitarists into an x-pattern, which could withstand the tension of his instrument’s steel strings as opposed to gut strings favored by classical guitarists. Martin’s innovations would allow the flat-top guitar to grow in size and influence, introducing the dreadnaught-style acoustic we see in popular music today in the 1920s. 

Orville Gibson and Lloyd Loar developed the archtop mandolin, whose design was enlarged and modified to create the archtop guitar in the early 1900’s. This guitar was different in that it featured f-holes instead of a central soundhole under the strings. This design would greatly influence the first electric guitars that would follow in the 1930s. 

The electric guitar made its first appearance in Hawaiian music. In the early 30’s, the Rickenbacker company produced a lap-steel guitar with a device that produced magnetic fields around the guitar’s strings. The steel strings’ vibration would manipulate the magnetic fields and produce variants in amplitude.  When this signal was amplified, it would ‘broadcast’ the sound of the guitar’s strings. This was the pickup, which is central to how an electric guitar works – even in modern guitars.  

Rickenbacker’s ‘Frying Pan’ as it was called due to its appearance, gave lap-steel players the ability to be heard and also created a new, ‘crying’ tone. The Frying Pan’s success quickly inspired other guitar manufacturers to develop electric guitars. In 1936, Gibson introduced the ES-150 hollowbody guitar. The ‘ES’ stood for Electric Spanish, and its 150-dollar price point. It was based on the steel string jazz guitars of the time, with a pickup mounted under the strings. It still had f-style soundholes and functioned as an acoustic instrument. Charlie Christian was one of the first adopters of electric Jazz guitar. By using the increased volume to put his single-note solos in front of Benny Goodman’s band, he helped develop the guitar into a lead instrument. Christian would inspire others to take up the electric guitar and develop its sound further, including BB King, Chet Atkins and Les Paul. 

Soon, electric guitars were populating bandstands. They could now compete with drums, bass, and horns. In this context, the guitar was a completely new instrument. Additional controls such as vibrato bars, also called whammy bars in the states or wang bars in England were added. Tone and volume knobs allowed players to control the signal being amplified from the stage, and the guitarist as a soloist developed. Early guitar showmen took Charlie Christian’s idea and moved it forward. T-Bone Walker was one of the first guitarists to lead a full band. He stunned audiences with his acrobatic moves, including playing the guitar behind his head and doing the splits during his solos. His on-stage antics would inspire future showmen, like Chuck Berry who would inspire a generation to pick the instrument up. 

At this time, electric guitars looked like the hollowbody jazz guitars we are familiar with. Essentially a small, curvy acoustic guitar with a pickup attached to the top, underneath the strings. These guitars worked well at lower volumes, but the pickup would cause feedback –which is that high-pitched squeal you hear when a guitar is too close to an amplifier. This came from the guitar’s top resonating in sympathy with the note being produced. 

Les Paul began to work on an idea to combat feedback – a solid piece of wood that the pickup would be attached to, making the wood more stable and allowing for higher volume levels before feedback. He called his invention ‘the log’ and it was in essence a chunk of wood with a neck attached to it, and sides that could be added to give the guitar a more recognizable appearance and feel. He presented the Idea to the Gibson Guitar Corporation in the mid-40s. Gibson didn’t invest, but other inventors took notice. Paul Bigsby built a guitar for Merle Travis using this concept, and Travis used it extensively for the rest of his career.  

Meanwhile, in California, a small-time local amplification manufacturer was working on the same idea. Leo Fender had supplied public address systems and Hawaiian guitars and amplifiers to swing bands. In 1948, based on feedback from players, he began working on an instrument with a faster neck, and more durable parts more suited to traveling and easy replacement. In 1950, Fender debuted the Esquire, with a single pickup. It would soon be renamed the Broadcaster, and after an injunction from Gretsch, who had a drumkit by the same name, the Telecaster. Fender added a pickup, selector switch, and tone knob. This new style of guitar was made of one piece of pine and was slimmer than a traditional hollow body.  The tone was brighter but could be adjusted through a knob that backed off the treble and increased bass response. The guitar also resisted feedback and held up well.  It was a hit with performing musicians and an incredible moment in instrument manufacturing.

Seeing Fender’s success, Gibson’s Ted McCarty quickly called back Les Paul and quickly work on his namesake guitar which was introduced in 1952.  A key Gibson innovation was the humbucking pickup. Introduced in 1957, the humbucker was essentially two small pickups wired together, out of phase, which canceled out the 60-cycle hum associated with many electronics at the time. It also provided a thicker, meatier sound than the single coil pickup, and became a standard on almost all Gibson guitars. 

Other solid body and semi-hollow body guitars would follow, including the Fender Stratocaster, the Gretsch Duo-Jet, and Chet Atkin’s line of Gretsch semi-hollow bodies, which featured a traditional ES style body with a solid piece of wood in the middle of the body’s chamber. 

Guitars developed quickly, but at first, amplification did not. Many guitarists used 5 to 15-watt amplifiers to deliver their sound. The idea was to amplify the guitar’s acoustic qualities to be audible around other instruments. Guitarists soon pushed amps to their limit, causing components to distort the signal. This was a new sound – a strange, loud, fuzzy tone that made a guitar sound more like a saxophone. In the south, where equipment was limited, guitarists used whatever amps they could, and pushed them to the limit as they competed with driving drums and bass in jump blues. Jackie Benson, Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas, and BB King cut sides at Sun Studios that all feature overdriven guitar and would influence Rock n Roll’s early sound. 

As rock grew, so did the size of amplifiers. Fender introduced 45, then 60, then 85-watt amplifiers, giving guitarists more headroom and a cleaner sound. New effects like vibrato and reverb gave guitarists a wider pallet to create from.  Country guitarists created the cleaner, more refined ‘Nashville Sound’ with newfound headroom in amplifiers. Surf guitarists like Dick Dale used large amounts of reverb and whammy bar dives to create the iconic sound of California’s shore. In Duane Eddie’s 1958 instrumental ‘rebel rouser’. He uses reverb, vibrato, and his twangy Gretsch guitar to deliver a sound that was completely new for that time. 

In the early ’60s, a London music shop owner was challenged with the price of importing expensive American amplifiers and lowering profits for people to afford them. Jim Marshall, a drummer, used the fender Bassman as a template and created his own version of the amp using leftover supplies from British World War Two radios. This allowed him to supply English guitarists with an inexpensive version of the fender, although he placed the EQ in a different spot in the amp’s build, giving it a sound all its own. Players like Eric Clapton and Peter Green discovered the magical combination of a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall amplifier, giving English blues a unique overdrive that would be ground zero for heavier music to come. 

By the mid 60’s, rock had expanded into the dominant form of music in the US and England. Large crowds now began to fill amphitheaters and even stadiums to hear their favorite artists. Bands like Cream, The Yardbirds, and The Who crafted new sounds, driven by their guitarists – Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Pete Townshend. Townshend had helped bring a new, 100-watt amp into the spotlight by imploring Jim Marshall to build something that could compete with Keith Moon’s drumming. The monolithic Marshall stack would soon become the most iconic amplifier in rock, adopted by Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and countless others as a symbol and generator of power.

Of all the guitarists to push the boundaries of what a guitar could do, Jimi Hendrix was the most adventurous. After a stint in the Army’s 101st airborne division, Hendrix started off backing up performers in the early 60s like Little Richard, Wilson Pickett and the Isley Brothers. He became tired of the role of sideman and moved to New York in 1966, where he met Chas Chandler of the Animals. Chandler talked him into coming to England on the condition that he be introduced to Jeff Beck. 

Hendrix was a master showman, playing the guitar behind his head, with his teeth, even setting instruments on fire. He also incorporated any sound he heard into his own performances. After being exposed to the who, he used 100w marshall amps to achieve a distorted ad incredibly loud tone. He also would be influenced by the beatles’ studio innovations, soul music, and cream’s fusion of blues and jazz with heavily distorted sounds. Hendrix combined all of these influences into a unique sound that was futuristic and almost avant garde. His guitar would howl and cry as he bent the strings and controlled feedback from the amp by shifting his position and how much he bent the note. Hendrix influenced every guitarist at the time and demonstrated that the guitar was a pallet of seemingly unlimited expression. Amazingly, his catalog of recordings spanned only 4 years before his untimely death. 

Guitars too continued to evolve. The Gibson SG, which stood for solid -body guitar, debuted in 1961. Its aggressively thick sound would be used by the likes of Carlos Santana and Tony Iommi, whose band Black Sabbath would practically write the book on heavy metal. Throughout the 60s, electric guitar manufacturers continued to introduce new shapes, controls and finishes. Guitars like the Gibson explorer and flying V and Fender’s Jazzmaster, Mustang and Jaguar all gave players a modern palette of tones to choose from, and presented it in a futuristic shape. 

The Les Paul disappeared from the market in 1962, replaced by the SG. Many reasons have been given for its discontinuation, but as its popularity grew in the 1960’s with guitarists such as Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Peter Green, Gibson reintroduced the les paul in 1968. An interesting coincidence is Les Paul and Mary Ford’s divorce in 1964 and finalization in 1968 just happened to fall neatly within the timeframe of the Les Paul’s disappearance from the market, so Les Paul wouldn’t have to pay Mary Ford any alimony from the earnings of his namesake guitar. But I’m… sure that’s just a coincidence, right? 

During the 70’s, prog-rock guitarists like Robert Fripp had evolved guitar sounds into synthesizer-like territory, creating soundscapes through the use of effect pedals.  Fripp in particular helped popularize the Guitar-synth sound with his band King Crimson. He would inspire another guitarist, Andy Summers of the Police to create futuristic soundscapes that can be heard throughout the synth-friendly new-wave movement of the 1980’s. Another evolution was the introduction of active electronics in instruments. This would provide greater control of the tone through a boosted preamp section providing a cleaner, more even sound.  Early adopters of active electronics included guitarist les paul, and bassists John Entwistle of the Who and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin.

In the late seventies, an exciting new guitarist would revolutionize the guitar solo by bringing elements of classical arpeggios together with his love of bands like Led Zeppelin and Cream. Eddie Van Halen inspired a generation of shredders, who would mimic his fast playing, saturated overdriven sound, and over-the-top dive bombs. His guitar was as unique as he was – it was made by combining a fender Stratocaster-style body and neck from builder Wayne Charvel with a Gibson ES335 humbucking pickup, and a Floyd-rose tremolo bridge system. He also stripped out all of the control electronics aside from a single volume knob. Finally, he painted the body in a striped finish using gaffer’s tape between coats to create the effect. 

Van Halen’s playing and aggressive guitar modification inspired a generation of players, which would usher in a decade of fast-playing, high energy lead guitarists. Hair metal reigned supreme through the 1980’s, until another revolution, led by an unassuming, left-handed guitarist from Seattle would turn the industry on its head. Inspired by the simplicity, nihilistic attitude, and arcane sounds of underground and punk music, Kurt Cobain and his band Nirvana abandoned showing off technical prowess for serving their song’s loud-quiet- loud arrangements. Cobain used mid-60’s fender mustangs and jaguars, with a strap often secured by duct tape.  He used effect pedals and switched between clean and distorted tones to maximize the contrast between the verse and chorus.  Smells like teen spirit ushered in a new wave of heavy music, inspired by alternative bands like the Pixies and early heavy music like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Throughout the 2000s, the guitar continued to be featured prominently in Nu Metal and neo-folk movements.  

Throughout rock’s history, iconic guitars have been identified with the guitarists who played them. 

Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin’s main Les Paul is a stunning 1959 model in a sunburst finish. Page himself added additional switches underneath the pickguard, giving him the ability to control each pickup’s phase and pickup operation (single coil or humbucking). 

In the 50s, Chuck Berry gave us the definition of what rock guitar sounded like using a Gibson ES-355TD to record Johnny B Goode. Its cherry-red finish is instantly recognizable and conjures images of Berry performing his duck walk on stage. 

Eric Clapton is associated with developing sounds using several models. He was one of the first guitarists to use the combination of a late 50s les paul through a Marshal JTM45. The best example of this is his performance on The Album John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton. In Cream, He often used a Gibson SG hand painted in psychedelic rainbow colors. He would also use a Gibson ES-335 during this period. Perhaps Clapton’s most famous guitar is ‘Blackie’, a Black Fender Stratocaster which is comprised of parts from three separate guitars that Clapton Purchased at Manny’s music in New York.

BB King’s ‘Lucille’ is one of the most famous guitars in the world. Based on a Gibson ES-355, the Lucille is named after an actual person. BB king was playing a show early in his career when a fight broke out. The two men knocked over a barrel of kerosene, and the building caught fire. King ran back into the burning building to retrieve his guitar. Later, he learned that the men had been fighting over a woman named Lucille, and he named his guitar after her. 

Some guitarists have built their own guitars. Bo Diddly built his first guitar in 1945. It was a cigar-box-style body with a pickup from a victrola record player. When he gained popularity in the 1950’s, Diddley worked with Gretsch guitars to build a custom model for him.  His association with Gretsch lasted the rest of his career. 

Brian May of Queen built his ‘Red Special’ guitar with his father at the age of 16. Almost everything was manufactured by Brian and his dad.  He purchased only the frets and tuning machines from a local store. The initial pickups were also made by May, but later he installed pickups made by Burns, after he rewound and modified them. 

The guitar has been an evolving part of rock n roll since its inception and continues to be the instrument most associated with rock. Throughout popular music’s changes, twists and turns, the electric guitar is always present as players continue to push the boundaries of what it can produce. As much as guitars and guitarists have changed, the guitar, at its core is still a simple set of strings designed to let people express themselves through music.

Thanks for exploring the world and evolution of the electric guitar with me today. I hope you Join me next week when we discuss how the role of the modern musician has shifted to incorporate the world of business and marketing while maintaining artistic integrity. Thanks again for tuning in to the Musicscope. I’m Mike Grubb.