Despite the persisting unfashionability of guitars in mainstream music, guitars are too versatile and adaptable to ever go away. And while electric guitars may never be as ubiquitous in households as pianos at their peak or even acoustic guitars, as I mentioned in my last piece, sales have grown 72% since 2009 to 1.41 billion. Even video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have inspired people to learn the real instrument. Enrollment in the School Of Rock has grown to over 17, 000, while thousands of other music camps now include guitars, something that certainly wasn’t a thing when I was at band camp.
It’s not just kids going to camp — on July 30 to August 2, you can attend Camp Fuzz with Dinosaur Jr.. If it weren’t so expensive, I’d be tempted, though somewhat embarrassed, to go. Dinosaur Jr. was the band inspired me to really focus my listening on the guitar. During my first week of college I ended up in the hospital with a collapsed lung for ten days, and
Was constantly playing on my Walkman, as I got lost in J. Mascis’s mega-distorted solos. I have no doubt it would be fun, and it will likely sell out. Camp Fuzz is just one in a series put on by Music Masters Camps, based in the Catskill Forest Preserve, east of Woodstock in upstate New York.
The Guitar: A Brief History From The Renaissance To The Modern Day
I consider most guitars nice to look at. Some are considered more than cultural artifacts, but actual works of art. Just as I had finished Brad Tolinski & Alan di Perna’s book Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound & Revolution of the Electric Guitar (2016), the Play It Loud exhibit opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 8 to October 1. It seems to focus on the significance of guitars that were played by well known players, but it’s a good start.
While the exhibit features more instruments than just guitars, I can see why it named itself after the Play It Loud book. No other instrument is a more iconic representation of popular music in the second half of the 20th century than the electric guitar. I can’t imagine anyone more qualified to write such a book than Brad Tolinski, editor in chief of
. The well-researched book goes deep into the stories of key guitar makers, and players who helped push the innovations. The story starts with George Beauchamp’s and John Dopyera’s early efforts at making guitars loud enough to overcome crowd noise, loud drums and amplified vocals with the tri-cone, three spun cones attached to bridge in 1926. The machinist they outsourced their nickel bodied guitars to, Adolph Rickenbacker, added further innovations resulting in the A-25 Frying Pan, which hit the market in 1932.
George Harrison's First Electric Guitar Tops The Bill At Music Icons Auction
The first big name guitar hero of the era of the electric guitar was Charlie Christian. A buddy of influential Texas bluesman T-Bone Walker, he was blowing people away in the jazz scene in Oklahoma City, until he was recruited by Benny Goodman in 1939. Soon, the Gibson ES-150 (Electric Spanish) became Charlie’s main axe, and the popularity of both guitar and player exploded, despite the fact that they were only just emerging from the Great Depression, and $150 was a heck of a lot of money. Meanwhile in California, a friendship between Les Paul, Leo Fender and Paul A. Bigsby (who had a background in motorcycle and industrial design) would result in further innovations.
As Les Paul became a successful performer, he would later end up hanging out with fellow guitarists at the Epiphone showroom in New York, which sometimes included Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. They’d talk about the challenges the hollow body guitars presented in controlling tone and feedback. A tinkerer since the 1920s, Les Paul worked on a concept for a solid body guitar, resulting in the “Log.” Other musicians ridiculed the look of the instrument until Paul added the “wings” so as to resemble the shapes people were used to. Even so, people like Epiphone’s Epi Stathopoulo were less than impressed at first. Paul Bigsby created one of the early attempts for a solid body for Les Paul in 1944. His innovations were more fleshed out in the Travis-Bigsby guitar he made for country picker Merle Travis, with a cast-aluminum bridge, in 1948.
The next year, Fender came out with a design which bolts the neck to the body rather than the traditional dovetail joint. This made the guitar easier and cheaper to make, customize and repair. A pragmatic instrument, coinciding with the mid-century-modernist movement in design and architecture, for the working class musician. The design came out as the Esquire in 1950, eventually evolving to the Broadcaster, and finally the popular Telecaster in 1951. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Albert Collins, Muddy Waters, Nathaniel Douglas (Little Richard) and Paul Burlison of the Johnny Burnette Rock ’n’ Roll Trio were early adopters of the Telecaster. The Stratocaster came out in 1954, it’s unique quacky tone from three single coil pickups made popular by the most worshipped of guitar heros, Jimi Hendrix.
Prs Se Santana Signature Guitar Santana Yellow
Surf guitar legend Dick Dale worked closely with Fender on further innovations in amplification and guitar. He needed a louder amp, and they camp up with the 100-watt Fender Showman with 15-inch JBL loudspeakers. “When I plugged that speaker into the Showman amp, ” Dale later recalled, “the world of pansy-ass electronics came to an end. It was like Einstein splitting the atom.” The Jazzmaster (1958) and the flashy chrome-surfaced Jaguar (1962) also became popular with surf guitarists. Less expensive student models were introduced, including the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic (1956) and Mustang (1964), which also became popular with punk musicians in the 70s and 80s. Johnny Ramone used a different guitar, named after surf legends, the Mosrite Ventures II. Ironically it was punk/new wave era artists like Elvis Costello and Television’s Tom Verlaine who helped pull the Jazzmaster out of obscurity.
Another influential partnership between manufacturer and musician was Gretsch and Chet Atkins, who was influenced by Merle Travis, Les Paul and George Barnes. The first Atkins signature guitar was the garish 6120 (1955), featuring a campfire orange finish, kitschy G logo, and engravings of cowboy motifs on the fretboard like steer head, cactus and such. Atkins hated the look but reluctantly used it, and it was a success, outselling Gibson’s concurrent ES-175. Elvis Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore, Buddy Holly, Cliff Gallup (Gene Vincent) and Eddie Cochran played it. Gretsch also came out with the rocket-shaped Jupiter Thunderbird for Bo Diddley.
Gibson wasn’t to be left behind in the solid-body market, coming up with their version of the solid-body Stradivarius, the Les Paul in 1952. The goldtop version sold for $210, about $20 more than the Telecaster. While Les Paul was at a peak in 1952 with his
I Want My Guitars To Be Part Of Home Decoration, Like A Piece Of Art
EP, his stardom was soon to fade as a new country-blues hybrd, rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll became the next big thing. Gibson kept innovating, adding the Tune-o-matic bridge to the Les Paul Custom by 1954, and humbucker pickups designed by Seth Lover in 1955 were added by 1957. The result was a warm, dark, bass-heavy sound of that would differentiate Les Pauls from the brighter Fender sound. They marketed the Les Paul Standard (1958) to jazz players, wrongly assuming the rock ‘n’ roll fad was going away. They had no idea of course, that hard rock and heavy metal were around the corner. They had stopped production in 1961, they same year they introduced a more Modernist looking Les Paul SG, which Les Paul reluctantly posed with in the catalog, but they soon removed his name from it. But later in the 60s, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Peter Green, Jeff Beck, Paul Kossoff, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page helped revive the Les Paul, prompting them to resume production in 1968. While Tony Iommi most often used an SG (both Gibson and Epiphone have made Iommi signature SGs), he also had a couple Les Pauls, which became a popular axe with the legions of doom bands that sprung up in the 80s and beyond, including Victor Griffin (Pentagram), Scott “Wino” Weinrich (The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan), Bruce Franklin (Trouble), and Mats Björkman (Candlemass).
In 1958 Gibson also introduced the ES-335 archtop semi-hollowbody, and a trio of ultra-Modernist designs, the Flying V, the Explorer and the Moderne. However, the Moderne was not put into production until 1982, while the other Modernist designs did not gain much popularity until the metal era. In 1963 they took another shot at a new design that might connect with the current audience, with the Firebird, reflecting hot rod car designs like the Ford Thunderbird, just like Fender did in 1962 with the Jaguar. In 1963 Rickenbacker’s semi-hollow body 12-string 360/12 would soon to be a big hit thanks to an endorsement from the Beatles, cementing it as the guitar of choice for its jangle sound. Also out in 1963 was the teardrop-shaped Vox Mark III which was favored by the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones.
When the garage band explosion happened in the mid-60s, many other
The Electric Guitar: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Musical Instrument
Surf guitar legend Dick Dale worked closely with Fender on further innovations in amplification and guitar. He needed a louder amp, and they camp up with the 100-watt Fender Showman with 15-inch JBL loudspeakers. “When I plugged that speaker into the Showman amp, ” Dale later recalled, “the world of pansy-ass electronics came to an end. It was like Einstein splitting the atom.” The Jazzmaster (1958) and the flashy chrome-surfaced Jaguar (1962) also became popular with surf guitarists. Less expensive student models were introduced, including the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic (1956) and Mustang (1964), which also became popular with punk musicians in the 70s and 80s. Johnny Ramone used a different guitar, named after surf legends, the Mosrite Ventures II. Ironically it was punk/new wave era artists like Elvis Costello and Television’s Tom Verlaine who helped pull the Jazzmaster out of obscurity.
Another influential partnership between manufacturer and musician was Gretsch and Chet Atkins, who was influenced by Merle Travis, Les Paul and George Barnes. The first Atkins signature guitar was the garish 6120 (1955), featuring a campfire orange finish, kitschy G logo, and engravings of cowboy motifs on the fretboard like steer head, cactus and such. Atkins hated the look but reluctantly used it, and it was a success, outselling Gibson’s concurrent ES-175. Elvis Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore, Buddy Holly, Cliff Gallup (Gene Vincent) and Eddie Cochran played it. Gretsch also came out with the rocket-shaped Jupiter Thunderbird for Bo Diddley.
Gibson wasn’t to be left behind in the solid-body market, coming up with their version of the solid-body Stradivarius, the Les Paul in 1952. The goldtop version sold for $210, about $20 more than the Telecaster. While Les Paul was at a peak in 1952 with his
I Want My Guitars To Be Part Of Home Decoration, Like A Piece Of Art
EP, his stardom was soon to fade as a new country-blues hybrd, rockabilly and rock ‘n’ roll became the next big thing. Gibson kept innovating, adding the Tune-o-matic bridge to the Les Paul Custom by 1954, and humbucker pickups designed by Seth Lover in 1955 were added by 1957. The result was a warm, dark, bass-heavy sound of that would differentiate Les Pauls from the brighter Fender sound. They marketed the Les Paul Standard (1958) to jazz players, wrongly assuming the rock ‘n’ roll fad was going away. They had no idea of course, that hard rock and heavy metal were around the corner. They had stopped production in 1961, they same year they introduced a more Modernist looking Les Paul SG, which Les Paul reluctantly posed with in the catalog, but they soon removed his name from it. But later in the 60s, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Peter Green, Jeff Beck, Paul Kossoff, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page helped revive the Les Paul, prompting them to resume production in 1968. While Tony Iommi most often used an SG (both Gibson and Epiphone have made Iommi signature SGs), he also had a couple Les Pauls, which became a popular axe with the legions of doom bands that sprung up in the 80s and beyond, including Victor Griffin (Pentagram), Scott “Wino” Weinrich (The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan), Bruce Franklin (Trouble), and Mats Björkman (Candlemass).
In 1958 Gibson also introduced the ES-335 archtop semi-hollowbody, and a trio of ultra-Modernist designs, the Flying V, the Explorer and the Moderne. However, the Moderne was not put into production until 1982, while the other Modernist designs did not gain much popularity until the metal era. In 1963 they took another shot at a new design that might connect with the current audience, with the Firebird, reflecting hot rod car designs like the Ford Thunderbird, just like Fender did in 1962 with the Jaguar. In 1963 Rickenbacker’s semi-hollow body 12-string 360/12 would soon to be a big hit thanks to an endorsement from the Beatles, cementing it as the guitar of choice for its jangle sound. Also out in 1963 was the teardrop-shaped Vox Mark III which was favored by the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones.
When the garage band explosion happened in the mid-60s, many other
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