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Guitar History
Have you ever think about the
guitar history?
Who invented the first guitar, what did it look like?
Acustic guitars?
What about the amplifiers and electric guitars..?
First, the guitar was
invented. That occurred a long time ago,
maybe in the 1500's
Acustic Guitars
Stringed instruments go back at least as far as Ancient Egypt
and Rome. We know this from clay tablets, and other forms of pictures, that
show people playing stringed instruments. In Europe, a stringed instrument
called the lute was more popular, but guitars were also around. During the 16th
century, guitars had double strings instead of the single strings that they
have today. Strings were made of gut, not nylon or metal. There was not one
standard type of guitar as there is today, either. Some guitars had three
strings, some had four, and some had five.
The 17th century was probably when the six-string guitar arrived. A Spanish
instrument called the vihuela had six strings. A vihuela had six double strings
made of gut. It was longer than today's guitar, but it was played using frets
on the neck of the guitar, and the music was written down in tablature as it is
now. Like the other stringed instruments, a vihuela had a hollow body that gave
the sound its volume. Many people consider the guitar a Spanish invention.
In the 18th century, the bass guitar was invented, and so was a ten-string
guitar. The ten-string guitar had the six regular strings and a separate set of
four bass strings. Also during this time, single strings came into use instead
of the old double strings.
A few names stand out in the development of the guitar. Francisco Tarrega was a
musician and songwriter. He developed modern techniques for playing the guitar.
He made the guitar very popular during the 19th century. Antonio Torres was a
luthier; he made guitars. He set the standard for the classic acoustic guitar
that is still played today.
Electric Guitars
Electric guitars were originally designed
by an assortment of luthiers, electronics buffs, and instrument manufacturers,
in varying combinations. Some of the earliest electric guitars used tungsten
pickups and were manufactured in the 1930s by Rickenbacker. The popularity of
the electric guitar began with the big band era, the amplified instruments
being necessary to compete with the loud volumes of the large brass sections
common to jazz orchestras of the thirties and forties. Initially, electric
guitars consisted primarily of hollow "archtop" acoustic guitar bodies to which
electromagnetic transducers had been attached.
The version of the instrument that is most well known today is the "solid body"
electric guitar: a guitar made of solid wood, without resonating airspaces
within it. One of the first solid body electric guitars was built by musician
and inventor Les Paul in the early 1940s, working after hours in the Epiphone
Guitar factory. His "log" guitar, so called because it consisted of a simple
rectangular block of wood with a neck attached to it, was generally considered
to be the first of its kind until recently, when research through old trade
publications and with surviving luthiers and their families revealed many other
prototypes, and even limited production models, that fit our modern conception
of an 'electric guitar.' At least one company, Audiovox, built and may have
offered an electric solid-body as early as the mid-1930s. Rickenbacher (later
spelled 'Rickenbacker') offered a solid Bakelite electric guitar beginning in
1935 that, when tested by vintage guitar researcher John Teagle, reportedly
sounded quite modern and aggressive.
Gibson, like many luthiers, had long offered semi-acoustic guitars with
pickups, but it was in 1954 that the Gibson Les Paul, the instrument that would
become their trademark, was introduced to the market. In the late 1940s,
electrician and amplifier maker Leo Fender, through his eponymous company,
designed the Fender Telecaster. In 1954 Fender introduced the Stratocaster, or
Strat, which had become by the late sixties the most widely played guitar on
the market. Fender is also credited with
inventing the electric bass, although
solidbody electric basses had appeared elsewhere as prototypes and limited
production models.
Unlike the more traditionally styled and crafted Gibson instruments, Fender's
guitars and basses pioneered the modular, and hence much less expensive, method
of guitar making in which the body and neck of the guitar were crafted
separately, using commonly available woodworking tools, and then bolted
together to form a complete guitar. Today, the design of electric guitars by
most companies echoes one of the two classic designs: the Les Paul or the
Stratocaster.
Guitars are often theatrically destroyed during live performances, see The Who.
Guitarist-bowhunter-activist Ted Nugent has ended many of his concerts by
setting up a guitar on stage and shooting a flaming arrow into it.
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