 An
electric guitar
is a type of guitar with a solid
or semi-solid body that utilizes electromagnetic
"pickups" to convert the vibration
of the steel-cored strings into electrical
current. The current may be electrically
altered to achieve various tonal effects
prior to being fed into an amplifier,
which produces the resultant sound.
In contrast to most stringed instruments,
the solid-body electric guitar does
not rely as extensively on the acoustic
properties of its construction to amplify
the sound produced by the vibrating
strings; as such, the electric guitar
does not need to be naturally loud,
and its body can be virtually any shape.
In fact, since all the sound produced
by the amplifier comes from string vibrations
detected by the electric pickups, an
electric guitar that produces minimal
acoustic sound will actually have maximal
sustain. (Since less of the energy from
the string oscillations is radiated
as sound energy.)
The electric guitar is used extensively
in many popular styles of music, including
blues, rock and roll, country music,
pop music and jazz.
History
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.
Types of electric guitar
Most electric guitars are fitted with
six strings and are usually tuned from
low to high E - A - D - G - B - E, the
same as an acoustic
guitar, although some modern guitarists
tune their guitars lower, Drop D, to
produce a "heavier" sound.
Seven-string models exist, most of which
add a low B string below the E, and
were made popular by Steve
Vai and others in the 1980s, and
were revived by some so-called nu metal
bands. Jazz guitarists using a seven-string
include veteran jazzman Bucky Pizzarelli
and his popular son John Pizzarelli.
There are even eight-string electric
guitars, but they are extremely unusual.
The first model (and probably the only
one) was initially custom-created for
the band Meshuggah by the Nevborn Guitars
company, but is now sold to the public.
Jimmy
Page, an innovator of hard rock,
used and made famous custom Gibson electric
guitars with two necks - essentially
two instruments in one. These are commonly
known as double neck (or, less commonly,
twin neck) guitars. The purpose is to
obtain different ranges of sound from
each instrument; typical combinations
are six-string and four-string (guitar
and bass guitar) or, more commonly,
a six-string and twelve-string. Such
a combination may come handy when playing
ballads live, where the 12-string gives
a mellower sound as accompaniment, while
the 6-string may be used for a guitar
solo. English progressive rock bands
such as Genesis took this trend to its
zenith using custom made instruments
produced by the Shergold company. Rick
Nielsen, guitarist for Cheap Trick,
uses a variety of custom guitars, many
of which have five necks!
Some electric guitars have a tremolo
arm or whammy bar, which is a lever
attached to the bridge that can slacken
or elongate the strings temporarily,
changing the pitch or creating a vibrato.
Tremolo properly refers to a quick variation
of volume, not pitch; however, the misnaming
is probably too established to change.
Eddie
Van Halen often uses this feature
to embellish his playing, as heard in
Van Halen's "Eruption". Early
tremolo arms tended to cause the guitar
to go out of tune with extended use;
an important innovator in this field
was Floyd Rose, who introduced one of
the first tremolos which allowed the
guitar to stay in tune, even after heavy
use.
Electric guitars don't work with normal
microphones, but with special pickups
that sense the movement of strings.
Such pickups tend to also pick up the
ambient electrical noises of the room,
the so-called "hum", with
a strong 50 Hz or 60 Hz component depending
on the locale. Hum is annoying, especially
when playing with distortion. For this
reason, so-called "humbucker"
pickups were invented. Normal pickups
are single-coil; humbuckers are essentially
like twin microphones arranged in such
a way that electrical noise cancels
itself. A similar effect may be achieved
using a guitar with multiple single
coil pickups with an appropriate selection
of dual pickups. (See main articles
on pickups and humbuckers.)
A "MIDI guitar" is an electric
guitar fitted with sensors for sound
and note articulation. It is used to
transform string vibrations into MIDI
messages to control a synthesizer or
other electronic musical instrument.
There were several variations of this
type of guitar including the Roland
GR series which used a "hexaphonic"
pickup (an individual pickup for each
string). Early adopters of the this
type of guitar technology were Pat
Metheny, and Steve
Morse.
Another instrument, the pedal steel
guitar, does not look like a guitar
at all, but resembles a small rectangular
table with one or more sets of strings
on top. Country musician Junior Brown
uses a custom-built instrument of his
own invention, the guit-steel, which
has one neck that is a steel guitar,
and one standard electric guitar neck.
Electric guitar sound and effects
An acoustic guitar's sound is largely
dependent on the vibration of the guitar's
body and the air within it; the sound
of an electric guitar is largely dependent
on a magnetically induced electrical
signal, generated by the vibration of
metal strings against sensitive pickups.
The signal is then shaped on its path
to the amplifier. By the late 1960s,
it became common practice to exploit
this dependence to alter the sound of
the instrument. The most dramatic innovation
was the generation of distortion by
increasing the gain, or volume, of the
preamplifier in order to clip the electronic
signal. This form of distortion generates
harmonics, particularly in odd multiples
of the input frequency, which are considered
pleasing to the ear.
Beginning in the 1960s, the tonal palette
of the electric guitar was further modified
by introducing an effects box in its
signal path. Traditionally built in
a small metal chassis with an on/off
foot switch, such "stomp boxes"
have become as much a part of the instrument
for many electric guitarists as the
electric guitar itself. Typical effects
include vibrato, fuzz, wah-wah and flanging,
compression/sustain, delay, reverb,
and phase shift. Some important innovators
of this aspect of the electric guitar
include guitarists Jimi
Hendrix, Eddie
Van Halen, Steve Jones, Jerry
Garcia, David
Gilmour, Yngwie
J. Malmsteen, Thurston Moore and
Daniel Ash, and technicians such as
Roger Mayer.
By the 1980s, and 1990s, digital and
software (http://guitar-sound.info)
effects became capable of replicating
the analog effects used in the past.
These new digital effects attempted
to model the sound produced by analog
effects and tube amps, to varying degrees
of quality. There are many free to use
guitar effects software for personal
computer downloadable from the Internet.
Today anyone can transform his PC with
sound card into a digital guitar effects
processor. Although there are some obvious
advantages to digital and software effects,
many guitarists still use analog effects
for their real or perceived quality
over their digital counterparts.
Some innovations have been made recently
in the design of the electric guitar.
In 2002, Gibson announced the first
digital guitar, which performs analog-to-digital
conversion internally. The resulting
digital signal is delivered over a standard
Ethernet cable, eliminating cable-induced
line noise. The guitar also provides
independent signal processing for each
individual string. Also, in 2003 amp
maker Line 6 released the Variax guitar.
It differs in some fundamental ways
from conventional solid-body electrics.
For example it uses piezo pick-ups instead
of the conventional electro-magnetic
ones, and has an onboard computer capable
of modifying the sound of the guitar
to realistically model many popular
guitars.
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