The Electric Guitar Evolution

References to the guitar more or less in its modern form date back to the 14th century. It had four courses of double strings and a rounded body like a gourd or a pumpkin. Around the sixteenth century the guitar was a popular musical instrument amongst the middle and lower classes of Europe, and as it increased in popularity it began to undergo a change of shape. Luthiers began making instruments with single strings instead of courses and experimented with its form until by the 19th century the body of the guitar was made wider, and flattened out. The wooden tuning pegs which adjusted the tension of the strings were replaced by metal machine heads. Now we have the guitar shape that the modern electric guitar is based on.

Legend:
1. Headstock:
1.1 machine heads
1.2 truss rod cover
1.3 string guide
1.4 nut
2. Neck:
2.1 fretboard
2.2 inlay fret markers
2.3 frets
2.4 neck joint
g 3. Body
3.1 "neck" pickup
3.2 "bridge" pickup
3.3 saddles
3.4 bridge
3.5 fine tuners
3.6 tremolo arm (whammy bar)
3.7 pickup selector switch
3.8 volume and tone control knobs
3.9 output connector (input jack)(TRS)
3.10 strap buttons
4. Strings:
4.1 bass strings
4.2 treble strings

During the Big Band Era of the 1930's and '40's, the guitar players with the orchestras found that they needed some way of being heard above the sound of the rest of the instruments. This is where the electric guitar as we know it got its first big break.

The main problem with the electric guitars of the time was that feedback was coming through the amplifier from the vibration of the guitar's body. This challenge led to the evolution of the solid body electric guitar.

Modern electric guitars are made of many thin layers of wood glued together. The top layer is often a more attractive wood to give the guitar a pleasing appearance, and the other layers are of a wood which gives a good tone such as poplar or ash. The use of laminates endows the instrument with the robust body and tonal quality that would be impossible in one piece of wood.

The original solid body guitar was however, made from one piece of wood. In 1941 Les Paul turned a railway sleeper into an amplified stringed instrument. He called it "The Log". When production of his instrument began he stayed with the conventional guitar shape to give his market a familiar image to relate to. Les Paul's invention marketed as the Gibson Les Paul is still extremely popular.

The first electric guitars were made in the 1930's and had soundholes in the body that were smaller than the soundholes of conventional guitars. In 1924 Lloyd Loar, an engineer with Gibson, used a magnet to change guitar string vibrations into electrical signals, which could be amplified through a speaker. Now it was possible to build guitars that did not possess soundholes but could be heard clearly through an amplifier.

Paul Barth, George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker founded the Electro String Company in 1931. This firm made electric guitars available to the general public for the first time. Their guitars resembled steel guitars, and were played in the guitarist's lap using a slide.

In the 1940s, the Fender Broadcaster Electric guitar came into the world. Renamed the Stratocaster, it was put on the market in 1954. The Strat with its distinctive tone and light weight remains the second most popular guitar in the world.

Ibanez, Jackson, Paul Reed Smith, ESP and Yamaha have made solid body electric guitars with original designs, distinctive shapes and new materials mixed with modern technologies to produce more efficient and versatile electric guitars. Today's electric guitars produce tones varying between futuristic music or quasi-acoustic sounds.

In the 1960s, effects boxes introduced fuzz, delay, echo and the wah-wah sound to the arsenal of sounds available to the modern guitarist. A pedal operated by the guitar player's foot turns the effects on or off. Now guitars contain software that lets guitars sound like other types of guitars or reproduce the sound of other musical instruments. With developments like the latest self-tuning guitars, maybe the old joke about a guitarist "phoning in" a solo will become a reality!

In 1972 a popular British guitar-oriented band recorded an album called Machine Head. One of the songs on that album is titled Smoke On The Water and is one of the most popular songs of all time. It contains the definitive guitar riff - the one that everybody plays of there is a guitar in the room and people start fooling around with it.

The song tells the story of a fire at a Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention concert in Switzerland at which a fire broke out and the smoke could be seen spreading across Lake Geneva. The song was not recognized as a potential classic and for until it was included on the album which meant it needed a title, it was known to the group as “the dank-dank song” because of how the riff sounded when you hummed it.

Get the rest of the story at How To Play Smoke On The Water On Guitar

The basis for this Hub is an article called "The Electric Guitar And Its Place In Musical History" by Ricky Sharples at Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free, a great source of electric guitar lessons.