The Electric Guitar

Acoustic guitars and their various musical relatives canappeared, allowing notes to be bent down or up
be traced back thousands of years, but the idea of a(before, they could only be bent upwards by pulling the
guitar using electric currents to amplify its sound had tostring away from its natural line, thus tightening it). The
wait until the 1930s to start to take root. Necessitytremolo arm was part of the early sound of rock 'n' roll,
was, perhaps, the mother of invention here, as theand could make a vibrato sound or create the long,
volume of the guitar, used previously in blues and jazz,sustained, wailing sounds associated with Jimi Hendrix.
could not compete with the new sounds of the bigOther sound effects, such as chorus, overdrive,
band and the shriek of brass instruments. Earlyvibrate, wah-wah, reverb and delay (echo) could also
experiments with simply adding microphones to guitarsbe controlled via foot pedals by the player, further
had only limited success, partly due to the quality of theadding to the variety of sounds available. The pickup
tone and partly because of the feedback that couldwas also applied to bass guitars, and is now seen on
occur as soon as a reasonable volume was reached.violins, mandolins, cellos and many other types of string
The breakthrough came when Les Paul, a jazzinstrument.
guitarist, successfully experimented with a magneticMusical styles using electric guitars
pickup system that could convert the vibrations of theThe genres of music that use electric guitars are too
strings to an electrical signal to be amplified and sent tonumerous for this article, but their origins can be traced
a speaker. Soon, guitarists started adding pickups toback to the jazz and big band sound that became
their hollow-bodied guitars, but in fact there was nopopular between the wars. Blues guitarists pioneered
need for an electric guitar to have a hollow body, asthe "dirty" sound that would later morph into heavy
the pickups could detect very subtle vibrations andmetal, and no rock and roll group would be complete
amplify them anyway. Before long, Fender,without at least one electric guitar. Bob Dylan was
Rickenbacker and, of course, Gibson were producingonce called "Judas" by a heckler when he swapped
solid-bodied electric guitars.his acoustic for an electric on stage, a significant
Innovations unique to the electric guitarmoment in electric folk. The sixties saw mainstream
Electric guitars allowed many innovations that would gopop and psychedelic bands putting the instrument to
on to define their sound. Most noticeably was the factgood use, and disco, punk, ska and reggae music of
that volume and tone controls could be added to thethe seventies used the instrument's inherent rhythm; a
electronics between the pickup and the cable, whichlively and thriving African sound is once of the guitar's
meant that the accomplished guitarist could adjust themost innovative current streams. Whenever a new
tone and loudness whilst on stage. Second and thirdtechnology has come along, especially the electronic
pickups were added at various points along the bodyrevolution of the late 1970s and 1980s, people have
to take advantage of the difference in tone at variouswritten off the electric guitar, but it shows no sign of
points along the strings, and these could be blendedlosing popularity.
together with multiple controls. The tremolo arm