The pickup earned the nickname “the Charlie Christian” thanks to the jazz virtuoso who is generally credited with introducing the electric guitar solo. Gibson’s 1936 ES-150 (E for Electric and S for Spanish) had a sleek bar-shaped electronic pickup that was mounted into the guitar’s hollow body for a more streamlined look. Spanish-style electrics, which you could sling in front of you while standing and singing, proved to be much more versatile for many different musical genres. It differs from the traditional Spanish-style guitar in that it is played horizontally, on a stand or in the player’s lap, and has a sliding steel bar that can be moved along the frets for a gliding effect. The commercial version of the Frying Pan was a hollow cast-aluminum lap-steel guitar, and wasn’t an immediate hit beyond some Hawaiian, country, and blues musicians. The pickup, a device that converts the strings’ vibrations into electrical signals that can be amplified, was bulky and unattractive, but it worked. Invented in 1931, the Frying Pan had an electromagnetic pickup made out of a pair of horseshoe magnets placed end-to-end to create an oval around the guitar’s strings, with a coil placed underneath the strings. The first commercially successful electric, Rickenbacker’s “Frying Pan” guitar, didn’t kick off rock ’n’ roll yet either, but it did inspire competitors to jump into the electric guitar market. The first commercially advertised electric guitar was offered that year by the Stromberg-Voisinet company of Chicago, though it was not a smash hit. The electric guitar was essentially born in 1929-long before the advent of rock and roll music. Rickenbacker Electro Hawaiian, or “Frying Pan,” guitar prototype, around 1931. The volume was suddenly able to go up: way up. Then, in the 1920s, innovations in microphones and speakers, radio broadcasting, and the infant recording industry made electronic amplification for guitars possible. That suited twangy Hawaiian and blues music but not other genres. Around 1925, John Dopyera designed a guitar with metal resonating cones built into the top that amplified the instrument’s sound. For example, in the late 1890s, Orville Gibson, founder of the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company, designed a guitar with an arched (or curved) top that was stronger and louder than the earlier flat-top design.ĭuring the first three decades of the 20th century, with the rising popularity of Hawaiian and big band music in America, guitar makers built larger-bodied instruments, using steel instead of gut strings, and metal instead of wood for the guitar body. As a result, the traditional Spanish-style acoustic guitar-wooden with a flat top, a symmetrical hollow body, a sound hole in the center, and gut strings-began to change in size, shape, and construction. As performance spaces increased in size, stringed instruments like guitars were hard to hear over other instruments, especially horns. Through the 19th century, guitars were part of a musical ensemble. So when I first started working with co-curator Gary Sturm on an exhibition about the invention of the electric guitar at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, our driving question was: Why electrify this centuries-old instrument? The simplest answer: Guitarists wanted more volume. The acoustic version has been around since at least the 16th century. Rock ’n’ roll is an industry that’s continually pushing musical, social, and cultural boundaries, and the electric guitar is its iconic instrument. Even as a 13-year-old who grew up primarily listening to, and playing, classical music, I felt compelled to run out and buy his band’s “1984” LP at my local Tower Records store. I loved his cool “Frankenstein” guitar, so named because he cobbled together a variety of guitar parts and decorated his creation with colored tape and paint. I remember the first time I saw Eddie Van Halen on MTV, the way he played two hands on the fingerboard during his short “Jump” guitar solo.
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