THE HISTORY OF THE GUITAR
The guitar is a fretted, stringed instrument, and is a member of the lute
family. It originated in Persia and reached Spain during the twelth-century,
where itıs versatility as both a solo and accompanying instrument were
established. The theory of the guitar was discovered in the early centuries.
They found that the sound of a bowstring could be enhanced by attaching a
resonating chamber -most like a tortiseshell- to the bow. From the bow came
essentially three main types of stringed instruments: the Harp family, which was
the sound of plucked strings indirectly transmitted to an attached sound box.
The second was the Lyre family, which was strings of a fixed pitch are attached
to the directly to a sound chamber. And the third was the Lute family, this was
were the pitch of strings was altered by pressing them against a neck that is
attached directly to a sound chamber. Within the Lute family came two groups.
The lutes proper which had rounded backs and the guitar type instruments with
their flat backs.
Guitar-shaped instruments appear in stone bas-relief
sculptures of the hittites in northern Syria and Asia Minor from as far back as
1350 B.C.
The word guitar also has origins in the middle and far east,
deriving from gut, is the Arabic word for four, and tar, the Sanskrit word for
string. The earliest European guitars did have four courses of gut strings.
A
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course is a pair of strings tuned in unison. These early guitars were
distinguished from lutes by body sides that curved inward to form a waist and by
four courses of strings. Some but not all early guitars had a flat back, while
lutes always had a flat back. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the lute
was the dominant fretted instrument. The lute with was pear-shaped and had five
or more courses of strings was generally regarded as a higher class of
instrument. By 1546 the guitar had gained enough popularity to merit the
publication of a book of guitar music. By this time guitars had added another
course, and modern tuning had come into existence. Chord positions were the same
as they are today. The frets of the early guitars were made of gut and tied
around the neck. This made placement of frets very difficult. The early guitars
were also much shorter in length than todays guitars.
The second most
popular instrument during the Middle ages was the cittern. It was more like the
modern guitar than any other during that time. It had metal strings, fixed
frets, a fingerboard that extended onto the top, a flat back, and a movable
bridge with strings anchored by a tailpiece; and it was played with a quill or
plectrum(pick). But this modern instrument soon lost its popularity and
disappeared by the late 1600ıs. Through the 1600ıs and 1700ıs the guitar design
changed very little, although interest increased around luthiers.
In the
1770ıs the first guitars with six single strings appeared,
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blowing the
evolutionary lid off the instrument. Within the next few decades, numerous
innovations followed: body waists became narrower and body bouts changed shape,
becoming circular in northern Europe and more oval shaped in southern Europe.
Inlaid frets of brass or ivory replaced the tied on gut frets and the neck was
extended one full octave(12 frets) clear of the body. Metal tuners with machine
heads began to replace friction pegs, and strings were anchored by bridge pins,
replacing the method of tying strings to the bridge. By the 1820ıs most of the
fingerboard extended all the way to the soundhole. As rapidly as the guitar
changed so did itıs acceptance. By the 1800ıs the Lute had all but
disappeared.
One of the best known makers of this new-style of guitar was
Johann Georg Staufer of Vienna. Staufer and another maker Johann Ertel in 1822
designed a fingerboard raised off the top of the guitar, and experimented with
different fret metals, settling on an alloy of brass,copper,silver, and
arsenic.
The first half of the 19th century was a time of great
experimentation for the guitar. And many of the innovations that were credited
to 20th century makers were actually tried a century earlier. Some of them
included: The peghead with all six tuners on one side and scroll shape at the
top, which is now common of the fender guitars was tried in the 1800ıs by
Staufer. Gibson came out with the raised
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fingerboard in 1922. Actually
it was done exactly 100 years earlier by Staufer and Ertel. In 1988 Fender
introduced a scalloped fingerboard on one of itıs models. Again this had been
done in the first half of the 1800ıs. Artist endorsement models like the Les
Paul, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Chet Atkins modelıs, which were of huge success had
already been thought of and done like the Luigi Legnani model by Staufer in
1820.
In the early 20th century guitars began to develop into what we
know today. In 1903 the first Gibson catalog assured that instruments would be
made of woods with the most durable, elastic and sonorous qualities such as
maple, mahogany, vermilion, and suitable woods. They settled on maple but only
the high-end mandolins were made of maple. It wasnıt until the
mid-to-late1920ıs, when they finally began to make them with maple wood. During
the early 1900ıs Gibson and a company out of Chicago, the Larson brothers were
the only ones whose instruments were built for steel strings. The others were
still made for gut. From the 1850ıs to the 1920ıs , a variety of new guitar
designs surfaced, some were outlandish and some were ideas whose time would not
arrive until decades later like the Gibson carved top guitar and the Larson
Brothers steel-stringed flat top which were both turn-of-the-century
innovations.
The guitar rested on an evolutionary plateau from the 1850ıs
into the 1920ıs, at least in part to the perfection of C.F Martinıs design. This
was partly because the guitar was secondary instrument, and was
not
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subject to the competition like the banjo or mandolin. The closest
the guitar came to challenging them was in Hawaiian music from 1915 into the
1920ıs.
But in the 1920ıs a demand for greater volume began to
revolutionize the banjo and continued to be the strongest driving force for new
fretted instrument design for the next three decades. At the same time two new
innovations in related fields were changing the musical instrument dramatically.
The first advance the phonograph, actually dates back to the late 1800ıs, but
did not gather full force until after World War I. Recordings made all kinds of
music available to people who had no access to any other music except for local
and touring bands. The second advance was the radio. From 1920 to 1925 the two
were in heated competition, with radio forbidding itıs artists to make records
and vice versa. The music industry began and many different styles became
popular, such as popular music from Broadway and ³Tin Pan Alley² in New York.
Such styles as ³race² or ³blues², and early jazz later revived as ³Dixieland²,
and country music gained footholds in the music marketplace. In the 1920ıs the
guitar began to emerge as the common denominator- the most versatile and
portable instrument, best able to fill a role in an ensemble or accompany a solo
performance. Players with different styles on every type of music appeared,
among them Eddie Lang in jazz, Lonnie Johnson in blues and Jimmie Rodgers and
Maybelle Carter in country.
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The 1930ıs would be the most important
decade in the history of the guitar, with more successful innovations than any
other period of time. The Impending rise was signaled by the appearance of the
first tenor guitars. Just as the tenor banjo, or mandolin-banjo as it was called
earlier, owed part of its initial popularity to the ease with which a mandolin
player could switch to it. It offered a shortcut for the tenor banjo players to
switch to the increasingly popular guitar.
Popular music of the 1920ıs
was becoming louder and louder. The invention of the electronic amplification
raised the volume of radios and record players. The little parlor guitar from
the previous century just could not cut it in the popular music of the day. In
1928 Andres Segovia first performed in the United Stated, turning the world of
classical and semi-classical music on its ear. He brought a practically new
style of music. As with many later guitar stars, Segovia had a guitar as
influential as the music he played on it. It was made in Spain. in 1850 when C.F
Martin was perfecting his x-bracing pattern and developing the American flat top
guitar, Antonio de Torres in Spain was perfecting fan bracing and other designs
that would characterize the modern classical guitar. The muted resonance of a
typical American parlor guitar was no match for the hardy, robust sound of
Segoviaıs guitar. The new guitar left the American parlor guitar with no
protection from the onslaught of new designs.
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The importance of
volume cannot be overstated. The quest for a louder guitar would be the driving
force behind all the innovations of the 1920ıs and 30ıs: the resonator guitars
of National and Dobro, Martins dreadnought-sise flat tops, and Gibsons
³advanced² wider archtops and large bodied flat tops. When the limits of the
acoustic guitar were reached the quest for volume would spark the invention and
evolution of the electric guitar. Although the experimentation on the acoustic
guitars continues, the standard acoustic guitars of today were all well
developed by the end of the 1930ıs.
The sign of the electric guitar was
in the 1930ıs. People such as Les Paul and Eddie Durham were experimenting with
the actual products. Durham carved out the inside of an acoustic guitar and put
a resonator that he had cut out of a tin pan and placed it inside the guitar. He
found that when he struck the strings the sound was greatly increased. By 1932
the Embryonic Rickenbacker company persuaded several of its acquaintance
publicize their new lap, steel electric guitar. Eddie Durhams Hitting The
Bottleı played on this instrument was cited as the first amplified guitar on
record. By 1936 he was using a guitar with an electric pickup and had tried
converting radio and phonograph amps. That same year the most reputable guitar
company, Gibson, would introduce the ES150. Although it was almost identical to
the existing L50 acoustic, the presence of an integral bar pickup close to the
fingerboard meant this
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guitar was evolutionary. This Gibson model made
the electric guitar acceptable.
Pickup technology was primitive,
Rickenbackerıs pickup was of a horseshoe design, where-by the magnets actually
surrounded the strings. Walter Fuller and Gibson combined and designed a more
practical pickup using two solid nickel magnets below the strings and a one
piece steel bar was surrounded by the pickup coil. This directed the magnetic
field toward the strings. After a few years a man by the name of Leo Fender
showed up on the scene and improved the electric guitar. His improvements
greatly increased its acceptance and popularity with both the musicians and
listeners. In 1950 the Fender Company introduced the broadcaster, shortly after
to become the telecaster. It pioneered the latest design of bolt on neck and a
solid body, electric design. This began a new type of music called Rock and
Roll. And so the birth of the electric guitar changed music, but what the people
didnıt know is that it would only get better. In 1954,in addition to the
telecaster, which was still being produced and is still being produced, Fender
introduced the most copied body style of the guitar ever. The introduction to
the stratocaster brought forth some of the greatest guitarists ever known. It
featured the first double cut away, making it easier to reach all of the high
strings and also had a third pickup added to it. Then in 1960, one man came
along and changed the sound of the guitar forever, Jimmi Hendrix. With
his
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explosive riffs and incredible volume he turned the guitar world
upside
down. He began experimenting with ideas to get his guitar to make
different sounds and came up with the infamous fuzz face and wah wah pedals
which he used to make the guitar almost speak to the audience. Many other
legendary guitarists made a name for their selfs with this guitar such as Stevie
Ray Vaughn, and Eddie Van Halen, all with similar but greatly different styles
of playing. The last major invention of the electric guitar was in 1964 when
Rickenbacker introduced the first twelve string electric guitar.
From the
beginning of its existence to the present day the guitar has taken on more forms
and changes than any other instrument to date. Changing in size, shape, material
and every other way imaginable. But one thing that hasnıt changed is the impact
of a well played guitar riff on ones attitude and emotions.