Modern culture and society can be directly related back to the invention of the electric guitar because of its influence on the youth of the nation. In order to appreciate the extent of the instrument's influence, one must first look back to its history and the innovation that began its production. And just as important, are the progressive improvements in technology which opened up new opportunities for the instrument. The electric guitar revolutionized the music culture;the music that was born from this had the biggest impact on society at the time and paved the way for future generations.
No one really knows exactly when or where the electric guitar originated. What began the process which eventually led up to its creation was the desire for greater amplification of the guitar. One expert on the subject wrote, "What guitar players needed was a way to separate the guitar's sound from the rest of the band and boost its volume." The first guitar that chieved this was the resonator guitar which was built in 1927 by the National Guitar Company. The resonator used a "clear internal mechanical system using three aluminum cones to capture, amplify, and project the guitar's sound." Unfortunately, this sound was very brash and didn't fit many of the popular music genres of the time.
Therefore, the search continued for a guitar with the ability for greater amplification such as the wind and percussion instruments yet keeping a warm and clear tone. In 1923 a man named Lloyd Loar brought the idea of using an electrical pickup placed underneath the strings to the Gibson Guitar Company. Unfortuneately, Gibson was not interested in mass producing electrical instruments at the time. Loar was not the first to experiment with using pickups; however, no one had really developed them enough to send a strong enough signal from the guitar to an amplifier. The electric guitar was never really commercially advertised until six years after Loar brought his idea to Gibson. The first electric guitar to be commercially manufactured was in 1929 by Stromberg-Voisinet, and produced by Kay Guitars of Chicago. However, this guitar still did not gain rapid popularity because they used a transducer-based system where the signal was picked up by a soundboard, which made a fairly unsuccessful venture because of the large amount of feedback produced. The electric guitar didn't really gain a great deal of popularity until the Gibson Guitar Company took up the project.
The Gibson guitar company was founded by Orville Gibson and started out manufacturing primarily archtop mandolins and guitars. Orville’s greatest asset was his wood-working ability which allowed him to make some very beautiful guitars. He decided to headquarter his company in Kalamazoo because it was considered the “furniture belt” in Michigan. This gave him access to the best machinery and a collection of extremely skilled workers (“The Beginning”). The most popular guitar to come out of the Gibson line was the Les Paul model. Les Paul invented the first solid-body electric guitar in 1946. He called his solid-body guitar ‘The Log’. When he first approached Gibson in the late ‘40s they rejected his guitar model because they were already at the forefront of electric guitar design. Also, they typically avoided aligning with artists when it came to manufacturing guitars. Yet in 1952 Gibson believed that the solid-body guitar had become ‘commercially viable’ and they looked to Les Paul to head up this production. The guitar that emerged from this partnership would be one of the most remembered and sought-after guitars of the time, the “Les Paul”. (“The Les Paul Story”)
From the beginning Gibson has been at the forefront of guitar manufacturers, but when Ted McCarty took over the presidency of the company in 1950, it skyrocketed and became the ‘go-to’ company for quality engineered electric guitars. During his sixteen years as president, the company produced its most popular line of guitars and equipment including the Les Paul, SG, and Flying V electric guitars as well as the “humbucker” pickups and the stop bar tailpiece. While he was president, the company also bought out the Epiphone name and they also began producing the extremely popular ‘Sunburst’ finish (“The McCarty Era”). Ted McCarty’s presidency of Gibson marks the single greatest era for the technological advancement of the electric guitar.
“What guitar players needed was a way to separate the guitar’s sound from the rest of the band and boost its volume” (Smith). The electric guitar underwent a great number of changes since the early models such as Stromberg-Voisinet’s guitar. There had always been problems with using electrical pickups because of the crude way they had been designed (Bacon 5). In the eighty years since the first guitars with electrical pickups many new advances have been made. A few of these advances can be seen in the design of the pickups used in the guitars. Fender began producing a single-coil pickup that, in simple terms, consisted of a single, generally copper, coil wrapped around a magnet. And in order to compete with Fender’s pickup, which produced a slight electrical feedback described as a ‘hum’, Ted McCarty set Gibson out on a mission to develop a way to eliminate this interference and gain control of the market (“History”).
There was a problem with the pickups that were being used on the electric guitars, and to the serious artist this was a big issue. The dilemma was that the pickups would produce a “humming” when they were placed near transformers or rheostats (resistors that are used to regulate an electrical current). Subsequently in 1954, Ted McCarty set two electrical technicians, Walt Fuller and Seth Lover, out on the task. One year later Seth Lover filed for a patent for his new pickup design that two coils to terminate the humming. The new pickups debuted on the 1957 Les Paul model guitar with the popular name, the Humbucker. They continued modifying these pickups to get a clearer sound. However, around the early 90s the market began to shift and the demand went back for the early ‘57 Classic model humbuckers because of their incredibly warm tone. Gibson’s newest pickup called the BurstBucker is considered by Gibson to be a sign of their “continuing commitment to providing the finest pickups for every style of electric guitar” because of its unsurpassable tone, clarity, and high output (“History”).
Another very notable advancement in the electric guitar has applied to its amplification. The amplifiers used in the ‘60s and earlier were very crude ‘torn’ speakers. In the ‘70s the amps started being built with overdrive capabilities. In the ‘80s they began to use effect pedals on floor sets so that they could use a wide range of sounds. This was when the distortion pedals started becoming popular and metal guitar music began its course (Keenan).
What prompted the innovation of the electric guitar was a search for greater volume; however, it evolved into the search for a different sound (Waksman). Since the signal had to travel from the guitar to the amplifier, this allowed guitarists to add the element of synthesizers to their music and this created new and “harder” music genres. Around the 1960s guitarists started using artificial reverberation (an ambience effect combining many short echoes) which began a new ‘surf-style’ rock such as the Beach Boys. Reverb is just one example of this. There have been many styles of synthetic alterations to the sound that include various types of distortion, fuzz, overdrive, chorus, reverberation, wah-wah, flanging, and phaser or pitch shifting. This has evolved by the use of what are called effects pedals. The guitar is plugged into the pedal which is plugged into the amplifier. As the signal travels from the guitar to the amplifier it passes through the pedal which alters the signal, applying the desired effect (Keenan).
“The history of the guitar is in many ways a history of the limits of popular music” (Heller). It is undisputable that throughout history music can be seen as one of the major defining forces that has shaped and molded society. The primary purpose and goal in developing the electric guitar was to achieve a greater volume of play; however, this has in turn opened many new possibilities for such things as synthetic reverberation, distortion, and other effects which have birthed many new genres of music. Furthermore, the added volume available to the guitar made solos more popular because for once the instrument could be heard. Soon following the electric guitar’s rise in popularity, many new musical genres were born such as an ‘urban-edged’ style of blues and prompted players such as Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, who are considered some of the earliest pioneers of rock. The electric guitar revolutionized blues and created a new style which became known as ‘rhythm and blues’ which later evolved into what would be called ‘rock and roll’. The style of artists drastically changed in the late 60s and 70s as musicians began experimenting with power chords, ‘flashy solos’, and even alternate string tunings giving it a lower pitch to achieve a ‘heavy metal’ sound. One of the most influential guitarists during this time was Jimi Hendrix, who performed using the tremolo bar (a bar attached to the bridge that changes the distance from the bridge to the nut creating a ‘vibrato’ sound), ground strings into the frets, and even played with his teeth. The versatility of the electric guitar provided a way for many new music communities such as punk, rock, reggae, various forms of metal and hardcore, and countless other. These new music types began to build small ‘underground’ fan based communities and also started a wide variety of branches off of the original ‘rock’ music type (Smith).
In search of simply louder music these pioneers discovered an instrument with amazing versatility and adaptability and revolutionized a generation and an entire society. The electric guitar opened many new possibilities for live performance and even studio recording. Because of the continuing advances made in audio technology people are able to listen to a wide variety of music genres and focus on styles that appeal to them. And now because of the internet, media, television, and radio, access to the music is instantaneous (Heller).
The innovation of the electric guitar was obviously a pivotal point in the music industry’s history. Yet it can be looked at as either a tool that gave people the ability for free-expression, or as the cause for the immoral, disrespectful, or rebellious society we live in today. Unquestionably it had a visible impact on our society, and this instrument is even seen as a symbol of American culture. Music is not simply an outlet for the artists’ expression, but it also is a way of increasing awareness in political and social issues. The number one result of the musical revolution in the 60s and 70s: people began to think for themselves and desire to take action to change the things that they felt were wrong and make them right. As a direct result of the passion in music that came with the electric guitar, people began to embody values of freedom, individuality, and self-expression. Nevertheless, this began to have a serious side-effect: the overall rejection of authority structures.
Music started taking on a completely different appearance from the traditional style of the 50s. The lyrics began to promote a great deal of immoral and dissolute behavior. It promoted drug use and promiscuous behavior. Good examples of these effects could were seen at the 1969 Woodstock Festival where several popular artists of the time played together such as Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, Santana, and many more (“Woodstock 69”). Juan C. Morales, one of those in attendance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival was quoted as saying,
The single and sole purpose for music had become “self-expression”. The electric guitar was the pathway that brought society to this.
Moreover, there were several groups that evolved with the music but didn’t create the rowdiness atmosphere that was evident at Woodstock. The electric guitar probably made its biggest impact on society in the ‘60s when a band came together called the Beatles. This band had possibly the single largest impact on the evolution of music, and in turn society. The Beatles were a group that embodied the purpose of music and yet they maintained their integrity as a group. They were considered the definition of “rock and roll”. Their famous guitarists Paul McCartney and John Lennon, native to England, were seen as symbols of cultural bonding as the band toured globally. The Beatles were not the only group that developed with the changes in guitar and didn’t adulterate the music. There were other famous players such as Chuck Berry that showed the music could “rock and roll” without the overexposure of drugs and sex (Smith). The electric guitar and its improvement did have an incredible impact on culture; however, the guitar itself is not responsible for the moral decline in society. This came from an idea, the belief in complete self-expression and freedom to do whatever one wants, and the music was just the pathway for expressing this idea. Ideas are very powerful but the key to their success is in the delivery. The electric guitar was a turning point for popular music and became the symbol of youthful independence.
The electric guitar revolutionized the music culture; the music that was born from this had the biggest impact on society at the time and paved the way for future generations. “At first it just wanted to be heard, but it ended up taking over popular music and revolutionizing society along the way” (Smith). Those who participated in the early development of the instrument never could have imagined the impact that their work would have on future generations. The electric guitar, with the artists that made it popular in the 60s and 70s planted a desire in the youth of the time for new, more expressive, and passionate music. The electric guitar brought music to life and gave music meaning and value to those who listened. So, the music became a defining characteristic of society.