An electric guitar is a guitar uses pickups to convert the vibration of its steel-cored strings into an electrical current, which is made louder with an instrument amplifier and a speaker. The signal that comes from the guitar can be electronically altered with guitar effects etc. reverb or distortion. Electric guitars have six strings but seven-string instruments can be used by guitarist such as jazz and metal and 12-string electric guitars (with six pairs of strings, four of which are tuned in octaves) are used for jangle pop and rock.
The electric guitar was first used by jazz guitarists. Thet were first made back in 1931 by the Rickenbacker company. It is used in a range of genres such as country,ambient and some contemporary classical music.
Engineers began experimenting with electrically powered instruments, such as music boxes and player pianos, in the 1800s. But the first attempts at an amplified instrument did not come until the development of electrical amplification by the radio industry in the 1920s.
History
Sketch of Rickenbacker "frying pan" lap steel from 1934 patent application.Electric guitars were originally designed by an assortment of luthiers, guitar makers, electronics enthusiasts, and instrument manufacturers. Guitar innovator Les Paul experimented with microphones attached to guitars. Some of the earliest electric guitars adapted hollow bodied acoustic instruments and used tungsten pickups. This type of guitar was manufactured beginning in 1932 by Electro String Instrument Corporation in Los Santos under the direction of Adolph Rickenbacher and George Beauchamp. Their first design was built by Harry Watson, a craftsman who worked for the Electro String Company. This new guitar which the company called "Rickenbacker" would be the first of its kind.
The earliest documented performance with an electrically amplified guitar was in 1932, by guitarist and bandleader Gage Brewer. The Wichita, Kansas-based musician had obtained two guitars, an Electric Hawaiian A-25 and a standard Electric Spanish from his friend George Beauchamp of Los Angeles, California. Brewer publicized his new instruments in an article in the Wichita Beacon, October 2, 1932 and through performances that month.
Sketch of Rickenbacker "frying pan" lap steel from 1934 patent application.Electric guitars were originally designed by an assortment of luthiers, guitar makers, electronics enthusiasts, and instrument manufacturers. Guitar innovator Les Paul experimented with microphones attached to guitars. Some of the earliest electric guitars adapted hollow bodied acoustic instruments and used tungsten pickups. This type of guitar was manufactured beginning in 1932 by Electro String Instrument Corporation in Los Santos under the direction of Adolph Rickenbacher and George Beauchamp. Their first design was built by Harry Watson, a craftsman who worked for the Electro String Company. This new guitar which the company called "Rickenbacker" would be the first of its kind.
The earliest documented performance with an electrically amplified guitar was in 1932, by guitarist and bandleader Gage Brewer. The Wichita, Kansas-based musician had obtained two guitars, an Electric Hawaiian A-25 and a standard Electric Spanish from his friend George Beauchamp of Los Angeles, California. Brewer publicized his new instruments in an article in the Wichita Beacon, October 2, 1932 and through performances that month.
The first recordings using the electric guitar were made by Hawaiian Style players such as Andy Iona as early as 1933. Bob Dunn of Milton Brown's Musical Brownies introduced the electric Hawaiian guitar to Western Swing with his January 1935 Decca recordings, departing almost entirely from Hawaiian musical influence and heading towards Jazz and Blues.
Alvino Rey was an artist who took this instrument to a wide audience in a large orchestral setting and later developed the pedal steel guitar for Gibson.
An early proponent of the electric Spanish guitar was jazz guitarist George Barnes who used the instrument in two songs recorded in Chicago on March 1, 1938, Sweetheart Land and It's a Low-Down Dirty Shame. Some historians incorrectly attribute the first recording to Eddie Durham, but his recording with the Kansas City Five was not until 15 days later.
Durham introduced the instrument to a young Charlie Christian, who made the instrument famous in his brief life and is generally known as the first electric guitarist and a major influence on jazz guitarists for decades thereafter
How to choose a good quality electric guitar.
Check how resonant the guitar is. This is the number one thing to look for. It has more to do with the wood than anything else. The pickups can be changed for very little money but the wood makes the guitar. Check for sustain length, this depends on the wood the neck is made of and how it is installed, a very, very important aspect of a guitar's sound.
Don't judge by price. There are expensive guitars that have the resonance of a brick, and there are cheap guitars that really sing. The old Fenders that sell for thousands of dollars today started out life as inexpensive solid body guitars.
Run through the fret board and get a feel for how it 'sings'. When you pluck a string, you should be able to get a vibration in the wood that you can hear all over the guitar. It should last a few seconds.
Realize that most new guitars need to be set up so a string buzz is OK - just make them fix it. It doesn't take very long to go through the fret board so make sure it's set up properly. Keep in mind the neck can be adjusted, and so can the level of the strings. The guitar should also be in tune in both the 5th and 12th frets (use a tuner).
Realize that the guitar neck is very important; it has to fit your hands. You have a number of nut widths, which set the distance from the E string to high E string. The other features the shape of the back of the neck.
You have the meaty: Gibson 50's style, fender C/U shape.
You have the thin: Gibson 60's style, fender standard thin/V shape.
You have the really thin: Ibanez wizard's, etc.
Keep in mind that the guitar and the amplifier go hand in hand. The two are going to need to sound good together. The pickups have a LOT to do with this as they set the 'gain' going into the amp or pedal.
Look at the kinds of pickups used. The humbuckers were designed as improvement to the single coil pickups. The kind of pickup is not as important as how it's voiced with the wood it sits in. Players from all styles of music use all kinds of pickup combinations. Its all about the voice of the pickup, the guitar's wood, and your body style preference. Although, if you have a certain timbre in mind, you'll have to find 'em pickups that suit that timbre; humbuckers give you more of a growl when crancked, and single coils (Fender singles, specifically) have a more glassy tone, great for blues.- Consider the output of the pickup. This makes a difference. The 'high output' pickups drive the tube amp harder to get a distorted sound. If you have a guitar amp without tubes this 'high output' effect is lost. It does however give your pedals a lot to work with but the overall effect on a solid state amp is just volume. The 'vintage' style pickups are low to medium output. You tend to get more definition with these pickups due to the fact that they are not built to drive an amp hard.
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fell in love with music @ 8:16 AM
