49 Fun Facts About The Electric Guitar

Which 1930s groups drove guitarists to go electric?

Big bands: swing-era brass sections drowned out acoustic guitars, so makers added magnetic pickups and jazz guitarists could finally take single-note solos like horn players.

What does a guitar's pickup do?

Converts string vibration into electrical signals: each steel string moves in the field of a wire-wrapped magnet, and the tiny current it stirs up in the coil is what the amplifier makes loud.

What was the 1930s 'Frying Pan' electric lap steel made of?

Cast aluminium: the 1931 prototype was carved from wood, but the Frying Pans sold from 1932 were cast in metal, neck and all, with horseshoe magnets arching over the strings.

Which two partners are credited with the first electromagnetic guitar pickup, in the early 1930s?

George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker put it on a lap steel in Los Angeles, but the patent did not arrive until 1937, by which time rival makers were already selling electrics of their own.

What did the name of Gibson's 1936 ES-150 refer to?

Its Spanish style and $150 price: 'Electric Spanish' meant a guitar held upright rather than flat on the lap like the Hawaiian steels, and about $150 bought the guitar, amplifier and cable together.

The ES-150's bar pickup became known by which jazz guitarist's name?

Charlie Christian played an ES-150, and his horn-like solos turned the guitar from a background strummer into a solo voice, so the blade pickup has carried his name ever since.

Dave Davies slashed his amplifier's speaker cone with a razor blade to get the snarling riff of which 1964 Kinks hit?

You Really Got Me: Davies took the blade to a little green Elpico amp that 'was sounding crap', then ran it into a bigger amp, and the torn cone gave rock one of its first distorted riffs.

Which Fender guitar was launched as the Broadcaster until Gretsch objected that it already sold Broadkaster drums?

Telecaster: Fender gave way in 1951, and for months workers simply snipped the old name off the headstock decals, creating the nameless 'Nocasters' that collectors now prize.

Which Gibson president led the team that developed the 1952 Les Paul?

Ted McCarty ran Gibson from 1950 to 1966, and with Fender's solid-body selling he signed Les Paul as a consultant so the company's answer would carry a famous player's name.

Why does a solid body avoid the wolf tones and feedback of an amplified acoustic?

It has no vibrating soundboard: a hollow guitar's top shakes in the amplifier's sound and howls back, while a solid slab barely moves, so the pickup hears the strings alone.

What does the 'tremolo' arm on a Fender Stratocaster actually change?

Pitch: Leo Fender's 1954 'tremolo' is really a vibrato, because tremolo means wavering volume, and he went on to label the true tremolo circuit on his amplifiers 'vibrato'.

Which guitarist is credited with the Stratocaster's surge in popularity in the late 1960s?

Jimi Hendrix, a left-hander, played right-handed Strats flipped over and restrung, and he set one alight on stage at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.

Fender's 1951 Precision Bass took its name from which feature, new to most bass players?

Frets: double-bass players find every note by ear on a bare fingerboard, so a bass that landed in tune each time was 'precision', and it let guitarists switch over with ease.

What kind of body does the Gibson ES-335, introduced in 1958, have?

Semi-hollow: a solid maple block runs down the middle of the thin hollow body, keeping some of an archtop's warmth while fighting the feedback that plagued fully hollow electrics.

What do the letters SG stand for on the Gibson model introduced in 1961?

Solid Guitar: it was launched in 1961 as the new Les Paul, but Les Paul disliked the two-horned design, and when his endorsement contract ended the name came off, leaving Gibson plain initials.

The Flying V and Explorer of 1958 were first built from which distinctive wood?

Korina is a trade name for pale African limba, and the space-age guitars cut from it sold so badly that only about 100 Flying Vs shipped before the model was dropped.

Which bluesman helped popularise the Flying V years after it first left production?

Albert King was a left-hander who simply flipped a right-handed 1958 Flying V upside down, and the huge string bends he wrung from it showed the odd-looking guitar had tone to match.

Who designed Gibson's humbucking pickup in 1955?

Seth Lover applied for the patent in 1955 but it was not granted until 1959, so the early units went out with a 'Patent Applied For' sticker underneath, the initials collectors still use for them.

How does a humbucker pickup cancel mains hum?

Two opposed coils: both pick up the same hum, but with winding and magnets reversed it cancels while the string signal adds up, giving a fatter tone that players came to want for itself.

Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstein guitar put which pickup into a Stratocaster-style body?

A Gibson PAF humbucker, by his own account pulled from his ES-335 and dipped in paraffin wax to stop it squealing: he wanted Gibson's thick tone with a Strat's shape and vibrato arm.

How did Eddie Van Halen give his Frankenstein guitar its famous stripes?

Masking tape and spray paint: he taped a criss-cross over the black body, sprayed it white and peeled the tape away, then later repeated the trick with red over the top.

Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstein went on show in April 2019 when which museum opened 'Play It Loud'?

The Met in New York hung about 130 rock instruments in an art museum from April to October 2019, before the show moved on to Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which co-organised it.

Brian May built his Red Special with his father using wood from what?

A fireplace: the neck was shaped from an old mantel in a father-and-son build done with hand tools and whatever lay around the house, from mother-of-pearl buttons to one of his mum's knitting needles.

What does Brian May use instead of a plectrum on his Red Special?

A sixpence coin: he finds its rigidity gives him more control than a bendy plastic pick, and decades of it wore the guitar's pickup covers enough to need restoring.

B.B. King named his guitars Lucille as a reminder of what 1949 event?

A dance-hall fire: two men brawling over a woman called Lucille knocked over a kerosene heater, King ran back into the blaze for his guitar, and the name warns him never to do a thing like that again.

Which Beatle's Rickenbacker twelve-string, seen in the 1964 film A Hard Day's Night, set off a rush for the jangling guitar?

George Harrison got a prototype while the Beatles were in New York for The Ed Sullivan Show, though he was ill in bed when it was shown off, and its chime in the film sent demand for electric twelve-strings soaring.

Jimmy Page's double-neck Gibson let him play which Led Zeppelin song live without swapping guitars?

Stairway to Heaven: the song moves between six- and twelve-string parts, so on stage he hopped between the two necks, twelve strings on top and six below, instead of changing guitars mid-song.

At which festival did Bob Dylan play his first electric set, in July 1965?

Newport Folk Festival: Dylan strapped on a Stratocaster with a blues band behind him, and people still argue whether the boos were for the electricity or for the poor sound and fifteen-minute set.

In which city did an audience member famously shout 'Judas!' at the electric Dylan?

Manchester: the heckle rang out at the Free Trade Hall on 17 May 1966, but bootleggers mislabelled the tape and it was known for decades as the 'Royal Albert Hall' concert.

Who invented the first commercially successful guitar vibrato tailpiece?

Paul Bigsby was asked by country picker Merle Travis to repair a Kauffman unit that would not stay in tune, could not fully cure it and, at Travis's urging, built his own, handing him the first one in 1951.

What is the defining feature of the guitars designed by Ned Steinberger?

No headstock: the tuners sit at the body end instead. Headless one-offs had been built before, but his carbon-fibre basses and guitars were the first to sell the idea in numbers.

What was Jim Marshall's trade before he started building guitar amplifiers?

Drum shop owner and drummer: he taught drums and opened a west London shop to sell kits to his pupils, whose guitarist bandmates talked him into stocking, and then building, amplifiers.

Which guitarist's demands for volume prompted Marshall to develop 100-watt amplifiers?

Pete Townshend also asked for one cabinet holding eight 12-inch speakers. Marshall warned that nobody could lift it, then split the design in two and piled the halves up, creating the Marshall stack.

The Vox AC30's 'jangly' tone made it a favourite of which wave of bands?

The British Invasion: the Beatles, the Stones and the Kinks all plugged into it, though the Beatles soon outgrew its 30 watts and moved to bigger Vox models as their crowds grew.

What studio mishap made the fuzz sound Gibson's 1962 pedal copied?

A faulty mixing desk, by most accounts: a failing channel turned Grady Martin's bass solo on Marty Robbins's hit Don't Worry into a buzz, and when the part died engineer Glenn Snoddy built a box to bring the sound back.

Keith Richards used a Maestro Fuzz-Tone to record which 1965 hit?

(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction: Richards meant the fuzz riff only as a sketch for a horn section but was outvoted, and the single's success cleared out Gibson's whole stock of the pedal by the end of 1965.

The modern wah-wah pedal was created by accident while redesigning what?

A Vox amp: a junior engineer at Thomas Organ was swapping a costly three-position tone switch for a cheaper sweepable circuit when colleagues heard the 'wah' it made and put it in a pedal.

Leo Fender never learned to play guitar; what kind of shop did he run before building them?

Radio repair: he opened Fender Radio Service in Fullerton in 1938, and the musicians who came in for amplifiers told the man who could not play what a working guitar needed.

How is a twelve-string electric guitar laid out?

In six paired courses: every string has a partner beside it, and because the two never vibrate in perfect step the twelve-string gets its shimmering jangle.

Which extra low note does a seven-string electric guitar typically add?

B: a fourth below the usual low E. Steve Vai's 1990 Ibanez Universe was the first mass-produced seven-string, and the idea took off in metal after Korn used it on their 1994 debut.

Which Chuck Berry guitar anthem did NASA send into deep space aboard the two Voyager probes in 1977?

Johnny B. Goode: Berry's 1958 hit about a country boy who can really play rides on the gold-plated record fixed to each Voyager, a sampler of Earth's music meant for whoever finds it.

Rickenbacker's 1935 Electro Spanish solid-body was made of what?

Bakelite: the body was not quite solid, with thick moulded plastic walls, yet it all but ended the feedback that plagued the big hollow electrics of the day.

Les Paul's early solid-body prototype was a wooden block with hollow guitar halves added for looks; what was it nicknamed?

The Log: the solid block carried the strings and pickups so the body would not feed back, and the wings were only there to make it look like a guitar. Gibson showed no interest when he first offered it.

Dick Dale's 1962 surf-guitar instrumental 'Misirlou' found a new generation over the opening credits of which 1994 film?

Pulp Fiction: Quentin Tarantino opened his crime film with the 'King of the Surf Guitar' tearing through what is really an old eastern Mediterranean folk song, and the film won Dale a new audience.

In rock, the player who handles chord progressions and riffs fills which role?

In a power trio one player often switches between rhythm and lead roles.

Whose guitar-driven hit 'Strange Things Happening Every Day' has been called the first rock and roll record?

Sister Rosetta Tharpe: the gospel star took her electric guitar from church into nightclubs, and this 1944 recording was the first gospel record in the R&B top ten. Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley all drew on her.

Which effect is considered a key element of electric blues, rock and heavy metal playing?

Overdrive: it began as the sound of valve amplifiers turned up so far that the signal clipped, adding grit, compression and sustain. Pedals later put the same effect under a foot switch.

Many US radio stations banned Link Wray's wordless 1958 guitar instrumental, fearing it would stir up what?

Gang fights: the title was 'Rumble', teenage slang for a street brawl, and amid a panic over juvenile delinquency that alone kept it off playlists. It still reached the US top twenty.

Peter Frampton's talk box made his guitar seem to speak by sending its sound where?

Into his mouth: a plastic tube carries the amplified guitar up to the player's lips, and shaping the mouth turns the notes into vowels and words that the vocal microphone picks up.