The Electric Guitar Trivia
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49 free The Electric Guitar trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This electric guitar trivia quiz is about the instrument itself: how it works, who built the famous ones and what players did with them. It starts in the early 1930s with the cast-aluminium lap steel that was the first electric instrument on sale, the men who invented the electromagnetic pickup, and Gibson's first Electric Spanish model with its Charlie Christian pickup. Then it walks through the classic solid bodies and their dates: the Precision Bass, the Stratocaster's contours, the ES-335 semi-hollow, the SG, the Flying V and Explorer in Korina, and the double-neck Jimmy Page played. The second half is hardware and legend. What a humbucker actually cancels, who designed the first one, the Bigsby and the locking Floyd Rose, why Marshall built 100-watt amps, the Vox AC30's jangle, the fuzz box on Satisfaction, the accidental wah, the headless Steinberger, and the stories behind Lucille, Brian May's fireplace guitar, Eddie Van Halen's $50 body and the crowd that shouted 'Judas' at Dylan. For the acoustic and classical side, and the general history, see our main guitar quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the electric guitar and its makers, models and gear, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1930s groups drove guitarists to go electric?
Big bands
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.
Q 02What does a guitar's pickup do?
Converts string vibration into electrical signals
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.
Q 03What was the 1930s 'Frying Pan' electric lap steel made of?
Cast aluminium
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.
Q 04Which two partners are credited with the first electromagnetic guitar pickup, in the early 1930s?
George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker
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.
Q 05What did the name of Gibson's 1936 ES-150 refer to?
Its Spanish style and $150 price
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.
Q 06The ES-150's bar pickup became known by which jazz guitarist's name?
Charlie Christian
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.
Q 07Dave 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
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.
Q 08Which Fender guitar was launched as the Broadcaster until Gretsch objected that it already sold Broadkaster drums?
Telecaster
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.
Q 09Which Gibson president led the team that developed the 1952 Les Paul?
Ted McCarty
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.
Q 10Why does a solid body avoid the wolf tones and feedback of an amplified acoustic?
It has no vibrating soundboard
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.
Q 11What does the 'tremolo' arm on a Fender Stratocaster actually change?
Pitch
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'.
Q 12Which guitarist is credited with the Stratocaster's surge in popularity in the late 1960s?
Jimi Hendrix
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.
Q 13Fender's 1951 Precision Bass took its name from which feature, new to most bass players?
Frets
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.
Q 21How did Eddie Van Halen give his Frankenstein guitar its famous stripes?
Masking tape and spray paint
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.
Q 22Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstein went on show in April 2019 when which museum opened 'Play It Loud'?
The Met in New York
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.
Q 23Brian May built his Red Special with his father using wood from what?
Q 14What kind of body does the Gibson ES-335, introduced in 1958, have?
Semi-hollow
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.
Q 15What do the letters SG stand for on the Gibson model introduced in 1961?
Solid Guitar
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.
Q 16The Flying V and Explorer of 1958 were first built from which distinctive wood?
Korina
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.
Q 17Which bluesman helped popularise the Flying V years after it first left production?
Albert King
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.
Q 18Who designed Gibson's humbucking pickup in 1955?
Seth Lover
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.
Q 19How does a humbucker pickup cancel mains hum?
Two opposed coils
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.
Q 20Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstein guitar put which pickup into a Stratocaster-style body?
A Gibson PAF humbucker
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.
A fireplace
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.
Q 24What does Brian May use instead of a plectrum on his Red Special?
A sixpence coin
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.
Q 25B.B. King named his guitars Lucille as a reminder of what 1949 event?
A dance-hall fire
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.
Q 26Which 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
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.
Q 27Jimmy Page's double-neck Gibson let him play which Led Zeppelin song live without swapping guitars?
Stairway to Heaven
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.
Q 28At which festival did Bob Dylan play his first electric set, in July 1965?
Newport Folk Festival
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.
Q 29In which city did an audience member famously shout 'Judas!' at the electric Dylan?
Manchester
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.
Q 30Who invented the first commercially successful guitar vibrato tailpiece?
Paul Bigsby
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.