We left off from our last part in the history of the electric guitar with europeans rocking it out to the lute as their fretted instrument of choice, while the four string chartar had just arrived in spain from central asia. So how come we all ended up wailing on electric guitars, and not on electric lutes?
The lute is a pretty nifty sounding gadget. Have a listen to it here:
But hang on.. we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. How did this four string instrument from somewhere near Persia become a Strat and a Les Paul? Well the first thing the spanish did when they got ahold of the chitarra was to add four more strings to it. This 8 string instrument had four “courses” of two strings each, with each course of two strings tuned either in unison or in octaves. The earliest music written for this four-course guitar was written in 16th century Spain. The italians added an extra course to the instrument, and the tuning came to be standardised as A, D, G, B, E.. much like the 5 highest strings of the modern electric guitar.
A century later a sixth course of strings was added to the guitar, making something very similar to what we would recognise today as a 12-string guitar. The six-course arrangement was replaced by six single strings gradually, to allow for more technical playing and intricate single note lines that would be too cumbersome to play on a guitar with more strings in each course. Spanish guitar makers then added a “fan” style bracing that is still used on classical guitars today. This bracing allowed extra strength, which let guitar makers build a wider guitar.
Up to this point, guitars were still built with animal gut strings. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, steel strings were developed. These were initally not used on guitars, as the designs of the period could not withstand the much greater tension that steel strings put on the body. It took the development of a much stronger “X” brace to allow for steel string guitars. These steel string guitars had a much louder and brighter sound. They were also extremely important to the eventual development of the electric guitar, because a vibrating steel string, unlike a gut string, can induce an electric signal in a magnetic pickup. If steel string acoustic guitars were never developed, it is unlikely that we would have the electric guitar that we know today, as magnetic pickups are crucial to the traditional sound of an electric guitar.
EDIT: sorry dudes – wordpress seems to not want to embed the youtube vidoes properly – i’ll try to sort it all out.
