The electric guitar is now ubiquitous; around the world, millions are sold yearly, and its first century created a massive multimedia legacy of words, scores, recordings, films, and historic instruments. Its associated industries support performing, recording, publishing, and instrument manufacture. Collectors trade vintage instruments for huge sums, while budget-priced new instruments, many of impressive quality, are mass-produced, using computer-assisted techniques, in greater numbers than ever before.
The authors in this rich collection offer refreshing, overdue realignments of perspectives, with broad-ranging in-depth considerations of the worlds of the electric guitar. This recent research is compelling reading, scrutinising the players and their cultures, instruments, amplifiers, and signal processors. Five main sections on History, Technology and Timbre, Music Style and Technique, The Electric Guitar in Society, and The Global Instrument are each prefaced by ‘personal takes’ from appropriate specialists, offering engaging stories and astute analysis.
Older writing on guitars was male-biased to the point of entirely ignoring acclaimed female electric guitar players: the improved gender balance of subjects and contributors in this volume is noted, in contrast to the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar (Coelho Reference Coelho2003), which was produced by an entirely male group of writers. Similarly improved, this volume also contains post-colonial appraisals of the instrument in the Caribbean, in various African nations, and in Southeast Asia, counterbalancing the West-centric viewpoints in earlier electric guitar discourses.
Waksman scrutinises the electric guitar industry’s ‘Golden Age’ as it became ‘an engine of musical transformation’ (p. 50). Vallejo and Hebst examine ‘innovations … in the new millennium’ (p. 165), while Gibson and Warren consider the ethics of production ‘from factory to forest’ relative to ecological controversies, and luthiers’ and players’ entanglements with current CITES regulations.
Hill’s ‘Misunderstood History of the Electric Guitar’ (pp. 19–35) tells how the ‘amplified’ guitar actually predates its electrification, as luthiers in their quest for more volume designed progressively larger instruments, during the 19th and early 20th century. As an aside, the little-documented switch from gut to metal strings – which began around 1900 – might have merited more consideration here, since it significantly altered what had previously been a defining characteristic of the ‘Spanish’ guitar. This change was a fortuitous and highly important move, making possible the innovative electromagnetic pickup technology, upon which the electric guitar’s very identity – its distinctive sound – has relied ever since. The pickup’s fundamental design has survived relatively unchanged for over a century, allowing ‘musicians new-found creative freedom by controlling timbre, volume, and expression to a degree, and in a manner, previously impossible’ (p. 33). Hill also describes ‘a much longer and more convoluted history than is generally realised’. To be heard at all, electric guitars require amplifier technology, but several years of aggressive licensing litigation, over patented amplifier designs, constrained guitar developers in the early 1930s. Once resolved, the 1940s saw the electric guitar rapidly become the sound of modernity in a breadth of styles, from the mid-1940s George Shearing Quintet (with Chuck Wayne), and the early 1960s ‘surf-guitar’ instrumentals, to the harder-edged 1960s electric gospel, blues, and rock of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Muddy Waters, and Jimi Hendrix.
Many electric guitarists learn from their peers. Lee offers optimistic glimpses of current practice, with geographically remote ‘Virtual Guitar Communities’ generously sharing information. This is a major radical change: before the Internet, study resources were scant and harder to find; today’s abundance of resources is curated by informed, supportive fans and students, often with direct access to leading players.
In ‘African Electrical Networks’, Braddock describes guitarists’ difficulties even gaining access to electric guitars, and reliable sources of electricity, for performances. Pioneer Docteur Nico ‘played the amplifier as much as the guitar’ (p. 290) on songs such as ‘Ngonga Ebeti’ (UK guitarist John Renbourn cites Nico as an important inspiration). Likewise, Moore portrays controversial and turbulent cultural interactions of the electric guitar with political and social currents in the Southeast Asia cultures, describing the ‘fetishisation’ of the Western players, and instruments, that dominate the post-colonial Indonesian guitar scene. At the same time, electric guitars and western instrumentation have been assimilated into the qasidah moderen Islamic song tradition, although ‘few music researchers have attempted to address the knowledge gap on guitar-centric music in Southeast Asia’ (p. 339).
The electric bass guitar is discussed by several authors and given a well-condensed history by Wright (pp. 150–164). A stark contrast is apparent between the numerous female innovators on this instrument, from the great Carol Kaye to esperanza spalding, and the chauvinistic world of male guitar heroes; this is discussed further in Foley’s nuanced gender analysis, ‘Trailblazers, Self-Creators, and Provers: Celebrating Women and Electric Guitar’.
Lewis investigates ‘rhythm’ electric guitar, an important but often ignored style overshadowed by grandstanding soloists, which nevertheless made evolutionary leaps using amplification’s subtleties. Jim Hall commented to Chip Stern (Reference Stern1999) that amplifiers allowed him to play more quietly. Aspiring players in the 1960s and 1970s often believed ‘lead’ or ‘rhythm’ were different professions. However, a syncretic mix of rhythm and lead electric guitar could fuse these two roles into a single guitar part, epitomised in Jimi Hendrix’s playing. (I stand with Mongan [Reference Mongan1983] in recognising Oscar Moore’s similar innovations, worthy of mention here. Using an electric guitar with Nat ‘King’ Cole’s trio from the late 1930s, his virtuosity was highly influential, although now almost forgotten.)
In sum, this new volume is an essential contribution to contemporary academic literature on electric guitar, addressing significant knowledge gaps and offering signposts to many other avenues of potential research.
