USAR02: Music and Technology

Guitar and Technology: The Metamorphosis of the Guitar through History

Lim Jien Hwee, Jeffrey. CCLA03 ["Music And Technology"], University Scholars Programme, National University Of Singapore.

"For the guitar is the most unpredictable and least reliable musical instrument in existence - and also the sweetest, the warmest, the most delicate, whose melancholic voice awakes in our soul exquisite reveries." Andrés Segovia

Music and technology has always been intertwined. For the guitar, this statement holds all the more true. This essay aims to trace the developments of the guitar from its earliest form to the much-popularised electric guitar that we see today. The main focus is on how technology has interacted with the guitar, especially in influencing the genre of music played by the instrument through the years. Lastly, I will attempt to discuss how music played by the guitar created some milestones in popular music culture.

The history of the guitar spans over many centuries. From the time it was first discovered that a vibrating string tied over a wooden box could produce pleasant sounds, plucked instruments of the guitar family have existed. Among its distant ancestors, the guitar can include lyres and harps, the long necked lutes of Mesopotamia and certain stringed instruments depicted in ancient Egyptian paintings. Many medieval paintings, stained-glass windows and carvings show musical instruments very similar in shape to the guitar as we know it.

The way a guitar produces sound reflects technology itself. When a player plucks a string, the string vibrates, and most of the energy is transferred to the soundbox via the bridge. Resonance in the soundbox and the efficient radiation of the soundboard then amplify the weak sound of the string so that it carries through the surrounding air. For centuries, guitar makers have worked on these principles to improve the quality of sound made by the instrument.
The earliest known works for fretted instruments was published in the 16th century. Here, two instruments, which many consider to be the ancestors of the guitar: the lute and the vihuela , were widely played. However, the vihuela became more popular, especially in Spain. A considerable amount of music for vihuela was published in the country between 1535 and 1578 in various anthologies composed by the leading vihuelistas. The vihuela was played by both the aristocracy and by professional musicians employed by them. Up to this point, technology has not interacted very much with the instrument. The high cost of printing meant scores were not readily available and performances of any kind were limited to the private arena. The instruments were meticulously hand made thus it was difficult and expensive to own one.

Another 16th century ancestor of our modern Spanish or classical guitar was a smaller member of the family, strung with four courses. The lute, the vihuela (which had six-courses) and the four-course guitar were all played with strings tuned in pairs, each pair being called a "course". Of the three, the guitar most closely resembles the modern classical guitar that we use today. It is thus not surprising that a four-course guitar was more popular with the general public. You would hear it in the villages whilst in courts the more refined vihuela was usually preferred. Towards the end of the century, the addition of a fifth string gave the guitar a broader range and greater sound. The five-course guitar eventually displaced all other types, and this instrument was in vogue for the best part of two centuries. The guitar was also easier to produce and more economical to own. Scores were still not readily available thus most of the songs were taught from person to person.

The early 17th century guitar was used purely as a strummed instrument, for its five course, tuned in octaves, made it an ideal accompaniment to the popular songs and dances of the age. Unlike the lute and vihuela, which were exclusively an upper class instruments, the guitar was associated with wandering players and performers. The unsavoury reputation is uncanny, especially when its descendant, the electric guitar is no stranger to controversy. Since the Baroque era, the guitar has had the reputation of an instrument played by the decadent.

The 18th century was not a very productive time for the guitar. Yet during this period, important advancements to the guitar took place. The guitar gradually adopted its present method of stringing, using single strings instead of the courses that had for centuries given plucked instruments their characteristics tone colours. In the early 19th century, the six-string guitar became extremely fashionable. Two great players, Fernando Sor (1778-1839) and Mauro Giuliani (1781-1829), composed and performed music of considerable beauty and complexity. They toured Europe and astounded audiences with their skill and brilliance. Thankfully, much of their work has been notated and kept and is still being played today by classical music enthusiast.

Sor, Giulani and their contemporaries played their music on smaller guitars than we are accustomed to nowadays. The vibrating string length (i.e. the distance from the bridge to the nut) was only about sixty centimetres. The methods of construction were also not sufficiently developed to allow the guitar to achieve its full potentiality of resonance and volume.

Thus, the instrument would have remained in the backwaters of musical creativity if Antonio de Torres Jurado (1817-1892), or simply Torres, did not attempt to create a more expressive kind of guitar. He increased the depth of the instrument, giving it more sonority. Then he altered the shape of its curvatures, ultimately producing a more mathematically accurate structure. Torres also increased the overall size of the guitar so that the vibrating length now became about sixty-five centimetres. This measurement is still regarded by craftsman as an ideal size of the instrument in terms of volume, tone production and ease of playing. The technology that enabled Torres to craft his guitars to such precision laid the foundation for the instrument's tremendous rise in popularity during the 20th century. It also gave the world opportunity to see and listen to great classical guitarists like Andrés Segovia and Mario Maccaferri perform at their very best.

If technology and the guitar have always been intertwined, the influence of the former on the latter has never been more salient in recent history. Two types of guitar are symbolic of the technological developments that have shaped the instrument: the steel-string acoustic guitar and the electric guitar. Not only did these guitars give rise to a new sound, they gave rise to completely new forms of music.

Metal-strung guitars have a long history, both as "folk" and "art" instruments. They have been made in many countries over a span of centuries, and played by many different classes of people. But all the main types of steel-string guitar now in use are essentially of American origin, and were developed in the late 19 th and early 20th centuries.

The use of steel strings instead of the nylon ones (used by the classical guitar) brings about a fundamental change in the sounds of the guitar. Steel strings produce a loud volume and twanging, jangling tone. The reason is that steel strings are very true and efficient vibrators: whereas a nylon string produces a note with perhaps six to ten overtones, a note struck on the steel string can have in excess of fifty. As steel-strings exert a heavy pull on the neck and table, and have great vibrational efficiency, they transfer a lot of energy to the top of the guitar and produce more volume.

Thus, a maker of steel-string guitars must make an instrument which is both sturdy and responsive. It must use the power available from the strings but will not be distorted by the pull they exert. The need for structural stability thus becomes a major factor in determining design. The design of the guitar has to incorporate something that resists the strong pull but every time you put in structural bars you risk interfering with the tone bars. But steel strings have so much energy available that volume is hardly a consideration. This gives the maker more liberty thus in this way, the construction of a steel-string guitar is actually easier than that of a classical guitar.

Technological advancements means guitars can be built on a large scale in factories. This also means that more people than ever before can gain excess to the instrument. This provides the platform for new innovative playing styles, sounds and music to surface. A large scale of business allows companies to carry out programs of research, development and testing, which are far beyond the scope of any one individual. Gibson, a major guitar firm, believes that well-designed machinery can do many tasks that are originally done by hand and with greater speed and consistency too.

Before, the nylon-string guitar was restricted to classical music, especially in Europe. The steel-string guitar produced a new sound and gave rise to a whole different genre of music. It found its first great expression in the blues. In the early 20th century, the steel-string guitar was synonymous with country blues. It was the instrument adopted by almost all singers of the blues and was an important influence on the development of this genre of music.

Blues drew on an ancestry of ballads, work songs, field hollers and spirituals, elements of which came from African music. Confusion surrounds the formative years, for as with all true folk music there are no written records, and the investigation of the origins began after the style had evolved. The blues flourished in the rural areas of Southern USA and followed the migratory paths of black people. Blues was first and foremost a vocal art with the instrumental accompaniment in a subordinate role. The guitar was most suitable for this purpose as it has some of the flexibility of the human voice. You can bend and flatten a note and the use of the droning sound of the guitar played by sliding down the strings can achieve the necessary interaction of sound. Later, the twelve-string guitar was added to the repertoire of steel-string guitars. This guitar produced an extremely loud and gutsy sound. Famous blues guitarists include Son House, Skip James, Leadbelly and Daddy Stovepipe.

Today, blues players still exist and remain popular. However, the steel-string guitar has moved away from blues to modern pop music and also serves as a virtuoso instrument. Thus, the sound of the steel-string guitar can be heard all over the world in coffee bars and also on concert platforms. Audiences have become more appreciative of technical skill on the part of performers. Even in this MTV generation, the steel-string guitar's influence cannot be underestimated. In fact, MTV has a special unplugged segment that features pop stars playing their music using only acoustic instruments. Needless to say, the steel-string guitar dominates performances of both rock bands and individual singer-songwriters.

"You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding. It didn't sound like a banjo or a mandolin, but like a guitar, an electric guitar. That was the sound I was after." Les Paul

The electric guitar was developed when the danceband guitarists of the late 1930s wanted to be heard above the rest of the band. At first, microphones were attached to the body, but that resulted in too much feedback, so magnetic pickups were developed through experimentation with Gramophone pickups. In the late 1940's, Les Paul , with the help of the Gibson Guitar Company, brought out the first commercial solid body electric guitar. With the application of advanced electronic and engineering techniques to the electric guitar, the instrument has been climbing in popularity and versatility ever since.

To understand how the electric guitar works, we will look at the component parts of the system, namely the strings, pickup, amplifier and loudspeaker.
The strings of the electric guitar adhere to the steel-string guitar. The body and end supports of the electric instruments are very rigid, to keep the vibration in the string and to radiate as little of the energy acoustically as possible. This is done by making the body of the instrument very heavy and by using a metal bridge. Metal strings are more flexible and have less internal damping than do nylon strings and they are able to vibrate much longer in high-frequency modes.
The next step is to have the magnetic pickup transform the mechanical motion of a vibrating string into a varying voltage. The basic pickup consists of a magnet, of which one pole points toward and one points away from the strings, with a wire coil wrapped around the magnet. When the gap between the string and the pole piece changes, a voltage is created in the coil proportional to the velocity of the string's motion. Changing the location of the pickup along the string's length can change the quality of the signal produced. Most guitars have two or more pickups, allowing the player to create composite sounds.
Once the pickup has produced a voltage whose frequency and amplitude are proportional to the string movement, the signal must be amplified in order to drive a loudspeaker. It is a common misconception that the original signal itself is somehow expanded electronically. What in fact happens is that the original signal controls another, much larger voltage, and the larger power source drives the loudspeaker.

The loudspeaker performs one of the same functions as the soundboard of the acoustic guitar: it radiates the vibrations of the string into the surrounding air, so that they may be heard. The mechanical movement of a steel string induces a voltage in a coil of wire wrapped around a magnet, while the electrical signal applied to a loudspeaker coil induces a magnetic field that changes in value according to the amount of signal variation. The magnetic field moves the cone attached to the coil, and this motion in turn changes the sound pressure of the surrounding air, thus producing sound.

The invention of the electric guitar gave birth to a new sound and it was among jazz musicians that the instrument found its first great role. Before, the guitar was restricted to relatively small groups because of its low volume. Also, its main role was to provide accompaniment for the other solo musicians. With amplification, the electric guitar was incorporated into bigger bands and was used as a solo instrument as well. One of the pioneers of solo jazz guitar is Charlie Christian (1919-1942). He displayed an inventiveness of melody and harmony unique among electric guitarists. He used the sustain and tonal properties of the instrument to produce clear ringing lines perfectly set off by the big band backing. The single-note runs he played came as a revelation to guitarists brought up on the chordal sound of the bug band rhythm section.

However, the most important contribution of the electric guitar to music and popular culture was that it singularly defined the sound of rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll was intimately tied up with the emergence of a youth culture after the Second World War. The loosening of social attitudes and increasing prosperity had helped create a young audience who cared little for the goals and aspirations of their parents. Like in the Baroque era where music played by the guitar was thought to be decadent and unruly, rock 'n' roll was noisy, often aggressive and brash when compared to soulful singers like Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra.
As rock 'n' roll's popularity grew, the instrument associated with it, the electric guitar, became a symbol of youth. From now on the fortunes of the electric guitar were intermingled with those of popular music and the music industry as a whole. The icon of this form of music was none other than Elvis Presley. Although Elvis's guitar playing was passable at best, the whole vitality of his music excited the audience. After all, sheer noise could, and often did, cover mediocre playing. Moreover, the three- or four-chord guitar music and unsophisticated single-note solos perfectly suited the simple lyrics and feelings of the songs. Countless small groups started to play at local clubs and dances in both America and Europe. In this way the electric guitar became the new urban folk instrument, and inspired a whole generation to create its own music, especially in the mid to late 1950's.

In the meantime, technology continued to improve and invent new sounds for electric guitars. One of the most important developments is by overloading the input amplifier until the upper limits of the amplifier "clip" the output signal. This adds distortion and sustain to the sound. The amounts of distortion and sustain are increased by increasing the amplitude of the input. The developments of effects like fuzz and wah-wah sounds added to the range of sounds available to electric guitarists. This paved the way for louder, heavier music like rock and eventually heavy metal.

The 60's brought to prominence bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. They were the first groups with an international following that verged on the hysterical, and were greeted with an enthusiasm which horrified parents, amazed the authorities and delighted record companies. With the new technology that came with the electric guitar, the music played by rock bands was getting progressively louder and heavier. The grand master of manipulated sound was James Marshall Hendrix (1942-1970). His playing style was extraordinary and no one controlled distortion better than Hendrix. He could play undistorted lead on some strings while getting feedback on others, a trick which made guitarists listening to his records at the time speculate on the identity of the second and third guitarists. No one fully understood his technique, and no one since has been able to reproduce his mixture of sounds.

Sound manipulation, distortion and the feedback produced pointed to a new concept of the electric guitar. From being a conventional musical instrument on the one hand or a stage prop on the other, the electric guitar became the heart of the sound system, in which artificially induced noise was as legitimate as a musical note.

One drawback of the electric guitar has always been the necessity of a cord to connect the instrument to the amplifier. Three major problems result from this. First is the physical danger of tripping over the cord, a problem compounded when a number of electric-instrument performers share a stage. Second is actually the risk of electrocution, especially in Europe and other places where amplifiers may use 220 volts. During the 1970's there were several fatalities from electrical shocks caused by musical instruments. Finally, cords inherently have a limited frequency response, due to the electrical property of capacitance. This does not affect a studio player who sits several feet from his amplifier, but a cord longer than fifteen feet begins to act as a low-pass filter, and the longer the length, the lower the frequency response. Replacement of the guitar cord by a wireless transmitter eliminates all these problems.
The cordless guitar system consists of a battery-powered transmitter and a receiver. The system can be the FM tunable type or the VHF fixed-frequency type. The broadcast unit is plugged into the guitar and is usually attached to the performer's guitar strap. It either uses the connecting cord as an antenna or has a small antenna already attached to it. Not only did this development have a resounding effect on the quality of sound during concerts but it also gave rise to concerts being visual spectaculars. From the late 70's to the early 90's, rock bands not only had to sound good, they had to be flamboyant and utilise the stage as a platform for physical showmanship. The removal of restrictive cords meant they could fully manipulate the space onstage. It was common to see guitarists jumping off platforms and running everywhere to heighten the mood of the concert.

The modern era of electric guitar development also involve the use of synthesizers to influence the sound of the guitar. A guitar synthesizer uses the guitar signal to control waveforms other than its own, giving the guitar all the techniques and sound available to the keyboard synthesist. A guitar synthesizer usually uses a hexaphonic pickup to capture the sound. This is actually six independent pickups in a single unit, with six separate output wires, one per string, so that the output of each pickup will always be one pitch at a time. It is now possible to play six different instruments simultaneously, one per string, each with timbral characteristics that vary as much as those of orchestral instrument.

Current technology for electric guitars revolves mainly around the use of computers and digital technology. It is often a misconception that electronic music like techno, trance and rave music spells the death of the electric guitar as the computer can manipulate and toggle with all the sounds necessary for such music which is becoming increasingly popular. However, the electric guitar is extremely versatile and since it is electronically driven, it provides a platform where a musician can combine the forces of old school playing techniques and digital manipulation to create a new and exciting sound. It is common to find guitar riffs blending in perfectly with electronic music of today.

Some artistes however reject modern technology, especially computerized special effects in their music. They claim that digital and computer manipulation is against the tradition of making music with electric guitars. At the forefront of such protests is a popular rock band called Rage Against the Machine. They have a disclaimer on their CD covers that their music is produced purely by guitars, bass and drums with no additional computer editing. However, I find their statement somewhat hypocritical. Without technology, there would not be an electric guitar to start with not to mention the many electronic effects that the band uses. Technology provided a platform for them to produce the kind of music they want to play. In other words, the band has embraced one technology but condemned another. Not all bands however have this problem. U2, one of the world's premier bands has no qualms about mixing good quality songwriting with special effects. Despite their use of computer technology in producing their music, the sound of electric guitars still remains the primary focus of their brand of music.

The guitar, with its many hybrids and forms, takes its place as one of the most versatile and expressive instruments today. You can find guitars used in classical, jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll, hard rock and heavy metal music. It also has its place today in increasingly popular forms of music like rap, hip-hop and electronica. The main reason for this is that the guitar is extremely receptive to new forms of music, while at the same time maintaining its importance to older forms. The guitar undergoes ongoing modifications and has never been left out of technological advancements in music. Because of this, the guitar has stood the test of time and I dare say it will continue to do so.

Bibliography

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• Grunfeld, Frederick V. The Art and Times of the Guitar. New York: Da Capo Press, 1974.
• Schneider, John. The Contemporary Guitar. California: University of California Press, 1985.
• Tyler, James. The Early Guitar. London: Oxford University Press, 1980.
• Wade, Graham. Your Book of the Guitar. London: Fakenham Press, 1980.
• Wade, Graham. Traditions of the Classical Guitar. London: John Calder Ltd, 1980.