1st Touch of Electric Guitar
Electric guitar uses pickups to convert the vibration of steel-cored strings into electrical current, which is then amplified. The signal that comes from the guitar is often electrically altered to achieve various tonal effects prior to being fed into an amplifier, which produces the final sound which can be either an electrical sound or an acoustic sound. Devices commonly used by guitarists are meant to add distortion, wah, equalization, tremolo, and phase shift, amongst others, in some cases radically changing the sound that is emitted from the amplifier.
Despite its traditional association with rock music, the electric guitar has long been used in many popular styles of music, including almost all genres of rock and roll, country music, jazz, blues, ambient (or "new-age"), and even contemporary classical music. The instrument's distinctive sound and intimate connection with many legendary internationally-famous musicians has made it the signature instrument of late twentieth-century music. Specialized steel guitars are also in use, although they are to be considered a different instrument.
Some of the earliest electric guitars, essentially adapted hollow bodied acoustic instruments, used tungsten pickups and were manufactured beginning in 1931 by Electro String Instrument Corporation in Los Angeles under the direction of Adolph Rickenbacker and George Beauchamp. Their first design of a hollow body guitar instrument that used tungsten pickups was built by Harry Watson, a craftsman who worked for the Electro String Company. This new guitar which the company called "Rickenbackers" would be the first of its kind.
The earliest documented use of the electric guitar in performance was during October 1932 in Wichita, Kansas by guitarist and bandleader Gage Brewer who had obtained two instruments directly from George Beauchamp of Los Angeles, California. Brewer publicized them in an article appearing in the Wichita Beacon, October 2, 1932 and through a Halloween performance later that month.
The first recording of an electric guitar was by jazz guitarist George Barnes who recorded two songs in Chicago on March 1st, 1938: Sweetheart Land and It's a Low-Down Dirty Shame. Many historians incorrectly attribute the first recording to Eddie Durham, but his recording with the Kansas City Five was not until 15 days later. Durham introduced the instrument to a young Charlie Christian, who made the instrument famous in his brief life and is generally known as the first electric guitarist and a major influence on jazz guitarists for decades thereafter.
The version of the instrument that is best known today is the solid body electric guitar, a guitar made of solid wood, without resonating airspaces within it. Rickenbacher, later spelled Rickenbacker, did, however, offer a cast aluminum electric guitar, nicknamed The Frying Pan or The Pancake Guitar, beginning in 1931. This guitar is reported to have sounded quite modern and aggressive when tested by vintage guitar researcher John Teagle. The company Audiovox built and may have offered an electric solid-body as early as the mid-1930s.
