Music Talk : Electric Guitars, Part 1 - pickups and families

So I was at Ploughman last Thursday listening to Willoughby Hayes do a Gentle Thursday set, and I was glad to have made it. I missed the last couple of chances I had to see Mr. Hayes, and it’s well worth finding him and hearing his set. He plays a mix of covers and originals, all in a country flavor, wearing a black hat that is cool as hell on him, but would make me look ridiculous (I call that the Slusser Effect).

You should definitely find a way to catch Willoughby when he comes through town again, and pull up his music on whatever stream doodad you push through your Airpods. On Thursday night he was playing an Acoustasonic Telecaster, which is a hybrid acoustic/electric guitar from our friends at Fender.

I think they’re cool. I’ll probably get one soon, after trolling Reverb for a deal on a used one. It will then sit quietly for the most part with the other dozen or so guitars I have around my house. Occasionally I get a hair twisted and I pick one up and make noises with it.

I’m that guy. I even build them and let them sit quietly. I like having them around, and knowing I CAN play one if I want to. What do you want me to tell you?

Because I love them and love talking about them, I thought I’d write a little about the electric guitar since it’s had such a prominent place in my life.

I’m not going to talk about acoustic guitars for now. That’s a whole other thing, and much of what I’ll say about electric guitars is not true about acoustics. We’ll talk about them another time.

I think of electric guitars in two kinds: Solid body and hollow or semi-hollow body. A hollow body guitar is built similarly to an acoustic guitar, but it has pickups like an electric and doesn’t use the body itself to generate all the sound. It’s typically made of plywood. Hollow body electric guitars are often used to play jazz and some old blues and rockabilly. There’s a tendency for them to have some nasty feedback in certain amplification. To try to fix that, some guitar makers put a wooden block inside the guitar, anchoring the top to the back of the guitar and so helping with the feedback problem from the resonation. These are called semi hollows. The most famous of these is probably Gibsons ES series, like the ES335, which is what BB King played.

An example of a hollow body player is Brian Setzer, back with the Stray Cats and the Brian Setzer Orchestra.

Now we get to the solid bodys. There are a bunch of these, but there are two kinds that prevail, even though there are a few others. But primarily there’s the Fender and the Gibson camps. Most other guitar makers more or less fall into some versions of these archetypes.

Leo Fender didn’t play guitar himself. But he decided he wanted to build a simple electric guitar that people could afford, and even replace parts like the neck when they wore out. He made it from whatever wood he could find that was cheap but durable, and he designed it in a way that was ergonomic and sounded great, but was incredibly simple to mass manufacture. He called it the Broadcaster to start with, but it turned out there was a drum company who already had that name trademarked for a snare drum, so, in typical Leo fashion, he shrugged and called it the Telecaster instead.

It still exists with very little changes to this very day. It’s one of the great inventions of the 20th century. Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen, and many others are known for their Telecasters.

Around the same time, Gibson took a completely different approach. They partnered with the famed guitarist and innovator, Les Paul, to design a guitar. It was built with solid mahogany with a thick cap of maple and a beautiful paint job. The neck didn’t bolt on, but was glued in permanently, a real marvel of woodworking and design. The Gibson Les Paul also is still being made today with minimal changes from its original design.

Aside from the radically different approach to making these instruments, the main practical difference is in the magnetic devices that pick up the signal from the strings and send it on to the amplifier…called the pickups.

Before either of these guitars existed, Gibson had created a pickup called a P90. It was basically 6 magnetic posts with about 5000 winds of hair-thin copper wire around them. This is dipped in wax and put into a box and mounted on the guitar under the strings.

Leo Fender took this design and boiled it down to its simplest possible form to create pickups that we now call “single coils”, even though P90s are also single coils. Leo’s pickups sound different, less “meaty”, I guess… they have more detail but a little less punch. Like a steak knife and a scalpel.

Single coil pickups have a tendency to pick up not just the string sounds, but any other radio or electromagnetic waves floating around…Flourescent lights, radio signals, etc…and they hum. There’s no way around it.

So when Gibson was designing the les Paul, someone had the idea to take two of these single coils, wire them up right against each other… the negative and positive charges tended to cancel out the low level interference sounds… “bucking” the “hum”, as it were. Shockingly, they call these pickups “Humbuckers”.

So, fine. We are very clever monkeys and figured out how to get rid of the hum. But what really ended up happening is we created two very different instruments. Not because the Les Paul is thick and hand carved and has a glued on neck and is made from select hardwoods, and the telecaster has a bolt on neck and much thinner flat slab of whatever wood Leo had bought up on a deal. That’s all esthetics, and beside what some people may tell you, doesn’t have nearly as much to do with the sound you hear as the pickups and electronics do. I could build you a guitar out of cardboard and rubber cement…it won’t play as nicely but it won’t sound all that much different. Buy me a beer some night and tell me how wrong I am.

So, telecasters are versatile, simple machines. They typically have two single coils pickups, the one near the neck is smaller and has a warmer, mellower sound. The one back by the bridge has a bigger, more bitey, twangy sound. You can play with either pickup or both, so you can get a lot of different vibes and sounds from one guitar. Telecasters are great for blues and country sounds, with bends and solos. The detail and the twang help it break through the sounds of the rhythm section in a rock or country band.

Fender later went on to build another guitar style. It had a smoother, long,  cool looking body, and three pickups instead of just two so you had a lot more options for tone, and it paired better with pedals and other effects, which were becoming more and more popular. A lot of the classic blues rock guitarists from the 60s and 70s, like Clapton and Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix and dozens of others famously played the new guitar, called the Stratocaster.

The strat even was the source of a ton of other guitar makers in the 70s and 80s. They tweaked the strat design for faster playing with more distortion, called “superstrats”. Shredders (people who play fast, often some iteration of heavy metal. They call themselves  shredders. Think of Peavey and BC Rich and Ibanez. Bright colors, weird pointy body shapes…lots of neon colored leather clothing and blow dried hair.

Meanwhile, the Les Paul typically has two Humbuckers. The single coils have about 5000 windings, so a humbucker has double that. This loses some of the detail and the “spank” you hear from Teles and Strats, but adds a LOT more signal, making it ideal for running through various Pedals and effects and playing loud and full, round sounds.

Some guitarists best known for playing Les Pauls are Jimmy Page, Slash, and Pete Townshend. There are, of course, other manufacturers who make guitars in this mold, most notably PRS, but I’ll be writing about PRS on its own some time. There’s a wild and funny story there, and I have some opinions there.  

Of course, I’m radically oversimplifying all of this. And there are other guitar manufacturers for hollow and solid electric guitars (Gretsch, Rickenbacker…others come to mind) who had their own styles…but I’m pretty sure most guitar players you listen to, if they’re playing an electric guitar, it’s probably a Fender or Gibson style.

Let me know if this is interesting to you…I have a lot more I’d like to say about the history of PRS and it’s “signature” models, and perhaps address some “common knowledge” about guitars that are often bullshit.  It’s interesting to me how some people define themselves with a certain type of guitar…just like gear heads from my youth were chevy guys or Ford Guys.

So let me know if you are a fan of all that is good and noble in the world, and play a telecaster, or if you’d rather play a lying, cheating Les Paul. I, myself, am completely neutral on the subject.