Category: Electric Guitars

The Les Paul guitar has remained at the top of the range of solid body electric guitars ever since its inception in the early nineteen fifties. Two major contributing factors were the personality of Les Paul, a popular pop and jazz guitarist as well as an inventor, plus the involvement of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, a company always devoted to innovation and quality.

Many people give Les Paul credit for inventing the solid body electric guitar and comment that the Gibson company was lucky to get his endorsement for their new guitar at the right time. When Les Paul was in his teens he was a guitarist struggling to be heard by his audience. Amplifying an acoustic guitar produced alot of feedback, so he came up with the idea of attaching a guitar neck to a block of wood. This soved the problem of feedback but audiences could not seriously listen to a musician playing such a strange looking instrument. With some modifications to the body to make it look more like a conventional guitar shape, Les had his prototype solid body electric guitar.

The eventual financial and musical triumph of the Les Paul guitar was motivated by the gibson Guitar Corporation’s wish to market its version of Leo Fender’s solid body guitar under the name of its inventor, Les Paul. This was 1952 and Les was the most popular electric guitar player in the world. The Gibson company eventually secured the Les Paul name after Les recommended some changes to the design.

There some basic features of the Gibson Les Paul design that have always set it apart from the models of other guitar manufacturers. One feature is the mounting of the strings on the top of the body of Les Paul guitars as opposed to passing them through the guitar body as is common on competing models. But the main feature of all Les Paul model guitars is their warm, individual sounding tone. This is attributed to the kinds of wood used by Gibson to make Les Paul guitars. Les Paul’s first attempt at designing a guitar using a piece of wood and an Epiphone guitar neck was called “the log.” In keeping with this solid tradition, the Gibson Les Paul guitars have always been thicker and heavier than other solid body electric guitars.

One thing Les Paul and the people at the Gibson Guitar Corporation have always agreed on is the need for their guitars to look as good as they sound. Consequently stylish inlays in the neck and headstock have always been a feature of almost all the Les Paul models.

You will find quite an array of different models in the Les Paul range of guitars. Featuring names like Classic, Supreme, Standard, Studio Baritone, Studio, Goddess, Menace, New Century, Vixen, Special, Doublecuts and Melody Maker, each one has its own individual sound. Between 1969 and 1979 Gibson even tried to market a range of Les Paul bass guitars. The Gibson Les Paul guitars have also been imitated by other companies such as Ibanez and Tokai. The legal wrangles surrounding these attempts at copying Les Paul guitars have only added to their collectibility.

And the Les Paul guitar is fitted out with Gibson’s newest automatic tuning gadget:

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Gibson guitars have ruled the rock and roll roost for many years. Ever since the nineteen thirties when pioneer electric guitar player, Charlie Christian took to them, Gibson guitars have always been very popular with guitar players. They have the magic combination of technical excellence and prestige and pizzazz. As pioneers in the electric guitar field, they have always made good use of every opportunity to get their guitars played by the leading guitarists. The company began in 1936 but Gibson guitars took hold of the 1960’s with both hands and gave the era a big tongue kiss. With the phenomenal growth of rock ‘n’ roll the solid body electric guitar which evolved in the fifties became the ultimate accessory for the young gentleman wishing to have loads of sex.

The era produced many famous Gibson guitar models like the Double Cutaway SG, the Firebird and the Flying V. Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Peter Green, Chet Atkins all big names of the guitar, played Gibson guitars. And one of Gibson’s triumphs - the Les Paul model was, and still is, in the hands of a boatload of guitar playing pioneers. The Les Paul model was the company’s response to public enthusiasm for the electric guitar. Les Paul was arguably the most popular electric guitar player in the world who had previously invented his own solid body electric guitar. He was signed up by the Gibson company to lend his name to their new guitar and actually made some design suggestions which may or may not have been followed up, according to who you listen to.

But the world of making great guitars was not all cheese and crackers. In the late nineteen fifties the world was obsessed with “modern” things. Space travel was on the minds of many creative people working in a multitude of areas of industrial design. So it was one morning that the Gibson Flying V awoke and attempted to take flight. Unfortunately it only survived for about one year. It slept then until the flamboyant nineteen seventies welcomed it once more to the world. Some famous guitarists, Jimi Hendrix among them, played it for a while and it found its way into the shops again, but only for a short time. The Gibson company tried to rescue the situation by introducing the Firebird, a variation on the Flying V thought up by a car designer. The result looks more like a bad drawing of an electric guitar.

Recently Gibson has added an astounding feature to the world of guitar playing. The Powertune system. It gives electric guitars the ability to tune themselves, thus making sure that the secret of many professional guitar players remains perfectly safe. Another thing that might surprise some people is the fact that Gibson has held its own quite well in the area of acoustic guitar manufacturing. There is an Arlo Guthrie guitar in the Gibson Artist Signature Series of guitars. Possibly somebody in the early seventies thought Arlo was going to be really, really big. Other artists to have Gibson acoustic guitars named for them are Elvis Presley, Sheryl Crow, Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson and Pete Townshend.

So if you find yourself wondering what makes Gibson guitars so special the answer is in the company’s ability to keep its name alive in the mind of the guitar playing public.

And here is something you might not know about Gibson guitars: they have free guitar lessons on their website.

Technorati Tags: Gibson guitars, Les Paul, Powertune, Gibson Artist Signature Series, free guitar lessons

You want to play electric guitar but you have a limited budget. Your first electric guitar needs to be cheap so you need to get some idea which is the best brand to buy. If you do not buy a good quality electric guitar your guitar playing learning curve is going to be that much more steep, and you are going to feel like a prize dumbbell telling people that your playing would be much better if your guitar was not such a pile of junk.

Let us set some ground rules. Do not buy a cheap electric guitar online unless the vendor is in your local area. Also, when we talk about cheap guitars we should be talking cheap brands, not old guitars of dubious quality and unknown condition. If there is a music shop or two somewhere close to where you live, they should be able to cater to your needs. There are a lot of deep mysteries connected with guitar playing but finding a cheap guitar is not one of them.

To start with, there are big brand name guitars that you may not be able to afford, and indeed it would be silly to pay a fortune for your first electric guitar, but there are copies of these famous guitars which you CAN afford. Amongst these copies of the big name guitars made by various guitar makers, are good and bad quality guitars, and you need to be familiar with the better quality makers of cheap guitars. Any guitar factory in Outer Mongolia can churn out realistic looking electric guitars but they may not be able to hold together for longer than five minutes.

So, let us first look at a few big name guitars. Fender, Gibson, Washburn. You recognize those names, right? Squier, Ibanez, Yamaha, Crafter. Do you recognize those names? They make cheap electric guitars some of which are copies of more expensive models. The basic difference between cheap guitars and expensive guitars is quality of materials. The reason you need to be aware of which cheaper brands to buy is that you do not want to go too far into the realms of cheap and nasty. Without wanting to influence you unduly, I think you could do a lot worse than buying a Squier Stratocaster for a first electric guitar. It is made by Fender, the makers of the original Strat.

Another thing you need to consider is the type of music you want to play. Once you start looking around at guitars you need to be aware of the sound. Right from the first day as a guitar player you should be listening to yourself making a sound that you are happy with.

One really cool thing you should be taking with you when you go looking to buy a cheap electric guitar is a guitar player. Even if it is one of the neighbors who bought a guitar years ago and never did anything with it, it is better than nothing. And then there’s the color. Your neighbor may be able to give you some advice on the construction of electric guitars or the benefits of this or that pickup, but only YOU can decide what color you want. When Mark Knopfler decided to buy his first guitar he knew he wanted a red one. It is an important consideration. You will not feel comfortable posing in front of the mirror with the wrong color guitar!

You will not be posing in front of the mirror? Oh . . . okay.

Technorati Tags: first electric guitar, cheap electric guitar