In case you do not know, Musicians Friend is a big website full of all kinds of musical stuff. Some of this stuff is guitar related and they also have a guide to buying an electric guitar. Their guide is for just about everyone from beginner to advanced guitar player and also has advice for those who are helping friends to buy an electric guitar. Electric Guitar Buying Guide
Just to expand on yesterday’s post, the Fender Stratocaster is a great electric guitar for fingerpicking guitar and I have found a tutorial on a blues song featuring electric guitar fingerpicking. Not only do you get tab for the song but an article on electric fingerstyle guitar and a list of some electric guitarists who forego the use of a pick for solos.
And I had to show this YouTube video of a very quiet and mellow fingerstyle guitar solo:
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:
Learn to set up your guitar with this free e-book!! Basic Guitar Set-up 101
by Charles Tauber
The info in this book strictly applies to steel string
acoustic guitars, but the basic theory is the same for classical and
electric guitars, as well as a wide variety of other fretted string
instruments. Download it here!
The book is in PDF format. If you do not have the Acrobat Reader, get it here.
