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The bass guitar, electric bass or simply bass, is the lowest-pitched member of the guitar family. It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or an acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length, and typically four to six strings or courses. Since the mid-1950s, the bass guitar has largely replaced the double bass in popular music.
An electric guitar is a guitar that requires external amplification in order to be heard at typical performance volumes. It uses one or more pickups to convert the vibration of its strings into electrical signals, which ultimately are reproduced as sound by loudspeakers. The sound can be shaped or electronically altered to achieve different timbres or tonal qualities, making it quite different than an acoustic guitar. Often, this is done through the use of effects such as reverb, distortion and "overdrive"; the latter is considered to be a key element of electric blues guitar music and rock guitar playing.
A humbucking pickup, humbucker, or double coil, is a type of electric guitar pickup that uses two coils to "buck the hum" picked up by coil pickups caused by electromagnetic interference, particularly mains hum. Most pickups use magnets to produce a magnetic field around the strings, and induce an electrical current in the surrounding coils as the strings vibrate. Humbuckers work by pairing a coil that has the north poles of its magnets oriented "up" with another coil right next to it with the south pole of its magnets oriented up. By connecting the coils together out of phase, the interference is significantly reduced via phase cancellation: the string signals from both coils add up instead of canceling, because the magnets are placed in opposite polarity. The coils can be connected in series or in parallel in order to achieve this hum-cancellation effect, although it is much more common for the coils of a humbucker pickup to be connected in series. In addition to electric guitar pickups, humbucking coils are sometimes used in dynamic microphones to cancel electromagnetic hum.
Clarence Leonidas “Leo” Fender was an American inventor, who founded Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company, or "Fender" for short. In January 1965, he sold the company to CBS and later founded two other musical instrument companies, Music Man and G&L Musical Instruments.
An archtop guitar is a hollow steel-stringed acoustic or semiacoustic guitar with a full body and a distinctive arched top, whose sound is particularly popular with jazz, blues, and rockabilly players.
A pickup is a transducer that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments such as the electric guitar, and converts these to an electrical signal that is amplified using an instrument amplifier to produce musical sounds through a loudspeaker in a speaker enclosure. The signal from a pickup can also be recorded directly.
The Fender Mustang is a solid body electric guitar produced by the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. It was introduced in 1964 as the basis of a major redesign of Fender's student models, the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic. It was produced until 1982 and reissued in 1990.
A P.A.F. or simply PAF is an early model of the humbucker guitar pickup invented by Seth Lover in 1955. Gibson began use of the PAF on higher-model guitars in late 1956 and stopped in late 1962. They were replaced by the Patent Number pickup, essentially a refined version of the PAF. These were in turn replaced by "T-Top" humbuckers in 1967, and production ended in 1975. Though it is commonly mistaken as the first humbucker pickup, the PAF was the first humbucker to gain widespread use and notoriety. The PAF is an essential tonal characteristic of the now-famous 1957-1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard guitars, and pickups of this type have gained a large following.
The Lace Sensor is a guitar pickup designed by Don Lace and manufactured by AGI since 1985.
The mini-humbucker is a humbucking guitar pickup. It was originally created by the Epiphone company. The mini-humbucker resembles a Gibson PAF humbucker, but is narrower in size and senses a shorter length of string vibration. This produces clearer, brighter tones that are quite unlike typical Gibson sounds. It fits in between single-coils and full-sized humbuckers in the tonal spectrum. It is frequently used in jazz guitars, mounted under the fingerboard or on the pickguard.
The Fender Bullet was an electric guitar originally designed by John Page and manufactured and marketed by the Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. It was first introduced as a line of "student" guitars to replace the outgoing Mustang and Musicmaster models.
Electric guitar design is a type of industrial design where the looks and efficiency of the shape as well as the acoustical aspects of the guitar are important factors. In the past many guitars have been designed with various odd shapes as well as very practical and convenient solutions to improve the usability of the object.
Kalamazoo is the name for two different lines of instruments produced by Gibson. In both cases Kalamazoo was a budget brand. The first consisted of such instruments as archtop, flat top and lap steel guitars, banjos, and mandolins made between 1933 and 1942, and the second, from 1965 to 1970, had solid-body electric and bass guitars.
The Gibson ES series of semi-acoustic guitars are manufactured by the Gibson Guitar Corporation.
Bart Hopkin is a builder of experimental musical instruments and a writer and publisher on the subject. Hopkin runs the website windworld.com, which provides resources regarding unusual instruments.
The Fender Telecaster, colloquially known as the Tele, is the world's first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar. Its simple yet effective design and revolutionary sound broke ground and set trends in electric guitar manufacturing and popular music. Introduced for national distribution as the Broadcaster in the autumn of 1950 as a two-pickup version of its sister model, the single-pickup Esquire, the pair were the first guitars of their kind manufactured on a substantial scale. A trademark conflict with a rival manufacturer's led to the guitar being renamed in 1951. Initially, the Broadcaster name was simply cut off of the labels placed on the guitars and later in 1951, the final name of Telecaster was applied to the guitar. The Telecaster quickly became a popular model, and has remained in continuous production since its first incarnation.
Guitar pickup potting is a process whereby the fine wire coils of a guitar pickup are encapsulated in a substance that inhibits movement of the coil. Guitar pickups are generally made from bobbins wrapped in many thousands of turns of fine wire. If the wire is left unpotted it is possible for unwanted microphonics or oscillations to occur, causing the pickup to "howl". This is often apparent when using overdriven amplifiers and distortion pedals. Potting also protects the delicate winding from damage.
The Gibson Victory was an electric guitar produced by Gibson Guitars from 1981 until 1983. In the late 1970s, a band named Stillwater came out with a song named -Mindbender "My Daddy was a Gibson. My Mama was a Fender That's why they call me Mindbender" about a guitar that could talk. This song may have started the SuperStrat battle, but in the early 1980s, when musicians watched Eddie Van Halen play his Frankenstrat they questioned and rethought everything about their instruments and the SuperStrat war began. Guitar buyers insisted on engineering advances allowing more speed and playability of skyscraping leads, dive bombing, and rock crushing shred. The master luthiers in Kalamazoo responded to these demanding guitarists by designing the Victory. The Victory, a superstrat, was a departure from Gibson's image as an old-fashioned guitar maker. MV stood for Multi-Voice, and X stood for ten. They were created by the Gibson research and development team in Kalamazoo, MI, with the sturdy body and neck work by Chuck Burge, and the "multi-voice" pickups and electronics by Tim Shaw.
Roger Rossmeisl was a German luthier who designed electric guitars in the 1950s and '60s for the US companies Rickenbacker and Fender.
Lollar Pickups is a Tacoma, Washington-based company that creates handmade pickups for electric guitar, bass, and steel guitar. The company was founded in 1995 by luthier Jason Lollar, a 1979 graduate of the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, and author of Basic Pickup Winding and Complete Guide to Making Your Own Pickup Winder was also a contributor to Bart Hopkin's Getting a Bigger Sound: Pickups and Microphones for Your Musical Instrument.
References
- ↑ Ricci, Benjamin (June 17, 2013). "Interview with Pickup Guru and Luthier Jason Lollar". Performer Magazine. Retrieved June 22, 2017.
- ↑ Hunter, Dave (August 27, 2014). "Review: Lollar Gold Foil Pickups". Guitar Player. Retrieved June 22, 2017.
- ↑ Gore, Joe (June 17, 2013). "Humbucker-Sized P-90 Review Roundup". Premier Guitar. Retrieved June 22, 2017.