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WALLACE MARX JR.
While even knowledgeable gearheads will
begin the story of guitar electronics after
World War II, the true genesis took place in a
wave of innovation between 1928 and 1936.
Single-coil, dual-coil, and hum-canceling pickups; tone and volume circuits; tone-shaping
effects and amplification; all were first developed during this period. This month, we’ll
explore the early days of electric guitar pickups, looking at how and why it happened.
Rey, who became one of the first stars of
electric guitar, recalled that during this period
more than one person was experimenting
with rudimentary electromagnetic units.
The Pickup Story, Part I: the 1920s
The widespread availability of electricity that
began in the early 1920s was an advancement so important it’s hard to find comparable events. Now you could flip on a light,
switch on a radio and keep your beer cold
in a refrigerator. Electricity gave Americans
a whole new way of living. Tinkering with
electronics motors came to rival sports,
outdoor activities, and even making music
in popularity. Leo Fender, Seth Lover, Walter
Fuller, and Ray Butts, all to be revered one
day as the great innovators of electric guitar,
learned electronics in the 1920s and ‘30s
in part by tinkering. But it was the generation prior who first saw electricity as the
solution to the guitar problem. The great
guitarist Alvino Rey; Rickenbacker’s George
Beauchamp; Lyon & Healey technician
John Kutilek; and Frederick Dierdorf, who
sketched out and applied for a patent on
an electrified violin in 1924. These and hundreds of other “tinkerers” contributed to the
eventual electrification of the guitar.
Still, the right combination remained elusive.
Several technologies seemed to be viable:
carbon button, piezo, condenser, electrostatic, electromagnetic. For the most part, these
technologies were uncovered years before
their musical application. The telephone,
introduced by Thomas Edison in 1877, could
be thought of as a pickup and amp combo,
with the mouthpiece as the pickup and the
earpiece as the speaker. Early electrics historian Lynn Wheelwright makes an interesting
observation, saying, “I am sure that, long
before amplification, somebody played their
violin or piano over an early telephone so
grandma or a fellow band member could
hear it. In my mind this is an early electrified, although not directly coupled, instrument.” Telephones used a carbon button
transducer in the mouthpiece, a sandwich
of two metal plates with carbon crystal, a
soot-like material, in the middle. When one
plate moves from sound vibrations, it acts
as a variable resistor, allowing voltage to
pass through at different rates. The crystals
convert the sound impulses into electrical
impulses (but do not actually produce current). It didn’t take long for instrumentalists
to begin experimenting with carbon button
units from telephones, attaching them to, or
placing them inside, instruments.
The condenser pickup consists of two plates
holding an electric charge. When affected by
sound waves, the thinner of the two plates,
known as the diaphragm, changes its distance from the receiving plate. This change
in distance effects the voltage strength
of the charge, creating a pulsing current.
Condensers, widely used in microphones,
were experimented with in musical instruments in the 1920s and '30s with limited
success. Gibson’s Lloyd Loar was rumored to
have experimented with condenser pickups
as early as 1924, but a 1936 interview places
the date late-1927 or early 1928.
By the end of the 1920s the guitar was
more popular than ever. But, because it
could not compete in volume with the
drums and horns of the jazz age, it was
limited on the bandstand. Microphones
were in wide use, and amplification was
an accepted technology, particularly in
entertainment. PA units with amps and
speakers were used to add volume to vocal
performances, phonographs, and radios.
Many guitar players had stepped up to the
microphone and had their playing amplified.
But this setup had limitations, so guitarists
looked at ways to combine microphone and
amplification technologies specifically for
guitar. They experimented with telephone
mouthpieces, microphones, phonograph tone
arms, and reverse-wired speaker coils. Alvino
In late 1928, the Stromberg-Voisinet
Company of Chicago, IL, introduced a new
electrified guitar, generally regarded as the
earliest known electric guitar offered to the
public. The pickup in this guitar looked very
similar to the driver of a speaker. Significantly,
it was an electromagnetic pickup. Electromagnetism, the phenomenon where a changing magnetic field produced a changing
electric impulse, had been discovered as
early as the 1820s. Connected to the top of
the guitar by a small, thin rod, the pickup in
the Stromberg converted the vibrations of
the top of the guitar into electrical signals.
Unfortunately for Stromberg, while the electromagnetic pickup was destined to become
the standard for guitars, sensing the vibrations of the instrument was not the best way
to go about it. Picking up the vibration of the
strings, not the instrument would become the
standard for all guitar pickups.
Three years after the emergence of the
telephone, in 1880, the Curie Brothers,
French physicists, proved the existence of
the piezoelectric effect, a phenomenon
wherein certain materials such as crystals,
salt, even bone, produce electricity when
moved, compressed, or shaken. In the case
of stringed instruments, piezo pickups
sense vibrations and produce a small current output. Piezo technology was used
in early electric phonographs and microphones. One of the first uses of a piezo
pickup on a musical instrument came in the
early 1920s in Germany, in an attempt to
amplify a piano. Because the piezo output
is so small, a preamp is required. This limited piezo utilization in the 1920s.
In the next installment: were it not for the
perfection of the electromagnetic pickup,
electric guitar might not have become
the dominant instrumental force in 20th
century music.
Wallace Marx Jr.
Wallace Marx Jr. is the author of Gibson Amplifiers,
1933-2008: 75 Years of the Gold Tone
