TWO NECKS
ARE BETTER THAN ONE:
One of the earliest examples of a multi-neck
guitar is dated to circa 1690, and built in
the style of the famed Alexandre Voboam. It
is a small-sized guitar with an even smaller,
almost ukulele-sized, guitar grafted to its
treble side. This instrument would have been
made for a professional musician who performed with an ensemble or orchestra. The
purpose of the second set of strings was to
allow the player to transpose on the fly.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,
multi-necked guitars appeared on a semi-reg-ular basis, but never in any kind of large-scale
production. It wasn’t until the 1890s, when
modern manufacturing methods facilitated a
sharp increase in instrument production, that
multi-neck instruments could be made and
distributed in the kind of scale that would
allow for widespread usage. As multi-neck
guitars began to be used more frequently,
there became a greater and greater demand
for the instrument—it built upon itself.
The double-neck guitars of the 1890s
reflected the tastes of the times. What
became popular were things like harp guitars, lute guitars and mandolin guitars. The
playing method differed from instrument
to instrument. On the harp guitar, the extra
strings were intended to mostly drone along
with the guitar. On a mandolin guitar, one
neck was played at a time. While none of
these instruments set the world on fire, they
did achieve enough popularity to establish
the concept of a multi-necked guitar as a
viable instrument.
The Early Lap Steels
As we know, the popularity of Hawaiian music
in the late 1910s and ‘20s led to the emergence of the guitar—particularly the lap steel
guitar—as an accepted instrument in popular
music. The portability and accessibility of the
guitar lent itself to usage across the entire
spectrum of society, from front-porch pickin’
to ballroom jazz. The need for more volume
from the instrument lead to the amplification and electrification of both lap steel and
Spanish-style guitars in the late 1920s.
The earliest multi-neck electric guitars were
lap steels. The famed lap steel guitarist Alvino
Rey, who seemed to have had a hand in a
multitude of early electric guitar inventions,
claimed to be one of the first electric lap
steel players to use instruments with more
than one neck. Rey, like many other lap steel
players before and after, knew that the instrument required multiple tunings to keep up
A replica of Grady Martin’s doubleneck Bigsby made in the
‘80s by R.C. Allen for Gary Lambert, the rockabilly picker
who played with Glen Glenn and Eddie Cochran. It diverges
from Paul Bigsby’s original in a number of details, most noteably the lower bout ornament, vibrato assembly, pickup and
control configuration and (rather obviously) the pickguard.
Photo courtesy of Rick Gould.
www.premierguitar.com
A replica of Grady Martin’s doubleneck Bigsby
made in the ‘80s by R.C. Allen for Gary Lambert,
the rockabilly picker who played with Glen Glenn
and Eddie Cochran. It diverges from Paul Bigsby’s
original in a number of details, most noteably the
lower bout ornament, vibrato assembly, pickup
and control configuration and (rather obviously)
the pickguard. Photo courtesy of Rick Gould.
