5 Fascinating Facts About the Electric Guitar

We could easily come up with at least a thousand-and-one fascinating things to say about the electric guitar but who has time for that? Instead, we’ve somehow managed to narrow it down to just five!

#1. The Frying Pan

At the dawn of the twentieth century, everyone and their aunt all over the world were experimenting with the potential of a brand-new discovery: electricity! During this period, a couple of smart buttons figured out a way to use parts of a telephone to amplify the sound of a stringed instrument. Exactly who discovered this witchcraft, we can no longer say for certain, but what we do know is that it led to the first ever commercially available electric guitar: the ‘Frying Pan’, built by Rickenbacker in 1931. Despite the name, this revolutionary instrument had a surprisingly modern sound.

#2. Valves

When you plug an electric guitar into an amplifier, you usually get what’s referred to as a ‘clean’ sound. But to get that classic raw and screaming guitar sound out of a valve amplifier back in the day, you’d have to turn the volume up quite a way so that the valves would ‘overdrive’, giving the sound that shredded edge. Luckily, effect pedals and amplifiers with built-in overdrive effects are pretty common these days, so even though you can still get valve amplifiers, you can also get some pretty cheap amplifiers and effects that make the same sound (and aren’t quite as loud).

#3. Metal

Usually, six strings is just enough for an electric guitar but, when you step over into the metal scene, you’re seeing more and more guitars with seven strings. On top of the standard six strings, these guitars have an extra low-B (that’s one whole note lower than the low-E string of a normal guitar), which allows metal guitarists to play those ground-shaking riffs. To get even lower, there are also eight-string electric guitars and even nine-string electric guitars. To hear what any of this might sound like and get your brain blown a bit, check out this DJENT2019 clip from Ormsby…

#4. The Mustang

Most of the time, you’re buying a guitar for the sound or the build quality, but sometimes you buy it for the idea – the prestige. Take the Washburn electric guitar that was once owned by Bob Marley, which managed to fetch over a million dollars at auction. What about Jimi Hendrix’ one-of-a-kind Fender Stratocaster: $2 million! But that’s nothing when you compare it to Kurt Cobain’s Fender Mustang – the one that featured in the music video for Smells Like Teen Spirit. That one? That one went under the hammer for no-less-than $4.5 million!

#5. The Whammy Bar

Some electric guitars feature what’s called a tremolo bridge, which is controlled by a ‘whammy bar’ or ‘tremolo arm’. But the word ‘tremolo’ actually makes no sense here. A tremolo effect plays with the volume of a sound, turning it up and down to create a kind of ‘wave’. What a whammy bar does is create a vibrato effect by pushing the pitch of the strings up and down like a wave. With guitars like the Fender Stratocaster, the whammy bar is designed for really subtle tremolo effects. But on models with, say, a ‘locking tremolo’ bridge (like the bridges made by Floyd Rose), the whammy bar is designed for pulling off really extreme note bends and dive bombs – Van Halen style – all without making the guitar fall out of tune!