Guitar

OF NOTE: Forty-two strings, four necks, two sound holes, and two ports, not visible • It took approximately 1,000 hours (two years) to build, and when all strings are tuned to concert pitch, the body is under 1,000 pounds of pressure

The guitarist Pat Metheny, a serious Manzer fan, asked her to build him a guitar “with as many strings as possible.” She came back with the Pikasso—a masterpiece in which lutherie meets sculpture. After seeing it in Metheny’s hands—and you can hear him playing it on numerous recordings, as well as see it on YouTube—the collector Scott Chinery asked Linda to make him one. Here it is, the Pikasso II. One difference: Metheny’s had numerous piezo pickups.

OF NOTE: Five bass strings, six traditional guitar strings, and fifteen harp strings running along the side—plus twelve internal resonating strings that run through the neck, which are what make this instrument a “sympitar,” a word coined by Carlson for his design, that gives guitars the shimmering sound of a sitar too

Fred Carlson is an inventive West Coast luthier who thinks like a sculptor, which is not hard to imagine when looking at Big Red, a harp sympitar—a harp guitar with sympathetic strings. As the guitar slowly came together in his shop, its colorfulness and exuberance never failed to make him smile. And look at that psychedelic back, which is made of a one-piece shell cast from recycled paper grocery bags.

Sounding off

What makes a guitar sound like a guitar? On the one hand, it’s pretty simple. For an acoustic flattop, strings are stretched tight and anchored over a resonant wooden “box” and vibrate when plucked. The vibrations are transmitted by the bridge to the guitar top, which in turn causes the top to start moving. This thin piece of wood, usually spruce, is responsible for up to 90 percent of a guitar’s tone, presence, sustain, volume, and all the other fun words used to describe the sound of an individual note or instrument. On the other hand, it’s pretty complicated when you factor in all the construction choices that affect the sound: the type and quality of the tone woods for the top, back, and sides, the bracing pattern and types of braces, the position of the bridge, the glue used, ad infinitum.

With its design adapted from the violin family, an archtop works somewhat differently. The top and back are carved out of thick boards, f-holes are traditionally used in place of a single round hole, two parallel tone bars brace the top, and the strings are not anchored but rather draped over the bridge and held by a tailpiece. When played, the soundboard moves up and down and the pressure is implosive, forcing the body in on itself.

The electric guitar, of course, derives its sound from the pickup and how the rest of the guitarist’s rig—amps and effects—processes it. The type of body (solid, hollow, semi-hollow) and wood used contribute to sustain, feedback, and some tone, but it’s really all about those little wires. Here are the basic pickups:

Basic Pickups

“Charlie Christian”

Introduced in the mid-1930s, this bar pickup produces a clear, powerful jazz tone, named after guitarist Charlie Christian (see here).

Single-coil pickup

Fender Single-Coil

Leo Fender used six magnetic pole pieces, one for each string, with a “single coil” of wire

running around them, resulting in a bright, punchy sound that can veer to “ice pick” on the treble end.

Gibson P-90

Gibson’s beefier version of the single coil, with a rich but bright sound

Humbucker pickup

Humbucker

Single-coil pickups hum—they’re like antennas, picking up disturbances and converting them into a 60-cycle hum, akanoise. In 1954, Seth Lover invented the dual-coil, noise-canceling—“buck the hum”—pickup, resulting in the darker, fatter, bluesier sound of a Les Paul.

Piezo

Piezo electric transducers use crystals or ceramic to register small changes in pressure produced by the strings. They’re mounted directly under the bridge and are used more often for acoustic guitars.

OF NOTE: Body made of hollow steel, which was then allowed to rust • Retro seafoam-green-on-cream paint, weathered knobs, and a Bigsby that looks like it was recovered from a guitar from the ’50s • Engraved rose pickguard

Wired magazine called the Trussart Deluxe Steelcaster a “zero-bullshit music machine.” It jumps to life in the hands, like a Telecaster on steroids—which explains why some of those Trussart-playing hands belong to a pantheon of guitarists and musicians including Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Tom Morello, Eric Clapton, Joe Perry, Lucinda Williams, and Billy F. Gibbons, who gave Trussart guitars the nickname “Rust-O-Matics.” As for his aesthetic choices, James Trussart—a French-born musician turned LA-based luthier—says, “I wanted to make a guitar that came with a history and a slight element of neglect, of decay, so it had a personality of its own.”

OF NOTE: Rare 9-string guitar—as if a 6-string and a 12-string had a child, with the bass side having single strings, and the treble side doubled up for the chime of a 12-string without quite so many intonation problems

Building on the need to supply instruments to aspiring West German rockers who were intoxicated with the music that GIs brought with them, German musical instrument companies like Framus were the first in Europe to start cranking out guitars. By the mid-1960s, Framus was the most successful of the group—even exporting instruments to the US. Paul McCartney’s first guitar was an f-hole Framus Zenith 17—he wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four” on it—and this Melodie is an example of the freedom that designers had even as the Fender/Gibson monolith was becoming the norm.

OF NOTE: The “maw”—as a nylon-string classical guitar, the N-20 wasn’t intended to be played with a pick, and Nelson’s years and years of performing simply wore it out • Baldwin pickup rescued from Trigger’s predecessor • Beginning with Leon Russell, some one hundred friends and artists have signed the guitar

Probably no guitar in the world is as famous and beloved as Willie Nelson’s “Trigger,” a Martin N-20. The N-20 was Martin’s foray into the classical guitar market, a Spanish-style, nylon-stringed instrument. Willie bought it in 1969, sight unseen, for $750, right after a drunk stepped on and destroyed his Baldwin acoustic, and he’s been playing it exclusively ever since. Trigger has appeared in more than ten thousand shows, recording sessions, jams, and guitar pulls, and is completely inseparable from the iconic songwriter, guitarist, and singer. The name came much later: “Roy Rogers had a horse named Trigger. I figured, this is my horse!”

OF NOTE: Martin’s Style 18 indicates a mahogany body with spruce top and spare decoration • Whereas the big country stars had instruments custom-made with their names woven into the fretboard or body, Elvis applied his name with stick-on letters supplied by the store to customize the case

In the holy trinity of Martin prewar dreadnoughts—the 18, 28, and 45—the D-18 holds the noble position of base instrument and is one of the company’s bestselling models. Introduced as a 12-fret and converted to a 14 in 1934, it is unadorned to the point of severity—almost Shaker-like in its lack of appointments—but has a raucous, powerful voice. And with that mahogany body, nothing gets in the way of the pure delivery of tone, so dry and open it can hold its own in any group, banjos included. For Elvis it meant having a perfect beast of a guitar to play rhythm. Or, as his main guitarist, Scotty Moore, said, “he just kept beatin’ on it till we got through the set.”

OF NOTE: Another missing link in the evolution of the solid-body “Spanish-style” electric guitar—i.e., a guitar that derives its sound entirely and exclusively from electricity • Those f-holes—they’re painted on • Not visible: beams bolted onto the flat back

Lloyd Loar was an internationally known mandolinist by the age of twenty when he came to Gibson with ideas for improving their mandolins. Gibson signed him on, and for the next five years, he blazed a path of greatness, introducing iconic instruments like an F-5 mandolin and L-5 guitar. He eventually left Gibson and in 1933 founded Vivi-Tone, where he explored his most offbeat ideas, including this visionary single-plank electric.

OF NOTE: Sixteen mini-toggle switches for the organ, including Sustain, Percussion, Flute, Strings, Trumpet, Oboe, and more • Six “sound holes”—the “S” on the bass side, and five minis under the strings, each covered in mesh

As the electric guitar found its place and started changing popular music, guitarists (and the listeners who loved their music) began craving ever more interesting and expressive sounds. Pedals were one way to go. Another was to change the nature of the guitar itself—mate it, as in this example, with an organ. From Sisme, the Italian owner of Godwin organs, came this magnificent instrument, a hybrid guitar-organ with complicated controls. It featured wired frets divided into six segments so that contact with the individual strings completed a special circuit and opened up a world of sounds and sustain. Some have described it as sounding close to a Hammond B3 organ. But everything had to be kept pristine. A little sweat from the player, and next thing there would be crackling interference.

OF NOTE: All the metal hardware is gold colored, including the tuners, knobs, and nut and truss cover • Two EMG pickups, a single coil on the neck, and humbucker on the bridge • Black fret markers using the simplified Prince spade symbol

Everything about Prince was unique, as if he were born knowing exactly what he wanted to do, and had the otherworldly talent, focus, and will to make it happen. A little bit of that is reflected in his “Cloud” guitar, designed by Prince and built by a Minneapolis music shop. The first Cloud was white, and four others followed in different colors. Though particularly heavy, with bodies of rock maple, they took a beating—Prince broke the neck of this one in 1994 while on a French TV show. His techs fixed it . . . and it fetched $225,000 at auction in 2018.

“Jaws on the floor” is the only way to describe the reaction to Prince’s solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” during George Harrison’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But the same could be said for his playing—well, his whole show, really—in the driving rain during halftime at Super Bowl XLI. Or, years and years earlier, the opening of “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?” Though often compared to Hendrix, as a guitarist Prince thought of himself a little more like Santana—“prettier.” Miles Davis called him a combination of “James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye . . . and Charlie Chaplin.” Truth is, there are no words to describe Prince, including Prince as guitarist. And if you weren’t lucky enough to see him live (especially his late-night solo shows) at least there’s YouTube.

OF NOTE: Everything in this guitar, down to the screws, is custom-made in the Teuffel shop • The “bird” is the cast aluminum piece that holds the neck—the “fish” is the piece that holds the bridge and control box

Ulrich Teuffel studied industrial design with a teacher who previously worked at Apple in the 1980s and was trained, he said, to think in concepts. His concept for the electric guitar? Understand all its constituent parts, then reimagine them in a way that allows the guitar to be fully modular. In 1995, he presented the first Birdfish, which puts an unlimited palette of tones at the player’s disposal. The two tubes on the left of the “body” are interchangeable tonebars (the instrument comes with one set made of maple and another made of alder) and the pickups—five are available, including two single coils with a vintage vibe and three humbuckers, one P-90, one PAF, one hot PAF—can be changed and placed in any position. There’s simply nothing else like it.

OF NOTE: This instrument was likely made by John D’Angelico, who apprenticed with his great-uncle, Raphael Ciani, and took over the business when Ciani died • Delicate floral work on the fret markers and ornate pickguard

Pete Seeger described the 12-string guitar sound as “the clanging of the bells.” He should know: His recording of “We Shall Overcome” helped usher in the second coming of the 12-string, with its bright, chimey sound, as a preferred folk instrument. The origins of the 12-string guitar are obscure—it likely came out of Italian workshops, whose luthiers were already used to making instruments with double courses of strings, like the mandolin. And its temperament is notoriously fickle—it’s difficult to tune and, because of the extra stress caused by all those strings, prone to warpage. But what a sound! Before Seeger, the best-known players were two legends of the blues, Blind Willie McTell and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter.

OF NOTE: Innovative 12-string headstock design, with Rickenbacker’s ingenious solution of keeping six tuners where they normally are and adding a modified slot design with keys facing backward • Split chrome “toaster top” pickups

The Rickenbacker 12-string helped create “the most famous chord in all of rock and roll,” said Rolling Stone about the jarring, jangling blast George Harrison and the band played at the opening of “A Hard Day’s Night.” It’s also responsible for one of the most famous sounds in ’60s rock history—the 12-string chime that gave folk-rock its sonic personality on the Byrds’ recording of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It all started in February 1964, when Rickenbacker displayed an experimental 360/12 at the Savoy Hilton hotel to tempt the Beatles as they prepared to invade America. Harrison walked away with it. P.S.: At the same time, Rickenbacker gave John Lennon a brand-new replacement for his much-used 325.

Virtually an unknown without even a record out, the Mexican-born Carlos Santana and his eponymous band from San Francisco delivered a legendary performance at Woodstock, announcing the arrival of a guitarist who would take basic blues inspiration into a world of possibilities. Over the course of Santana’s shape-shifting career, he’s explored or incorporated blues, rock, jazz, jazz fusion, salsa, African rhythms, East Indian, and classical music—and played with everyone from Booker T. Jones to Willie Nelson, John Lee Hooker to John McLaughlin, Prince to Shakira. And yet throughout, Santana’s maintained a melodic sound and an artistry so pure and distinct that, as he says, “with one note people know me.”

OF NOTE: The famous bird fret markers were inspired by a guidebook belonging to Paul Reed Smith’s mother, a bird-watcher • Beautiful popping wood grain • In-house designed and wound pickups, and a 25-inch scale, midway between a Gibson and a Fender

More evolutionary than revolutionary, Paul Reed Smith found the middle way between Gibson and Fender to create PRS, one of the most respected and successful guitar makers in America. A sublime craftsman with a musician’s instincts, he built a guitar for his idol, Carlos Santana, early on in 1980. Santana was so impressed that he called the guitar “an act of God.” How could this nobody working out of a tiny shop in Annapolis, Maryland, create such an amazing instrument? Either Santana was a genuine skeptic, or he was steeped in the art of motivation—it took two more guitars before Santana acknowledged that these acts of God were the acts of a man creating a new American classic.

OF NOTE: Lots of accordion bling, including the sparkly plastic covering over the body, pearloid or celluloid fretboard and headstock, and control buttons • Two pairs of single-coil pickups separated by a grill—the guitar’s body was hollow,and so presumably it could function as an acoustic

Purists like Martin and originators like Fender were guitar makers from the get-go. But for so many companies, guitars were more like a product line. These companies, like Sweden’s Hagstrom, were in the music business, and when tastes changed and the business shifted, they shifted along with it. And so in 1958, as the guitar boom began booming, Hagstrom pivoted from accordions to guitars, though they brought a fair amount of their accordion sensibility—and factory full of materials—to their early instruments. By the ’60s and ’70s, Hagstrom was manufacturing dozens of different models, even hiring Jimmy D’Aquisto to design an archtop. Lots of players used Hagstroms—Kurt Cobain once had a blue version of this P46 Deluxe—though the brand got its biggest PR boost when Elvis strummed a Hagstrom Viking during the 1968 “Comeback” TV special that relaunched his career.

OF NOTE: Four—count ’em, four!—pickups • Knockoff Fender Stratocaster headstock, knockoff Gibson SG body • All that chrome

Companies high and low clamored to get a piece of the guitar boom of the 1960s. One of them was the Maurice Lipsky Music Co. of New York, an importer and distributer who, circa 1967, introduced a line of Japanese-made knockoffs of models from Vox, Guild, Fender, and others. Lipsky marketed the Domino brand using the language of the times—“Lightning-Fast Action • Psychedelic Sounds • Elegant Mod Styling”—and the outlandish claim that “Today’s ‘top rockers’ know that only DOMINO can bring today’s BEST LOOKING, RICHEST SOUNDING instruments into their lives.” This candy-red, solid-body Domino Baron is a beauty, and sold for $75. Unknowable at the time, the guitar boom had actually peaked a year earlier, in 1966, and Domino, already on the fringes of guitar respectability, disappeared after one year in business.

THE FOUR SEASONS

“It started with the wood.” Inspired by a cache of very special tone woods that he had collected in his career, contemporary archtop builder par excellence John Monteleone embarked on a project in 2002 that resulted, four years later, in a quartet of extraordinary guitars. Each is different; each is designed to accompany the others; and each offers the guitarist not only a pinnacle of both design and art, including the use of rare materials like gold, silver, diamonds, and rubies, but also secret surprises. A look into the side sound holes reveals the seasonal theme of each instrument continuing on the guitar’s interior, with engraved scenes like leaves blowing off a bare tree in Autumn and a shining sun with a sailboat in Summer. Fittingly, the four guitars were unveiled at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a show on lutherie.

SPRING

Tyrolean spruce top, red tiger maple back and sides • Six small unusual sound holes • White to light blue sunburst • Inlays with red abalone shell, turquoise, and diamond

SUMMER

Tyrolean spruce top, big leaf maple back and sides • Mandolin-style scroll on bass bout • Yellow to red sunburst • Ruby position markers on the side of the fretboard

Autumn

Tyrolean spruce top, quilted big leaf maple back and sides • Elliptical sound holes, serrated to resemble autumn leaves • Lots of autumnal golds and reds, includes yellow gemstone position markers on the side of the neck

Winter

Tyrolean maple and Tyrolean spruce acquired from the workshop of James D’Aquisto • Mother-of-pearl and silver triangle position markers, with small diamonds on the side of the fretboard

Working all by his lonesome in an old industrial building in the luthier-friendly city of Santa Cruz, California, master builder Jeff Traugott makes about a dozen instruments a year. This way, he says, he can focus on every detail—from tone and playability to the specifics of craftsmanship—as well as his relationship with the customers who are serious enough to pay serious five figures and up for an acoustic. (It should be said that in Traugott’s world, Brazilian rosewood and German spruce are entry-level choices.)

OF NOTE: Curvy, slender body tapering right into the hollow neck • The wood is koa from Hawaii, historically used to build the islands’ oceangoing canoes, as well as the occasional surfboard

In another chapter of the story of German immigrants coming to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and getting into the musical instrument business, Hermann C. Weissenborn brought his piano- and violin-making skills first to New York City and then to Los Angeles. There, he transitioned into building a line of outstanding guitars designed specifically for Hawaiian lap-steel playing, then all the rage. With a body that extends all the way to the peghead and very light build using Hawaiian koa, it produces an exceptionally warm, sweet, loud tone, and has been enjoying a renaissance among slide guitarists like David Lindley, who sized the Weissenborn up memorably next to the Dobro.

OF NOTE: Double-cutaway, domed—bent, not carved—body • Patented bridge and device that is an adjustable palm rest • Not visible: internal metal rods that vibrate sympathetically with the strings, like a harp guitar—that tiny button on the rosette is used to dampen them

When Joseph Bohmann emigrated from Bohemia to Chicago in 1873, he unabashedly declared himself the “World’s Greatest Musical Instrument Manufacturer.” He built harp guitars, violins, parlor guitars, and what some credit as the first mandolin made in America. An eager innovator as well as a skilled craftsman and natural marketer, his instruments—like this little beauty—are full of patented innovations, including the bridge and tuners. At 121/8 inches across and with its domed body, it has been described as sounding like a “parlor archtop.”

OF NOTE: Lights behind a translucent plastic body flash in different colors according to the frequencies being played • Powered by a separate transformer that was prone to overheating, the 331 was called a “toaster with strings”

Trippy as it looks, the Rickenbacker 331 “Light Show” arrived too late for the Summer of Love. Rickenbacker introduced the guitar in 1970, inspired by stereo speakers and organs outfitted with lights that blinked and flashed in response to the music’s pitch. Though it was designed for the psychedelic movement, one of the most celebrated players who used a 331 was, ironically, Buck Owens, who loved to show his off on the program Hee Haw. Rickenbacker discontinued the guitar in 1975. If you’re curious, YouTube has a few videos of the Light Show in action.

OF NOTE: Antenna on the upper left bout to connect to FM transmitter • Calibrato vibrato, designed to keep the strings in tune • Micro-Nut, which allowed players to adjust the length of each string, a precursor by decades of tuning systems like the Buzz Feiten • Control knobs under the pickguard

There’s something about the electric guitar that appeals as much to the tinkerer as it does to the musician. A case in point is Micro-Frets, a company founded in 1967 by a self-taught inventor named Ralph J. Jones. Inspired by remote-control garage door openers, Jones offered the first cordless guitar, the Orbiter, with an antenna and FM transmitter. Other models included names like the Spacetone (Carl Perkins played one), Golden Melody, Calibra, and a guitar called a Voyager, so rare that even ex-employees had never seen one. With their oddball shapes and decades-ahead innovation—perfect for the late ’60s—Micro-Frets enjoyed a fair amount of success, all abruptly ended by Jones’s early death around 1973.

OF NOTE: All the firsts: the first f-hole archtop guitar • The first modern orchestra guitar • The first guitar with a 14-fret neck to the body that had an adjustable truss rod • Gibson knew it had something special on its hands, and gave it this befitting name: “The Master Line Guitar L-5 Professional Special Concert Grand Model”

Lloyd Loar was either a musical prodigy with the mind of a scientist or a scientific pioneer with the ears of a master musician. Probably both. When the twenty-year-old, internationally known mandolinist approached Gibson, he had ideas for improving the mandolin, and Gibson wisely signed him on. For Loar, everything revolved around tone, and his true contribution was the idea that each part of the instrument—tops, backs, tonebars, even f-holes—could be “tuned” to create a more dynamic whole. With the L-5’s debut in 1922, he really broke new ground, and its uncommon marriage of aesthetics and acoustics kept it as Gibson’s top-of-the-line model for more than a decade.

To learn of “Mother Maybelle’s” adventures with The Carter Family is to realize how quickly life changed in the twentieth century. In 1927, she descended from the hollows of Appalachia to Bristol, Tennessee, where a man named Ralph Peer installed an exotic recording machine in a local hotel; forty years later, she was performing with her daughters on her son-in-law’s national TV program, The Johnny Cash Show. A self-taught musician, Maybelle Carter revolutionized country and folk guitar with her innovative style, “the Carter scratch,” a rich, bouncy technique where she plucked out the melody on her L-5 with her thumb on the bass and middle strings, and strummed the chords on the treble string.