Introduction

Guitar shop showrooms are museums of design. As visitors walk by rows of instruments sitting on stands or hanging on walls, they encounter a tactile history of popular music spanning from the mid twentieth century to the present day. Often, these historical experiences are deliberately curated—prescribed by corporate merchandising plans that sort certain displays according to brand (e.g. Fender), time period (e.g. vintage), or genre (e.g. metal guitars). Within this ecosystem, certain designs are considered more valuable than others. On a typical Fender wall, American Original Stratocasters—instruments that faithfully emulate 1950s or 1960s designs—occupy impressive, top-shelf spaces with price tags that soar above the budget Squier instruments toward the bottom. Similarly, companies strategically choose designs for entry-level instruments that appeal to young musicians according to the prevailing music preferences of the year. In short, the electric guitar has an elastic history that is continuously iterated and reinforced through marketplace value. This should not be surprising, as it has always been a mass-produced instrument. Design changes are responsive to consumer demand, and those who attune to the instrument’s history often frame its story as a celebration of market ingenuity.

The precarious capitalism of the musical instrument market has steered manufacturers toward design decisions that maintain a meticulous balance between forward-thinking engineering and nostalgic reverence for legacy products. On the one hand, manufacturers are expected to innovate and create instruments that can potentially break through staid markets. On the other hand, these same companies continuously risk alienating a large part of their audience, whose attraction to the electric guitar is based on the widespread opinion that classic designs need no improvement. Often, the industrial success of a new guitar design hinges upon the question of how much innovation is acceptable to guitar buyers.

In this chapter, I will review a few key moments in twentieth- and twenty-first-century electric guitar design that demonstrate these tensions. I will begin by investigating the enduring legacy of mid twentieth-century guitar models such as the Gibson Les Paul and the Fender Stratocaster. These instruments—among others perfected in the 1950s and 1960s—have been key anchor points for electric guitar design since their introduction. Next, I will review various attempts by electric guitar manufacturers in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to capitalize on trends in musical style (e.g. heavy metal) and technology (e.g. digital sound processing) in order to breathe new life into their product lines. Finally, I will assess the state of electric guitar design in the present day, arguing that many of the most successful models appeal to guitar buyers by deftly balancing historical consciousness with technological innovation.

Mid Century Guitars of the Future

In the mid twentieth century, the electric guitar was the instrument of the future. Its design was imbued with a celebratory spirit of the instrument’s inventiveness. While instrument electrification dates back to the 1920s, the first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar is generally considered to be the Rickenbacker Model A-22 Electro Hawaiian Guitar, nicknamed the “Frying Pan,” produced between 1932 and 1939. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, luthiers at Rickenbacker, Fender, and Epiphone experimented with different electric guitar designs that were primarily marketed for jazz musicians. As a result, most of these instruments resembled the popular acoustic archtops used in the swing era but with the addition of either a piezo-electric or single-coil magnetic pickup.

The early 1950s was a prolific period of innovation in electric guitar production. Although many luthiers and inventors contributed to the development of the solid-body electric guitar, the first hits were undoubtedly the Fender Telecaster and the Gibson Les Paul.¹ Released in 1951 and 1952 respectively, these instruments proved to the industry that solid-body electric guitars were a profitable alternative to the electrified hollow-body models that dominated catalogs in the previous decade. Both instruments also represented radical shifts in style. With their curvaceous bodies and modular parts, the guitars visually rejected consumer expectations of what a guitar should look like. While it was not until the rock ’n’ roll craze of the mid to late 1950s that these instruments would come to dominate the industry, they quickly became popular among seasoned players and inspired a series of further innovations in guitar style among manufacturers.

The solid-body electric guitar soon became an important staple of musical instrument manufacturers’ catalogs. Instruments such as the Gretsch Duo Jet, the Fender Stratocaster, and the Gibson Flying V came to market, boasting their unique innovations and radical styles. The rapidity with which these new designs proliferated in the 1950s can be compared to another product that experienced a similar level of growth during the mid-century: the automobile. It is true, of course, that the surge in popularity in the automobile industry is partially due to factors well outside the electric guitar industry’s purview. Suburbanization and the growth of the US highway system greatly affected the needs and desires of the American middle class. However, there are both stylistic and ideological similarities between car and guitar design during this era that have had lasting effects on both markets.

Some comparisons between guitar and automobile design are quite direct. Fender’s custom colors are based on Dupont’s Duco automotive lacquer line, which furnished many prominent American automobile manufacturers.² For instance, the now classic Fender color “Lake Placid Blue” can be found on early 1950s Cadillacs, while “Fiesta Red” is most often associated with mid-century Fords. These colors are still used in Fender’s modern instruments. In the 1960s, Fender released instruments named after popular automobile models such as the Jaguar and the Mustang, furthering the consumer’s psychological connection. Gibson’s 1963 offset body model, the Firebird, was designed by former Chrysler designer Ray Dietrich. The instrument was initially named after the Pontiac Thunderbird.³ In 1967, Pontiac renamed their Thunderbirds as Firebirds, and both products are frequently linked in terms of their shared name and radical concept.

Another design comparison between mid-century guitars and cars can be found in the ideological underpinnings of 1950s and 1960s American consumerism. Sociologist David Gartman has written extensively on the history of Americans’ social obsession with car culture. He connects the dazzling designs of mid-century concept cars—dubbed “dream machines”—with Cold War-era social anxieties, positing that the automobile industry’s reliance on evocations of military and aerospace technology offered consumers a sense of comfort in the wake of global ideological struggle. Gartman writes, “American leaders ensured people that superior missiles would guarantee the triumph of Americanism against communism, and the visual crossbreeding of this technology with consumer goods ensured them that their private lives were similarly superior.”⁴

The Fender Stratocaster is a particularly salient example of the electric guitar’s connection to space-age futurism and military technology. Debuting in 1954, the Stratocaster looked remarkably different from nearly every other solid-body guitar on the market. According to Leo Fender, the instrument’s design choices were in response to interviews with many California musicians who complained about wielding bulky electric instruments such as Gibson’s popular ES series. The Stratocaster’s small, curvaceous, double-winged body evokes a sense of aerodynamism and control. Even the instrument’s name seems to have been deliberately chosen to evoke a stratospheric, jet-setting futurism. During the 1950s, the instrument was more commonly marketed according to its performance and harmonic richness, but by the 1960s and 1970s, advertisements for the Stratocaster and its related little brother, the Jaguar, celebrated them as the “world’s favorite space machines.”⁵ Other companies followed the Stratocaster’s lead by directly connecting their instruments’ design to aerospace technology. The Airline DLX and the Gretsch Duo Jet feature sleek bodies and rivet-like features that conjure images of fighter jets. In 1958, Gibson’s Flying V model was first produced and advertised in the company’s catalog as the “design of the future” and was frequently pictured in advertisements soaring through the clouds.⁶

Within this framework, electric guitar manufacturers’ push to continuously produce new solid-body designs speaks to larger trends of mid-century American consumerism that valued radical innovation as a representative trait of capitalist supremacy. The continuous stream of new guitar models that were more and more removed from the hollow-body instruments of the previous generation solidified the instrument’s place as a symbol of American ingenuity and progress.

There is a more generous interpretation of the electric guitar’s mid-century design that celebrates the newfound power of the middle class in mid-century American capitalism, rather than focusing on consumers’ deep-seated anxieties. André Millard hails the instrument as emblematic of the “mass-market, middle-class values” of the mid twentieth century.⁷ He describes the electric guitar as a democratic instrument, claiming that its accessibility and association with popular music directly represented the shift in economic power toward the middle class.⁸ Similar to automobiles, economic liberalization enabled manufacturers to price dream instruments within reach of middle-class musicians.

Price consciousness has been a core priority of electric guitar marketing since mass-produced instruments were introduced to the market in the late 1930s. For instance, Gibson’s “Electric Spanish” line of guitars—which are still very popular today—highlight their within-reach pricing as part of each model’s name. The ES-150, for instance, originally sold for about $150 when it was released in 1936.⁹ This price, which included an amplifier and an instrument cable, was still a tidy sum for most musicians—roughly double what an acoustic Martin guitar would have cost in the same year. However, it was comparatively priced to brass instruments of the same period, with which it was initially competing. As the market grew, manufacturers often created different models specifically to reach consumers looking for an instrument at a lower price point. The Fender Musicmaster (released in 1956) and the Gibson Les Paul Jr. (released in 1954) were introduced as less expensive alternatives to the Stratocaster and the Les Paul. Importantly, most design elements stayed the same with the cheaper models, especially in terms of body shape and headstock style. In short, the electric guitar has always been an instrument whose design history is directly tied to mass-market pressures of conspicuous consumption.

Guitar manufacturers’ fervor for releasing splashy new models began to quell as the industry grew. In essence, the creative dust from the electric guitar’s initial explosion into the marketplace began to settle as manufacturers turned their competitive attention to global expansion and overall profitability. At the same time, a wave of corporate consolidation and mergers heightened the economic stakes of design innovation. In the 1970s and 1980s, both Fender and Gibson were notably acquired by CBS and Norlin, respectively. Later, they would embark on a slew of their own acquisitions. Fender now owns Jackson, Charvel, Gretsch, Squier, and EVH. Not to be outdone, Gibson acquired Epiphone, Mesa Boogie, Tobias, and Steinberger. Both companies’ design strategies became stratified toward niche markets through their subsidiaries.

The electric guitar industry has never fully set aside the spirit of mid-century capitalist potential. As we will see, guitar manufacturers still consistently draw upon the legacy of their early-generation models. In fact, mid-century guitar designs have become so firmly entrenched in the social landscape of guitar culture that makers have often struggled to break out of their long shadow. To continue to grow their marketplace, guitar designers are in constant conversation with the past.

Design Monopoly

Since the mid-century boom of solid-body electric guitar design, three body shapes have dominated the industry: the Fender Telecaster, the Fender Stratocaster, and the Gibson Les Paul. Design historian Paul Atkinson calls these three body types “the Holy Trinity,” saying that “almost every guitar manufacturer of any scale has derivative versions of one or more of these three basic guitar shapes in its catalogue.”¹⁰ Indeed, while browsing a musical instrument shop, there are a striking amount of guitars that either pay homage to or look like outright copies of these three shapes, all of which have remained fundamentally unchanged since they were brought to market in the early 1950s. The ubiquity of these body shapes in any guitar shop calls attention to any guitar that is not a Telecaster, Stratocaster, or Les Paul as distinctly different.

In particular, the Les Paul remains a profound design touchstone for rock music in terms of style and affect, even as the instrument nears its seventieth birthday. One contemporary example where this is made especially clear can be found in the architectural design of the “Guitar Hotel,” a 140,000-square-foot resort in Seminole, Florida. Completed in 2019, the property’s main building is 450 feet tall and built in the shape of the Les Paul’s signature body design.¹¹ Spotlights stream from the building’s roof, creating the illusion of strings that puncture the sky. Entering the hotel is akin to entering the temple of rock itself, embodied by the majestic Gibson Les Paul.

The Les Paul body design is such a powerful reference point for the guitar market that it has instigated landmark legal battles in US trademark, patent, and copyright law. In 1977, Gibson’s parent company Norlin initiated legal action against the US distributors of Ibanez guitars for patent infringement, arguing specifically that Ibanez’s headstocks bore too strong a resemblance to the Les Paul. This case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but it began a series of legal actions that Gibson continues to take in fierce protection of their guitar’s design as proprietary intellectual property.¹²

Perhaps the most dramatic exchange involving Gibson’s attempt to maintain sole rights to the Les Paul’s body shape came in 1997 when Gibson filed charges against Maryland-based manufacturer Paul Reed Smith. In comparison to earlier action, Gibson was asserting that the entire design of the body infringed upon a 1987 trademark image that roughly depicts a single-cut guitar body. The dramatic appeals process of this case demonstrates the extent to which the Les Paul shape has influenced the guitar market on the whole. At first, the case fell in Gibson’s favor, and PRS was ordered to immediately cease producing guitars that bore a resemblance to the Les Paul. Later, the United States Court of Federal Appeals Sixth Circuit found that Gibson’s trademark could not sufficiently cover the instrument itself. Gibson had argued in their previous case that “On a distant stage, a smoky bar, wannabe musicians see their heroes playing a guitar that they want.” The appellate court dissented, stating that “If a budding musician sees an individual he or she admires playing a PRS guitar, but believes it to be a Gibson guitar, the logical result would be that the budding musician would go out and purchase a Gibson guitar. Gibson is helped, rather than harmed, by any such confusion.”¹³

Gibson’s attempt and failure to legally protect their Les Paul design reveals two important priorities among guitar manufacturers. First, the design of the guitar itself is considered to be of utmost value. Gibson’s complaint was focused more on protecting the recognizability of the instrument’s shape than any infringements on proprietary individual components or construction techniques. Second, their litigious protection of the Les Paul shape shows that even forty years after its release, the Les Paul was still an indispensable cornerstone of their business. Over its history, Gibson had done little to alter its original design. The Les Paul had been perfected and was synonymous with the business’s reputation.

What are electric guitar designers to do in an industrial ecosystem where it is so widely accepted that the instrument was perfected years ago? This is a question that has consistently troubled producers who struggle to grow. It is not a question unique to the guitar industry—manufacturers of mattresses or coffee machines are constantly striving to convince consumers that their products’ new features are worthy of discarding perfectly workable older models. However, the electric guitar industry has been met with an interesting amount of discord when it attempts to introduce new designs or features. It is perhaps for this reason that the “holy trinity” remains as sacrosanct as ever in the twenty-first century.

Individuality and Iconoclasm

There have been various attempts to update electric guitar design in order to incorporate technology that might improve instrument performance. Many of these designs stem from the industry’s response to musicians’ interest in modifying their personal instruments. Steve Waksman locates a period of intensity surrounding DIY (do-it-yourself) guitar production in Southern California during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Discussing Eddie Van Halen in particular, Waksman contextualizes his reputation for being a master tinkerer within a gendered landscape of consumption. He argues that Van Halen’s habit of constructing “Frankenstrats” by assembling guitars from parts pillaged from other instruments reveals “an impulse to position the male self as producer rather than consumer.”¹⁴ In doing so, Van Halen acquired a reputation for mastery over the instrument through both his virtuosity as a player and a designer. Van Halen’s Frankenstrat remains a touchstone in the history of electric guitar design, inspiring corporate trends that paradoxically capitalize on guitarists’ aversion to placid consumption through mechanisms of mass production. This presents an interesting problem: how can a guitar manufacturer sell individuality off the factory line?

Some of the most successful guitar manufacturers of the 1970s and 1980s attended to these niches of individuality by offering designs that were both endlessly customizable and markedly different from the sea of Gibsons and Fenders that were commonly found on stage. This period of guitar design is inextricably tied to the rise of heavy metal as a popular genre, particularly among rock guitarists who were attuned to innovations in instrumental technique. In regard to the 1980s, Robert Walser writes that guitar magazines saw heavy metal as “the main site of technical innovation and expansion.”¹⁵ It is no surprise that the electric guitar industry followed suit and produced guitars that courted this market of heavy metal aficionados.

New styles by companies such as Jackson, B.C. Rich, and Kramer featured sharper angles, offset body shapes, and bolder headstock designs that became very popular among heavy metal guitarists in the name of creating high-performance machines to match their fast, heavy playing. These guitars also highlighted the iconoclastic identity of heavy metal players for whom existing popular models did not offer enough freedom of expression, both in terms of musical and visual style. Jackson Guitars, for instance, was founded in 1980 when Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist Randy Rhoads drew his ideal instrument on a napkin.¹⁶ The resulting instrument—dubbed the “Concorde” in reference to the newly christened airliner—was constructed with a hyper-exaggerated offset that arguably promoted Rhoads’ virtuosity by appearing difficult to play. Similarly, Steve Vai’s partnership with Ibanez introduced the JEM series in 1987, which prominently includes an immediately recognizable handhold cutout in the upper bout. To this day, these instruments are often grouped together on guitar shop walls in a bricolage section. They serve as a visual reminder of the iconoclastic flamboyance of heavy metal in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in their defiant juxtaposition to the rather uniform-looking Fender and Gibson areas of the store.

The burgeoning aftermarket industry of electric guitar accessories, such as tremolo systems, pickups, and tools for modifying factory-line guitars, also exploded in the 1980s. Increasingly, design decisions became modular, giving consumers the opportunity to express their individuality through either altering their instruments themselves or choosing from a catalog of guitars assembled from an ever-lengthening list of custom add-ons. No longer would guitarists have to be satisfied with the choices presented to them by the major manufacturers. Even as heavy metal’s baroque style fell out of fashion, electric guitar manufacturers focused on delivering highly customizable instruments to market. However, the undergirding ethos of individualistic design shifted from a performance of virtuosity to a performance of taste and prestige.

In 1987, Fender opened its “custom shop,” a factory dedicated to bespoke instruments by acclaimed luthiers. It was not the first time that Fender had offered custom models—custom specifications and colors could be ordered since the 1950s—but this outlet greatly expanded customers’ ability to control minute production details. When ordering a Fender Custom Shop instrument, the consumer not only has the option to choose the type of tremolo system or pickups they desire, but they are also consulted on intricate details such as nut width, neck profile, and tone wood choices for each part of the instrument. However, the instruments come with staggering price tags, which are often three to four times more than an off-the-shelf Fender. Additionally, Fender offers “master-built” guitars, which are uniquely created by a roster of luthiers such as John English and Dennis Galuszga, who began their careers designing instruments for famous rock musicians. These are by far Fender’s most expensive newly built models, costing in the tens of thousands of dollars, but offer a non-fungible prestige of joining the ranks of rock guitar legends.

Despite these eye-popping price tags, the Fender Custom Shop has been a commercial success, with wait-list times extending into years and Fender admitting that the Custom Shop delivers them “incremental higher margin business” as part of their filings for an ultimately failed initial public offering in 2012.¹⁷ Nowadays, nearly every major instrument manufacturer offers some kind of bespoke option. Richard Hoover, president of Santa Cruz Guitar Company, asserts that this is a natural progression in the arc of a serious guitarist, saying, “as players age, they gain appreciation. They hear the sound of a custom instrument … they develop a taste for the extraordinary, and nothing is ever the same after that.”¹⁸ According to Kathryn Marie Dudley, the early twenty-first century saw the cash value of vintage and custom guitars skyrocket, outpacing wine and art between 2000 and 2006. Dudley offers that the boom may have been partly “fueled by the spending habits of baby boomers entering their prime earning years.”¹⁹

Custom shop guitars offer consumers the individualistic pride of a tinkerer without having to make personal investments in acquiring woodworking skills or electrical knowledge. However, this typically all happens within the basic framework of historic guitar design. Custom shop guitars rarely offer buyers the option to seriously change the basic specifications of a Les Paul or a Telecaster. This allows the companies to balance their production requirements against consumer demand for personalized instruments. It also maintains the delicate balance between the old and the new that we see so consistently across many guitar manufacturers’ design priorities.

There is another dimension to Waksman’s discussion of gender and guitar tinkering that is inherent to custom shop instruments. Not only do these guitars perform masculinity by repositioning the consumer as producer, but also by inserting the consumer into the fabric of electric guitar history itself. Custom shop instruments offer buyers the chance to deeply engage with their preferred brand and become an intimate part of constructing its design history. The continued success of major manufacturers’ boutique lines through the present day is a testament to the power of that emotional bond. It is perhaps this yearning to be a part of the storied history of these brands that has presented obstacles to broader design changes.

The Perils of Over-Engineering

In the twenty-first century, the electric guitar industry has had a difficult time convincing buyers that the guitar should be improved. In the 2000s, manufacturers produced instruments that incorporated digital technology to enhance their models. In many examples, they were careful to balance the new with the old. For instance, in 2006, Gibson released the HDX Pro, a Les Paul-type guitar that incorporated a slew of newly engineered features. While the HDX Pro was equipped with “classic Gibson pickups for an incredible, traditional tone,” it also featured an ethernet connection, six individual pickups under the bridge with digitized preamps, and compatibility with music production software.²⁰ Perhaps to temper fears of straying too far from the Les Paul’s iconic reputation, the first hundred guitars were personally signed by Les Paul himself, ostensibly bestowing his approval of this new direction. The guitars were only produced for two years before being discontinued.

The HDX Pro was not the only technologically hybridized model to experience market rejection in the early 2000s. The Gibson Firebird X was produced between 2011 and 2013, including a large proprietary digital pedalboard to control its many features. Between 2014 and 2016, Fender built Stratocasters that included “personality cards.” When proprietary chips are inserted into a slot on the back of the instrument, the pickups are automatically rewired to seven different custom settings based on popular modifications. In 2014, Ibanez released the RGKP6, which included a touch-sensitive Korg Kaoss Pad on the front of the body for modulation control. All of these guitars sold, but none of them achieved market permanence. It seems that the strategy of releasing technologically daring products that worked so well for other consumer markets at the time did not resonate particularly well with guitarists.

Perhaps the most infamously unsuccessful attempt to hybridize new technology with the electric guitar came in 2015 with Gibson’s launch of the G-Force tuning system. The product is an electronic mechanism that replaced the headstock tuners and automatically tuned the instrument at the touch of a button. All the player had to do was strum the out-of-tune guitar, and the G-Force tuner would detect which strings needed to be adjusted and turn the pegs. The product was introduced as an add-on item for custom guitars in 2007 but became a standard issue part on nearly all of Gibson’s solid-body guitars in 2015.

I worked for a large instrument retailer in 2015 when these guitars hit the shelves. Gibson sent representatives to the store to instruct the staff on the G-Force system’s benefits. The tuner worked most of the time, but the visit left the entire staff puzzled. Each Les Paul had a bulky, black box on the back of its headstock. A salesperson named Jon remarked, “How are we supposed to sell these? You have to charge a battery to tune your guitar!” He shrugged his head as he scrutinized the manual, muttering, “They don’t make ’em like they used to.”

It definitely seemed that most of our customers agreed with Jon. We sold so few 2015 Gibson guitars that, eventually, the same corporate representative returned with boxes filled with regular tuning pegs. As a team, we tore off each G-Force system, threw them in a box, and replaced them with manual tuners. Four years later, I stumbled on that same box gathering dust in a closet, an Icarian reminder of the perils of over-engineering the electric guitar.

Due to dismal sales of their 2015 instruments, Gibson’s credit rating was sharply downgraded.²¹ It would be erroneous to suggest that the G-Force tuner fiasco was the sole catalyst to Gibson’s business troubles, as the international credit agency Moody’s also cited Gibson’s massive debt and frequent senior leadership changes. Still, the risk they took in revamping their core product line dealt a severe blow. It was a move they never fully recovered from, and the company ultimately declared bankruptcy in 2018. In public statements released after their bankruptcy, Gibson’s new CEO, J.C. Curleigh, stated that the company would focus on building quality instruments rather than exploring new directions, explicitly promising that the company would “return to its historic roots.”²² In the words of my coworker Jon, Curleigh committed to “making ’em like they used to.”

Not all attempts to bring new electric guitar designs to market have been so contentious. Two bright spots in the electric guitar industry’s mission to generate consumer excitement through new designs have come in the popularity of signature artist models and rereleases of classic guitars. Connections between specific instruments and the artists who use them have been exploited by the industry since the electric guitar was introduced. For instance, Gretsch completely relied on their relationship with the artist Chet Atkins to facilitate their entry into the guitar space. According to Waksman, Atkins’ reputation for “intense engagement with the guitar as a musical instrument and a technological device” inculcated a sense of respect and quality within the guitar Gretsch sold under his name.²³ Artists continue to lend credibility to manufacturers through exclusive endorsements and partnerships in guitar design. For instance, Paul Reed Smith features the Santana line and the John Mayer line, while Fender produces guitars bearing the names of Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. These are mutually beneficial partnerships in terms of legacy preservation. Because the history of artist partnerships includes venerable names such as Atkins and Les Paul, sponsorship canonizes musicians within a small club of legendary instrumentalists whose legacies are not only inscribed on records but also on guitar headstocks.

Artist signature models can sometimes be a vessel for design improvements that might otherwise commercially fail in standard issue models. For instance, Fender’s popular Eric Clapton series has a number of design differences from other Stratocasters. It features noiseless pickups, Clapton’s signature on the headstock, and an overpowered tone control circuit that are rarely found on other Fender offerings. The fact that “Slowhand” himself uses this equipment engenders trust among consumers, and the Eric Clapton Stratocaster has been produced every year with frequent design changes since its introduction in 1988.

Other artist signature models have managed to successfully introduce alternatives to the standard body designs that dominate the market. Gretsch’s Malcolm Young Signature guitar includes gaping holes in the body where pickups usually reside. Ernie Ball Music Man’s St. Vincent series has a long and thin body shape that bears little resemblance to legacy models. All of these guitars continue to sell very well. Due to the massive popularity of their namesakes, these designs have largely avoided the death by obscurity that beset so many other experimental models. However, they are limited editions that only sprinkle guitar shop walls that are otherwise filled with tried-and-true designs.

Arguably the most successful trend in the contemporary electric guitar market is the reissuing of classic models across all price points. These guitars are often heralded for their meticulous attention to detail. There are some designs—such as can be found in Gibson’s Custom Shop catalog—that are based on “laser-scanned dimensions” of historic guitars and use “chemically-recreated plastics” to match the exact type of nitrocellulose lacquer found on mid-century instruments.²⁴ Reissues are popular at lower price points as well. For instance, Fender’s Squier Classic Vibe series includes budget Stratocaster designs that mimic the minute alterations the model experienced through the decades. For around $450, buyers can choose between the Classic Vibe ’50s or the Classic Vibe ’60s, which each feature slightly different headstocks and color options according to the specifications of the instruments sold in each respective decade. Gibson, Gretsch, and Rickenbacker have similar product lines, all of which frame guitar store walls as an uneven chronology of design.

Even when an instrument is not a reissue, many manufacturers draw upon the currency that vintage designs continue to hold. The 2022 Gibson SG Standard boasts a 1960s slim taper neck, referencing the specific neck profile Gibson used on all instruments in the 1960s. There is no doubt that in future years, the company will swap out features on their flagship lines with other historically informed specifications, promising years of new products that are assembled by recreating one or more parts of older guitars. In short, historical consciousness is not only ever-present in the production of nostalgic value, it is also ingrained into the vocabulary for discussing electric guitars in general.

Conclusion: The Continuous Rebirth of the Electric Guitar

When walking through a guitar shop, the plethora of instruments that offer an authentic vintage experience belies a fundamental tenet in electric guitar design: you must balance the new with the old. I argue that this sentiment exceeds vintage fetishization or elegiac associations between electric guitars and a golden age of music that has long passed. True, some writers have analyzed declining guitar sales within the context of a popularity battle among young musicians. In June 2017, The Washington Post published an article entitled “Why My Guitar Gently Weeps: The Slow, Secret Death of the Electric Six-String Guitar and Why it Matters.”²⁵ In the article, music writer Geoff Edgers describes the electric guitar industry as plagued by unsustainable growth and lowered demand, pinning most of the blame on the perceived lack of interest among the children of baby boomer rock fans. Responding to venerable Nashville guitar shop owner George Gruhn, Edgers writes:

Edgers goes on to quote many famous ambassadors to the baby boomer rock tradition—from Gruhn to Paul McCartney—who bemoan the loss of the male guitar hero icon and link it to falling sales. “Now it’s more electronic music. Kids listen differently,” he quotes McCartney saying. “They don’t have guitar heroes like you and I did.”

Such eulogies of the electric guitar equate declining sales and corporate insecurity to a loss of the musical values represented by the baby boomer era “guitar hero” figure. Industrial statistics tell a different story. Guitar World published a summary of a 2017 study by IBISWorld that the guitar industry has actually “posted a 1.4% annual growth rate from 2012–2017—is expected to continue to grow until at least 2022.”²⁷ The National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) boasts similarly optimistic outlooks, admitting that the growth is not as expansive as in prior eras but still sustainable.²⁸ As of 2019, they report that the “fretted instrument” market rose by 5.57% and that it was the fourth-fastest growth category in the industry behind “‘effects,’ ‘electronic player pianos,’ and ‘other electronic products.’”²⁹ The “death of the electric guitar” has become a convenient rallying cry for musical instrument company executives seeking to deflect the blame for their companies’ declining sales away from overexpansion or misguided strategic focuses.

By critically examining the state of the musical instrument industry and its design trends, we see not a death but a persistent rebirth of the electric guitar. Manufacturers have found a relatively safe refuge in relying on their historical catalogs to deliver sales. Artist signature models and new inventions generate some excitement, but, in terms of industrial success, they still pale in comparison to guitars based on the iconic designs of the mid twentieth century.

Why does this work? What are the reasons that guitarist consumers return time and time again to revamped older models instead of embracing new designs? As I have stated, perhaps it is the prevailing notion that the electric guitar was perfected long ago. Perhaps it is the vestige of the electric guitar’s symbolization of Western capitalist supremacy and middle-class values. Perhaps Edgers or Dudley are correct—the end-users are simply aging and want to spend money on the guitars of their youth. Whatever the case may be, the electric guitar continues to move forward by looking backward, constantly reiterating its history and arguing for relevance.

I will conclude by discussing one of Fender’s newest product releases: the Parallel Universe series, which debuted at the NAMM show in 2017. Instruments in this line, such as the Strat-Tele Hybrid or the Jaguar Strat, combine key features of classic Fender models into a single piece. For instance, the Whiteguard Strat boasts the body of a Stratocaster, with the pickups and headstock of a 1951 Nocaster. According to Fender, the Parallel Universe line “celebrates the modular nature of Fender guitars, splicing together DNA from various Fender models to create off-the-wall hybrids.”³⁰

The Parallel Universe series wonderfully encapsulates the tensions between old and new designs that I have outlined in this chapter. With images of time travel and futuristic genetics, Fender simultaneously positions itself as embodying both the sober historian and the radical vanguard. With these instrumental hybrids, guitarists are encouraged to relive the excitement of the electric guitar’s future from the perspective of a historical moment when its future seemed exciting. Put another way, the Parallel Universe constructs a sense of futuristic design by borrowing upon the potentiality electric guitar design once held but no longer seems to possess. In this way, Fender has developed a creative tactic that allows them to completely revamp their guitar designs without losing the classic brand image that has guaranteed their profitability for years.

The Parallel Universe series is not the first Fender product line that has tried to thread the needle of guitarists’ fickle design preferences by invoking the future-past appeal of time travel. The Fender Custom Shop series, dubbed “Time Machine,” has been in production since 1999. These guitars come in a variety of finishes based on the level of wear that the design entails. A N.O.S. (New Old Stock) guitar has no wear, promising an instrument that “hasn’t aged at all—as if you went back in time and bought it.”³¹ A Heavy Relic instrument is covered in nicks, belt-rash, and even simulated cigarette burns to create an instrument that is “designed to evoke decades of the most punishing play and touring.”³²

Both the Parallel Universe and Time Machine series guitars simultaneously highlight modern innovation and reverence for past designs. In the case of the Parallel Universe series, this is achieved through a postmodern bricolage that constructs a historical imaginary of past innovations.³³ With the Time Machine series, customers are invited to embark on a futuristic trip to the past, where affective history is available for purchase. Both demonstrate the important fulcrum on which guitar design choices have had to balance for some time: paradoxically convincing their buyers that electric guitars are both past their prime and have a future.

Introduction

The electric guitar is often presented as a novel but straightforward solution to a particular problem: amplification. It is remarkable, then, that histories of the instrument focus mainly on the iconic six-string itself. No electric guitar is complete without an amplifier, and no companion to the electric guitar is complete without a corresponding history of electronic amplification.¹

Amplification has always been a defining characteristic of the guitar. In fact, for most of its history, the instrument was itself nothing if not a resonant body, a self-amplifying acoustic system. After a period when luthiers were supposed to have been making guitars louder by making them larger, amplification began to take on new meaning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was during this time that metallic cone-shaped resonators were developed and the virtues of metal versus gut strings, as well as fingerpicking versus plectrum strumming, were debated. The early twentieth century then witnessed not just a set of crucial technological developments (vacuum tubes, electromagnetic pickups, cone loudspeakers) but a paradigm shift in how engineers, musicians, and the public related to the acoustic world. Sounds were reconceived as signals. Amplification lost its body. A generalized speaker culture took shape.²

The usual story, in terms of the electric guitar, has a certain predestined, crescendoing ring to it. This can give the impression that the instrument was simply requested and accepted by musicians and audiences, developed and delivered by technicians and companies. But that is not the whole story. In fact, it conceals a more complex history.

That history could fill volumes. Its value, for the purposes of this chapter, would not be found in establishing a series of amplifier firsts. Of course, there is no end of debate about what constitutes the first true electric guitar transducer (electrostatic microphones or electromagnetic pickups?), the first proper electric guitar amplification system (adapted radios and PAs or dedicated instrument “combos”?), the first real performances and recordings of distortion (“Hawaiian” lap steel players in the early 1930s or the sabotaged amps of early 1950s rock ’n’ roll?), and so on. These debates are easy enough to consult in the numerous popular accounts, magazine articles, authorized corporate histories, and coffee table books that serve the market of amplifier aficionados and collectors. Such publications tend to be organized around a few main features: chronology and progress, great men and their businesses, objects and their impacts—not to mention a loud–louder–loudest narrative engine. The limitations of those forms of technological history are known, and will here be treated only in passing, as sources of empirical evidence in a social investigation. The concern of this chapter is to understand the situation of amplification in history and culture, to understand its development and effects as matters of social construction. In other words, the guiding curiosity here is: if electronic amplification is the answer, what was the question?

Thinking in these terms encourages researchers to confront a series of counterintuitive realities. For example, it is not clear that the development of electric guitar amplification, especially during its early phase in the 1920s and 1930s, was really about higher sound levels—or loudness, as Matthew Hill suggests in Chapter 2. In fact, the first amps were not necessarily louder than some acoustic options that were available at the time, meaning that the adoption of electronic amplification must be otherwise explained. This illustrates a familiar theme in the history of technology, where “inferior” devices and systems become widely used, not because of their obvious initial superiority but due to a complex of other factors, including cultural imaginaries and capital backing. Well-known examples include the triumph of disc recordings over cylinders, of VHS videocassettes over the Betamax format—even the shift from waterborne stream power to coal-based steam power.³ Indeed, from the 1920s to the 1940s and beyond, electronic amplification was at least as much about timbral characteristics and tonal volume (apparent or actual extensity) as it was about loudness (apparent or actual intensity).⁴ What is more, all of this was wrapped up in the marketable novelty of an instrument that looked and sounded like the awesome modernity of electrification during the early twentieth century. In these ways, electronic amplification is part of a cultural history that is more helpfully measured in discourse than decibels—and, as I will emphasize, in ways that are inseparable from the boundaries of capital, class, and race.

Neither is the history of the guitar amplifier strictly a story of bigger and bigger being better and better. Those tendencies certainly exist, both materially and discursively, perhaps most noticeably emerging in the 1970s with regard to the noise of punk and the power of arena rock.⁵ But the history of guitar amplification is equally a history of miniaturization and personalization. Like the wider electronics industry of which it is a branch, the guitar amplifier’s history shrinks from tubes to transistors to chips and, eventually, digital modeling amps and the microscopic operations of software applications. Similarly, the electronic PA’s political rhetoric initially imagined larger loudspeakers allowing larger in-person audiences and creating an essentially limitless acoustic public sphere. But this idea was ultimately more successful with the rise of radio broadcasting, with the market penetration of radios into most private homes, and the aesthetic of intimacy defined by the radio voice (e.g. Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats). Guitar amps, by comparison, did get larger and louder for rock, yet they were simultaneously getting smaller for studios, bedrooms, desktops—even belt loops.⁶ Electric guitar amplification thus parallels the history of microphone singing, which was only ever partly about filling larger spaces with louder voices. That history was equally about making quiet vocal sounds and styles unnaturally loud as well as, especially in studio recording, making loud voices unnaturally quiet.⁷

These seemingly incongruous tendencies do not so much replace one another as their various possibilities become layered, complementary, and interdependent, and as different amp technologies serve different markets. This is perhaps most obvious with the continued production of technically obsolete but nonetheless desirable tube amplifiers, as well as the large trade in vintage amplifiers—a topic that would open up a discussion of masculinity in music equipment that is beyond the scope of this chapter.⁸ Also beyond our scope is the extent to which guitar amplification should be understood in relation to a range of competing precepts and practices that structured the history of sound reproduction, especially those surrounding so-called fidelity.⁹ A fuller account of guitar amplification would also have to understand its topic in relation to rituals of actual and aspirational loudness in a variety of musical settings.¹⁰ And finally, a more extensive treatment would need to go well beyond this chapter’s strategic focus on the United States in the early twentieth century—the place and the moment when the old technology of amplification was new.

Insofar as this chapter cannot present anything like a complete history of amplification, neither does it present a single argument about amplification. The goal is instead to cover a range of tendencies and possibilities that have existed in and around guitar amplification, in the interest of illuminating certain aspects of the amplifier’s historical emergence. A parallel aim is to suggest some ways that a study of amplification can speak back to certain prominent themes in contemporary music scholarship, which will become more apparent in what follows. To this end, the chapter concludes with a discussion of electric guitar amplification and the problem of electricity—suggesting that the power of the amplifier has never been found in loudness alone.

Loud and Clear: The Social Construction of Electric Amplification

The earliest attempts to electrically amplify the guitar involved attaching telephone receivers and carbon-button microphones to regular acoustic and resonator instruments, and playing those mishmashes through PA systems (which had been introduced for the purpose of speaking to large crowds around 1915). George Beauchamp, who was centrally involved in the early 1930s introduction of the electromagnetic pickup as well as the frying-pan style electric guitar that became associated with Rickenbacker, was apparently experimenting with microphones and PAs around 1925. Eddie Durham commented that one of his band leaders, Jimmy Lunceford, “used to bring the microphone right up to the F hole of the guitar, so that between that and the resonator it was almost like having an electric instrument.” Guitar Slim, too, amplified his guitar using microphones and PA systems—and he continued to do so long after dedicated amps were viable.¹¹

Although the microphone and PA combination addressed the amplification issue to some extent, and in ways that clearly worked well enough for some musicians, it also resulted in a lot of unwanted sound. Not only were feedback loops an issue, but microphones heard too much: from coughs and sneezes to moving chairs and private conversations. Moreover, as an early essay on electrical instrument amplification explains, “a microphone of the broadcasting type picks up the whole orchestra, when it is only the strings that are weak and that do not balance the brass, so the result is as unbalanced as the original.”¹²

Attempting to eliminate such noises and imbalances sparked an encounter between two broad frameworks of understanding (and then, a third). One came from the world of communications engineering, especially telephony and radio. The other came from the world of music, especially luthiers and performers. These ways of understanding the guitar are not defined by the mental life of any particular individual. Rather, they consist in an intersubjective scaffolding for problem-solving known as a technological frame. In this sense, we can speak of the technological frame of communications and the technological frame of the traditional guitar, or the communications frame and what Steve Waksman calls the amplified acoustic frame. As we will see, the differences between these frames were resolved into a new synthetic understanding of the electric guitar—a synthesis that contributed an emphasis on signals more than the resonating body of the instrument, and that imported a specific and idealized approach to signals from telephony and radio. The goal here was that a signal should come through loud and clear.¹³

At the same time, the new hybrid technological frame was further compounded by the flexible interpretation of early amplification among its most relevant social group: guitarists. Encountering electronic amplification, these guitarists—many of whom inhabited those places where low social class relations intersected with racialized lives and histories—brought with them a “heterogeneous sound ideal” that has been understood as a “distinct approach to sound in African and African-American musical traditions.”¹⁴ That sound ideal is said to prioritize flexible, non-tempered approaches to characteristics such as timbre and pitch—and I will refer to it as a musical structure of feeling, in the sense of those forms of thought and action that were not necessarily congruent with the dominant or hegemonic common sense of a period, and which were inherently at odds with the “loud and clear” sound ideal imported into the new technological frame of guitar amplification. In other words, electrically amplifying the guitar required a new framework for problem-solving in the world of music—but certain guitarists did not always use the new instrument in the way its designers intended. This eventually led to new technological collaborations and new musical possibilities. In these ways, the invention of electrical guitar amplification represents a classic case in the social construction of technology.¹⁵

From the 1920s, a variety of electric guitar experimenters, drawing on ideas from telephony and radio (the communications frame), began to realize that the acoustics of the conventional guitar interfered with the electrical signal. Microphones and telephone receivers were therefore disassembled while phonograph pickups were stripped of their needles, mounted directly inside the guitar, and amplified using modified radio receivers.¹⁶ Trial and error led these tinkerers to focus on transmitting and amplifying the electromagnetic vibrations of the strings themselves rather than the tone of the entire guitar. Indeed, as Lewis Williams, an employee of Lloyd Loar’s Vivi-Tone company, wrote in 1933: “The subtle etheric flux of a magnet takes a 100% vibration impression and delivers as much to the aggrandizer for pure tone of any volume.”¹⁷ And although Loar was working with general principles similar to those of Rickenbacker’s George Beauchamp, it was Beauchamp who became most recognized for following this line of thinking through to what, in retrospect, is its logical endpoint: a guitar without an acoustic resonating chamber.

Some of the earliest electric guitar designers worked within the amplified acoustic frame, meaning that “builders and manufacturers involved in making electric guitars held to the notion that amplified sound was still largely reliant upon the acoustic qualities of the instrument.”¹⁸ By contrast, other designers incorporated aspects of the communications frame, which contributed an emphasis on electrical signals themselves more than conventional acoustics. The translation of this signal thinking into the guitar world thus involved a set of compromises surrounding the subordination of the priorities of the acoustic frame (i.e. the faithful amplification of a traditional guitar tone) to those of the communications frame (i.e. the creation of a new type of guitar tone based on the priorities of electronic signals). This was the context in which amplification lost its body. Or, as Emily Thompson has written, “the desire for clear, controlled, signal-like sound became pervasive, and anything that interfered with this goal was now engineered out of existence.”¹⁹ At least, that was the ideal.

The virtues of loud and clear sound are stressed from the first promotions of electrically amplified guitars. Appearing in the Chicago Musical Instrument catalog of 1929, an advertisement for Stromberg Electro Instruments declares:

Further underlining the emphasis on loud, clear tone outlined in the Stromberg advertisement, Vivi-Tone’s spokesman Lewis Williams states: “Because of the inertia and resistance of sounding-board type of instrument [sic], the player must use a severe attack that pulls the string widely off its axis in order to get a loud tone.” He continues:

An early Rickenbacker catalog, ca. 1931, similarly registers how, having been “touched with the magic wand of electrical genius,” the “fairy-voiced Hawaiian guitar, the tinkling mandolin, the ethereal Spanish guitar—all have been liberated, dignified, and given their rightful place among the orchestral instruments.” The emphasis is on “volume! controlled volume.” A Rickenbacker amplifier advertisement from 1933 puts it succinctly: “power without distortion.”²² This same communications-derived preference influenced work on (and marketing of) electric guitar amplifiers until well into the 1960s. However, it did not always reflect the use of electric guitars.

It was perhaps Leo Fender who most famously held on to the notion that an amplified guitar, like a communications signal, should come through loud and clear.²³ Indeed, Fender “kept a close eye” on developments in the hi-fi home stereo market, and in 1961 Fender advertisements still opened by assuring that they were “capable of producing tremendous power, free from distortion, with reserve power available when needed.”²⁴ Yet tremendous power and distortion-free reproduction were not always seen by guitarists as positively correlated qualities. There are innumerable accounts of guitarists who played loudly enough to “be heard above the blare of the neighbor’s radio” and to “rattle the window panes, at that dance next month,” plenty of assertions “that nobody could outblast [Guitar] Slim when it came to volume,” and a certain amount of shock that Memphis Minnie played her guitar “amplified to machine proportions—a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.”²⁵ But there are fewer examples of players (as opposed to manufacturers) bragging about how pristine their guitar sounded, despite its high amplitude.²⁶

While it is apparent that the “loudness” of the electric guitar was appreciated by many players, they did not necessarily share the manufacturers’ desire to maintain “tremendous power, free from distortion.” In other words, while the translation of the communications frame into the invention and engineering of electric guitars and amplifiers was relatively smooth, these imperatives were modified in their relationship with a particular structure of feeling in the musical world. The practical thrust of intelligibility taken from telephony and radio (loudness and clarity for the sake of comprehension) took on an unexpected aesthetic dimension in the hands of musicians (loudness over clarity for the sake of expression). André Millard offers the following summary:

Of course, cooperation between manufacturers and users did eventually exist in the development of high-powered and deliberately distorted amplifiers—witness Marshall and The Who in Britain, Garnet and The Guess Who in Canada—to say nothing of the effects units that have been designed specifically for distortion since the 1960s.²⁸ While these amp makers, like earlier ones, were also schooled in the communications frame (via connections to electronics engineering and radio), their collaborations with musicians led to a higher degree of synthetic congruence between the communications frame and the musical world—much like the relationship between technological innovation and musicianship cultivated by Robert Moog and his synthesizer company.²⁹

But it is worth dwelling on Millard’s words, for they open onto a history of amplification that is more than just technical or musical. The history of amplification—of sound and electricity—is political. When Millard describes the “modernity” of engineers and equipment, as well as the “rational” customers they imagined, he implies something about the nonmodernity and irrationality of certain guitar players. Millard thus participates in a longstanding and ongoing political discourse whereby certain musical and cultural proclivities and practices are mapped onto certain social designations—especially class and race (as well as gender, which is pursued more in Chapters 12 and 13, by Sue Foley and Mashadi Matabane, respectively). These ostensible nonmodernities and irrationalities constitute the “heterogeneous sound ideal”—the musical structure of feeling—mentioned above, the guitar-related social history of which Rebecca McSwain describes:

McSwain thus emphasizes a historical intersection in the history of amplification, one where the physical meets the metaphorical—where the power and pleasure of amplification, which is not necessarily found in a literal loudness (or at least not in a sense that would be recognized today), are means by which exploited and oppressed groups make themselves symbolically and materially heard. Amplification becomes defiance, resistance. Yet there is another side to this story. From this perspective, amplification became attached to longstanding biases of deviance, newly expressed in a moment of material and symbolic interchange between loudness and electricity at a particular moment in history—the early-to-mid twentieth-century United States.

When Virginian country musicians Joe Maphis and Rose Lee Maphis entered a California saloon in 1952, they found themselves a world away from the barn dances they knew. The drinking, the smoking, the dancing, the fighting, the lewd talk, the “airborne din”—they had never experienced anything like it. The atmosphere stunned them into song:

High-amplitude music is here associated with indecency, even sin. In his history of the electric guitar, Ian Port summarizes the episode this way: “Thus was the penetrating sound of the Fender guitar first linked to behavior deemed unfit for polite society. Barely a year after it hit the market … the Telecaster was … carving a gap between those who would give themselves over to the new electric music, and those who heard in it a serious moral danger.”³¹

Port may be right that this was the first time Fender was linked to forms of class- and race-based moralism and discrimination. But this particular moment actually tapped into a longer history of loudness that was compounded by the meaning of electricity—a metaphor for power and progress, an object of wonder and admiration, and a symbol of danger.³² Electric guitar amplification took shape in a world undergoing a long “civilizing process”—in Europe, in its colonial encounters, as well as the Americas—whereby ruling classes fabricated their subjectivities by means of the acoustic construction and subjection of various “others” (rich versus poor, colonist versus colonized, settler versus indigenous, white versus nonwhite, human versus inhuman).³³ Such associations between loudness, class, and race took on new meanings not only during the electrification of the United States from about 1880 to 1940. These associations continued their sedimentation through the electric guitar, perhaps most noticeably with regard to Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s, but also well beyond the guitar—in, for example, hip hop-associated technologies such as car stereos and boomboxes in racialized urban and suburban settings through the 1970s and 1980s, not to mention innumerable contemporary situations in which loudness is constructed as the sound of stigmatization and exclusion.³⁴ Whatever meaning we may find in the guitar amplifier, then, its social and musical significance extends beyond the object’s immediate “materiality.” Indeed, the amplifier is not a thing. It is a relationship.

Signal Chains, Supply Chains, Fetish Claims

One point brought out clearly in the historical development of the guitar amplifier is that it has always been about tonal qualities as much as loudness. In fact, early amplifiers were not capable of very high output and at first were probably pursued for certain sonic characteristics and the novelty of electric modernity as much as anything else. The history of amplification may thus be described as a “relentless pursuit of tone.”

The editors of a book by that title—Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark—suggest that electric guitar tone should be understood as a “quasi-object.” They borrow this concept from actor-network theory, which is a tradition of science and technology studies related to the one discussed in the previous section, and they define the concept as “a heterogeneous network of causal forces encompassing aspects of both nature (acoustical facts, modes of perception, properties of electronic systems) and culture (aesthetic dicta, genre standards, individual expressive goals).” To illustrate guitar tone as a quasi-object, they suggest, it is both typical and helpful to take an “imaginative trip” along “the ‘signal chain’ that runs from the player’s fingers to the listener’s ears.”³⁵

Strings, pickups, wires, potentiometers, cables, tubes, transistors, resistors, speakers, the fretwork, and the hands—all, we are told, matter in the construction and maintenance of this quasi-object called tone. In such scholarship, the methodological mantra is to follow the “actors,” that is, anyone or anything that is a source of processual agency. Of course, this is also the modus operandi of guitarists themselves, as they pursue particular sounds by endlessly updating their techniques and technologies at various points in the signal chain. Scholarly approaches to the electric guitar are thus mirrored in certain popular practices of the electric guitar. Taken to the amplifier, this work would quickly become a history of different tubes, capacitors, speaker configurations, debates about modern versus vintage equipment, and so on. Such histories, in other words, would orbit closely around fetishism, in both the everyday Freud sense and the everyday Marx sense.

In the Freud sense, guitar amplifiers are fetishes as objects of intense (if displaced) desire. In the Marx sense, they are fetishes in being prized for themselves—inasmuch as their powers and values are attributed to their objecthood in ways that distract from the peopled processes through which amps are made. One response to this situation, of course, as the editors of the tone book demonstrate, would be to treat such displacements and distractions as social facts and to examine their effects in musical culture.³⁶ Another response would take inspiration from recent musicological and organological studies of instrumentality and “materiality.” Such work would be less about the actions or affordances in the “heterogeneous network” of the tonal “quasi-object.” Rather, it would take a different “imaginative trip” through another “network”—spiraling outward from the performer–instrument–listener encounter that constitutes the signal chain, toward the anonymous frictions of the global supply chains that make such an encounter possible in the first place.

One of the analytical and political motors of such work is toward the restoration of an object to its social and historical circumstances, a mode of analysis sometimes called demystification. This type of analysis is present in contemporary guitar scholarship, in studies of tonewoods such as Fijian mahogany, as well as other efforts in tracing guitars back to their trees, as we see in Chapter 14 by Chris Gibson and Andrew Warren.³⁷ It is also increasingly present in music scholarship writ large—including other instruments such as violins, pianos, and drums, as well as various recording formats and the “resource ecologies” that define musical electronics of all sorts.³⁸ The possibilities of this perspective in relation to amplification are apparent.

What are amps made of? Where do those materials come from? How do we account for the historical and ongoing production of millions and billions of paper cones, alnico and neodymium magnets, wooden cabinets, glass tubes, metal chassis, silicon semiconductors, and the like? What happens when we think not only about reproduction parts for the vintage market but true vintage parts themselves, which were made to different environmental standards, and which can raise problems such as toxic “capacitor juice” (polychlorinated biphenyl and dioxins)? What are the effects of all this on the planet and its people?

This type of critical supply chain organology represents a form of demystification that is aimed at puncturing the displacements and distractions of fetishism. Such work is crucial in our moment of ecological uncertainty. However, not only do these studies risk quickly reaching a point of diminishing returns (empirical details may change from object to object and component to component, but the general analytical and political points remain the same). They also risk falling into a trap. What does it say that this work of demystification itself strongly resembles a popular form of entertainment in television programs such as How It’s Made and Dirty Jobs, as well as countless YouTube channels—and is therefore entirely amenable to capital? What are the materialist forces that have given rise to (and which nourish) the current wave of scholarship on “materialities” such as signal chains and supply chains? And how does all this obtain in a moment of environmental turmoil, when guitar magazines publish articles on “The Environmentally Conscious Guitarist,” pointing out how “old tubes … blown speakers, frayed wires, trashed amps, unwanted enclosures, and fried electronics” contribute to the fact that “modern music making generates a small mountain of unwanted junk”? The lessons on offer in popular writing but also some scholarship come down to sympathetic, ethical, activist approaches to consumption, which throughout their history have been notoriously ineffective.³⁹ Here we converge on the observation that it is often the moment where signal chain and supply chain studies believe themselves to be at their most critical that they may, in fact, be most compatible with the interests of capital.

This should give researchers pause. It asks musicologists and organologists of both signal chains and supply chains to consider what is critical about their critiques. It should help us realize that, in a counterintuitive twist, such forms of demystification can function as deeper forms of mystification and fetishism. A parallel example from the sociology of food helps bring the point home. Supply chain showcasing, as is often found with regard to organic food, looks like demystification even and especially as it deposits an additional layer of mystification onto commodity culture. The sheep of fetishism sneaks in wearing the wolf’s clothing of critique, creating “a distortion of reality which reifies and reproduces the fundamental process of capitalism by making the commodity form the solution to its own mystifications.” In other words, and not to mention many other commodities that are sold in terms of ecological friendliness, organic food can represent the “predicament of a social formation that offers its agents the means to reproduce its own structure while simultaneously feeling as though they are toppling it.”⁴⁰

Amplifier companies do not appear to have adopted green marketing techniques. Not yet. Perhaps this is because, unlike wooden guitars, which have long been implicated in sustainability marketing, amps have less about them to suggest an aura of “naturalness.” Either way, the situation is a little surprising considering the range of other electronic goods (fridges, dishwashers, smartphones, laptops) that sell themselves in terms of energy ratings, water ratings, fairtrade supply chains, recyclability, and so on. Given the emerging hegemony of green capitalism, it is easy enough to imagine amplifiers also adopting such practices—even if belatedly. It is also straightforward to imagine a branch of guitar scholarship that would, likewise, trace amps back to trees and mines and factories. All of which, to me, raises a crucial question. Why is the practice of supply chain revelation, or the appetite for “materiality,” so central to both commodities and entertainment as well as the contemporary inclination of music research, and in what ways might such projects coincide?

Conclusion: The Electric Guitar and the Problem of Electricity

In his cultural history of the electric guitar, Steve Waksman asks: “Can electricity be the basis of difference?” He is wondering about musical difference—electricity as the line in the historical sand between two forms of the blues. Although Waksman thinks the idea is a bit strange, and “too far to the side of technological determinism,” he does find in it some explanatory force regarding the development of the electric guitar and musical experience. I see additional potential. It is possible to discuss electricity as a basis of material difference and, in so doing, to suggest the necessity of going even further in the direction of technological determination.⁴¹

Several authors point to a path forward, even if few of them would associate themselves with determinism. David Hesmondhalgh and Leslie Meier show that music listening was industrialized in its connection to consumer electronics in the first half of the twentieth century. Paul Théberge describes how musicians became consumers in a new way with the proliferation of digital instruments from the 1980s, which bound the musical world up in new ways with the rhythms of the computer industry. Georgina Born, Eric Drott, and Jonathan Sterne, in their different ways, discover the relationships between musicians, listeners, and social reproduction in today’s political economy of information capitalism. If all these authors contribute to our understanding of the long development of relations between music, technology, and capital, then the history of the amplifier is illuminating for drawing attention to one such relationship that has been fundamental but largely unexamined since the early 1900s: electricity.⁴²

The field of energy humanities is helpful here. Writing about oil, Imre Szeman describes how energy formations shape societies “in every possible way and at every possible level, from the scale of our populations to the nature of our built infrastructure … and from the possibility of movement and travel to expectations of the capacity to move and interact.”⁴³ Something similar can be said about music with regard to electricity. Electrical energy has not only shaped novel possibilities for making music and listening to it. Electricity has also altered fundamental understandings of what counts as “musical”—of what music is, what we expect of it, and what we might want it to become. If, as John Durham Peters has written, “grids and circuit boards are ontological in their effects,” then the electric guitar amplifier was among the earliest and most important electronic instruments to usher in new forms of musical existence and expectation.⁴⁴

Electricity like this does not occur naturally. It has always been bound up with a sociotechnical system that can be described in terms of electricity capital, or “the nexus of state, regulatory, and financial relationships that shape private accumulation through electricity provision.”⁴⁵ Electrification built itself throughout the United States according to the logics of commodification and profitability, not the logics of social need or value, which meant that “electricity was not merely one more commodity” but “seemed linked to the structure of social reality”—and in a particular way.⁴⁶ Electricity capital helped remake forms of citizenship and, in so doing, presented new opportunities, not just for the enrichment of everyday life but for forms of exploitation that reflected and reinforced differential politics of geography, class, race, and gender. If, as Théberge shows, musicians became new kinds of consumers in the 1980s, they had long been essentially customers in relation to electricity capital.

Although some electrical grids do take the form of public utilities, the ongoing privatization of electricity capital, as well as various uncertainties about generating electric power on a warming planet, raise real questions about the obligations, rights, and struggles of citizenship, subjectivity, and belonging. It also raises real questions about the material conditions of music.⁴⁷

We have evidently traveled far from the “users matter” paradigm of science and technology studies. It is possible to see the synthesis of technological frames and the incongruence between the loud-and-clear imperative of the synthetic electric guitar frame and the classed and racialized musical structure of feeling, not simply as a difference in ideals but, rather, in relation to a material force by which music (via the electric guitar) was made available to capital accumulation in new, lasting, and almost unavoidable ways—regardless of whether or not guitars were played at high volumes or with distortion. Additionally, we have pushed beyond the comforting concrescence of signal chains and supply chains sought in some musicologies and organologies of instruments, beyond a focus on the “materiality” of music that risks reinscribing the commodity fetishism it seeks to dispel, opening a broader and deeper meditation on the material conditions of musical life.

Can electricity, and by extension, the electric guitar amplifier’s relationship with electricity capital, really be the source of such difference? I do wonder. In the end, my conclusion is that skepticism on this matter speaks less to the triviality of the perspectives than to forms of encompassing political power and subjection that have, until recently, been largely taken for granted in music and music research. In other words, the importance of electrical energy in music has been hidden by its very success; its normative ubiquity has “hindered an appreciation of its biopolitical importance.”⁴⁸ Although the politics of the guitar amplifier may be most obvious in spectacular displays of loudness that rattle windows and embattle neighbors—or, conversely, when the power goes out and the conditions of its possibility are denied and laid bare—the significance of deeper infrastructures of energy production and distribution are no less real for being less apparent in their everyday situations. The electric guitar amplifier is a political technology, even in the quietest moments.

Introduction

First developed in the 1960s, effect pedals (also called “stompboxes” or simply “pedals”) are modular electronic accessories that can be incorporated into a guitarist’s signal chain, typically in between their guitar and amplifier. With knobs, buttons, and switches for controlling various sonic parameters, stompboxes are ideal tools for helping guitarists dial in a range of different tones, making a whole world of sound available to everyday guitarists at the mere flick of a switch. In their modularity, stompboxes allow guitarists to combine multiple effect pedals to create a near-infinite array of sounds, thus facilitating guitarists’ compulsory search for a unique and identifiable tone. Like vocal timbre, which is popularly thought to index a performer’s inner subjectivity, an electric guitarist’s tone should ideally be familiar yet totally distinctive.¹

While other effect-processing formats have been around for decades, stompboxes are compact, relatively affordable, and modular, allowing guitarists to construct multi-pedal rigs with dozens of distinct tones potentially on tap. Prior to the stompbox revolution of the 1960s, electric guitarists had limited options for processing their tone: distortion was only possible with a cranked tube amplifier; echo effects were achievable with magnetic tape machines, which were bulky and required frequent servicing; and more daring modulation effects were restricted to ad hoc studio trickery or similarly impractical rotary speaker cabinets, which employed mechanical motors to physically spin two speaker horns at slightly different speeds.

Throughout the 1960s, inventors incorporated the newly widespread transistor to miniaturize existing technologies into a small and easily tweakable format, resulting in the first batch of fuzz, overdrive, and modulation effect pedals. In the 1970s, a new integrated circuit, the “bucket brigade device” (or “BBD” for short), was developed by Philips Research Labs, which allowed engineers to replace magnetic tape-based equipment with miniature solid-state components, permitting the development of portable echo effects, as well as psychedelic modulation effects like phaser, flanger, and chorus, which were previously only available in recording studios. By the 1980s, digital computer processors opened the floodgates to processor-based effect pedals capable of shaping sound in any way imaginable.

While effect pedals are ultimately tools for shaping sound, they have also become culturally meaningful objects for myriad reasons that exceed their intended uses. Since the 2010s, a veritable “pedal culture” has developed, within which guitarists are not necessarily bound by any particular musical genre but rather by a shared devotion to effect pedals. Guitarists interested in stompboxes can now read books, follow YouTube talk shows and podcasts, and attend conventions for pedal makers and enthusiasts. Within this pedal culture, guitarists have started to understand the historical significance of the stompbox format and have begun historicizing both the technology and the culture it has inspired. In the year 2021 alone, stompbox enthusiasts authored numerous books, produced a feature-length documentary, published an illustrated children’s book, and performed a fully staged musical, all celebrating the history and culture around electric guitar effect pedals.²

In this chapter, I survey the historical development and cultural meaning of the stompbox format. Centered around three main categories of stompboxes—fuzz, delay, and modulation—this chapter foregrounds how guitarists have developed new ways of thinking about sound itself through their use of these various technologies. Throughout, I not only describe key technical innovations that mark turning points for gear history, but I also analyze how guitarists have integrated these new technologies into their musical practices. In doing so, I aim to show how the stompbox format has been central to the development of electric guitar-based musical styles since their inception in the 1960s. Then, following newer developments, I show how new musical styles have emerged that are defined by the integral and creative application of effect pedals. Ultimately, I suggest that electric guitar equipment produces not only musical sounds but also knowledge about musical sounds.

Fuzz

Arguably, distortion is the sound most commonly associated with the electric guitar. Initially considered an unwanted consequence of tube-powered amplifiers, distortion gradually became an acceptable and indeed desirable sound effect within electric guitarists’ expanding stylistic toolkits.³ After accidentally dropping his Fender Deluxe amplifier in 1956, Paul Burlison discovered that by halfway removing the vacuum tube responsible for amplifying his guitar’s voltage, he could purposefully get his rig to produce a raunchy, fuzzy distortion, as heard on “Train Kept A-Rollin” (1956). Like Burlison, subsequent guitarists searched for ways to deliberately overdrive their instruments. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, fuzz-hungry guitarists coaxed their rigs into overdrive by any means necessary, including inflicting damage upon their amplifiers. The iconic fuzz tones on guitarist Link Wray’s 1958 hit record “Rumble,” for example, are (maybe apocryphally) claimed to have been produced after Wray purposely impaled a pencil through his amplifier’s paper speaker cone.⁴

In 1961, while Nashville session guitarist Grady Martin was laying down a solo, the studio’s tube-powered mixing board began to fail, causing Martin’s guitar to distort. Against conventional wisdom, the session engineer, Glenn Snoddy, preserved the distorted solo on the recording’s final cut. After the record—Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry” (1961)—became a hit, subsequent guitarists clamored for the same fuzzed-out tone. To satiate the newfound need for fuzz, Snoddy designed a transistorized circuit that could approximate the distorted sound of his malfunctioning recording console. The portable outboard device, capable of reliably producing fuzz tones without damaging any equipment, was a revolutionary invention and is widely hailed as the earliest standalone fuzz pedal. Snoddy sold his design to Gibson, who released the “Fuzz Tone” under their Maestro subsidiary, becoming the first commercially available guitar effect pedal.⁵

Gibson’s early advertisements for the Fuzz Tone show how they regarded the pedal as a tool for session musicians to mimic the sounds of various brass, woodwind, and string instruments, similarly to how synthesizers were used later in the decade. A demo disc for the Maestro Fuzz Tone recorded in 1962 advertises:

On “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (1965), Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards famously used a Fuzz Tone on the recording’s main riff to imitate the sound of a horn section. “In ‘Satisfaction’,” Richards recalls, “I was imagining horns, trying to imitate their sound to put on the track later when we recorded … But we didn’t have any horns, and I was only going to lay down a dub … But the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that’s the sound that caught everybody’s imagination.”⁷ By mimicking the sound of another instrument, Keith Richards’ Fuzz Tone complicates conventional notions of timbre, which maintain that the term refers to the instrumental source of a particular sound. In other words, a trumpet is thought to sound like a trumpet precisely because a trumpet, and no other instrument, can produce that sound. With its “timbral thievery,” the Fuzz Tone shifts our focus as listeners from the source of a sound (“I am listening to a horn section”) to the qualities of the sound itself (“This sounds fuzzy”).⁸ So, while Richards may have intended for the riff from “Satisfaction” to be a horn line, what subsequent listeners have heard and latched onto is something else entirely, something far greater than the sum of its parts.

As guitarists sharpened their focus on playing with sound itself, effect pedals proved to be ideal tools for conceptualizing sound as a controllable entity. The materiality of analog circuitry especially has fostered a sense of physically controlling sound. In analog electronic circuits, a continuously variable signal travels (via wires and components) from point to point while each component physically modifies the movement of the signal. Like miniature Rube Goldberg machines, analog circuits bounce a signal from component to component, physically complicating its journey from point A to point B. Each switch that a guitarist flips draws new connections, new bridges between points in the circuit. Each knob they twist eases or resists the flow of current. The sense of control over sound is rendered all the more palpable when one’s knob-twisting physically alters a moving current. For this reason, analog components have themselves become the object of analysis and devotion for listeners seeking a source for their instruments’ exceptional sounds, like the antique varnish or exotic tone woods long believed to be the source of a Stradivarius violin’s exceptional tone.⁹

What is noteworthy about effect pedal culture is that guitarists have grafted these same centuries-old strategies for investigating and valuing old instruments onto a class of mass-produced electronic commodities. By fetishizing certain germanium transistors over others, gear connoisseurs attribute the “magic” of their tone to everyday mass-produced electronic components. As John Bowers and Vanessa Yaremchuk wax in their ode to components for Leonardo Music Journal, “before the Ibanez Tube Screamer there was the JRC4558 chip. Before the smooth sound of germanium fuzz, there had to be germanium, in particular in NKT-275 (‘Newmarket’) transistors.”¹⁰ The authors’ reference to cryptic component codes and parenthetical insider jargon marks a specialist knowledge that transcends most consumers’ general ignorance of how their electronic devices work. On the contrary, Bowers and Yaremchuk magnify their attention to componentry, inviting their readers to join their rhapsodic intoxication with what lies beneath the proverbial “black box”: “So let your favorite things be components … Let components themselves be your first love.”¹¹ Nowhere is this component of fetishism more prevalent than in Fuzz Face culture.

Released by Arbiter Music in late 1966, and most notably used by Jimi Hendrix, the Fuzz Face is built around the circular metal base of a microphone stand. The pedal gets its name from its anthropomorphic control layout: its two knobs, single footswitch, and curved label imply the eyes, nose, and smiling mouth of a human face. Beneath its grinning enclosure, the Fuzz Face’s circuit is relatively simple, employing only a handful of components: four resistors, three capacitors, two transistors, and two potentiometers. As such, the pedal quickly became an ideal platform for modification and experimentation. Technician Roger Mayer famously modified Hendrix’s personal Fuzz Face pedals, experimenting with different transistors for their unique sonic properties. Because its circuit is so sparse, each component takes on heightened importance for guitarists who can hold highly niche preferences for the most esoteric details about their Fuzz Face circuits. Guitar Player magazine has notoriously trumpeted that guitarist and tone connoisseur Eric Johnson “can hear the difference when he changes the brand of batteries in his [Fuzz Face].”¹²

With so few components contributing to its sound, guitarists claim (whether rightly or not) that they can discern and name even minor modifications to a Fuzz Face circuit. As a special issue of Guitarist magazine dedicated to effects pedals explains:

That minor component changes are meaningful and intelligible to listeners marks a change from Keith Richards’ use of fuzz. Whereas Richards used fuzz to index another instrument, later guitarists used fuzz as a means of controlling sound itself. By learning to aurally distinguish between silicon and germanium diodes, for example, in otherwise identical circuits, guitarists have concentrated their ear training practices all the way down to the atomic level of tone.

Following the fuzz craze of the late 1960s, guitarists sought out more amp-like flavors of distortion in the 1970s, culminating in the popularization of so-called overdrive pedals. Whereas fuzz pedals created thick distorted sounds within the pedal’s circuitry, overdrive pedals can increase a guitar’s volume before it hits a tube amplifier, causing the distortion to be produced in the amplifier as well as the pedal. The resulting overdriven sound is meant to mimic the sounds of a loud tube amplifier. Among the many overdrive pedals created since the 1970s, the most popular, most copied, and most influential is the aptly named Tube Screamer, designed by Susumu Tamura for Maxon in 1979 and soon after distributed by Ibanez. A product of Japan’s booming electronics industry, the Tube Screamer has been mass-produced in large quantities since its debut and sold at a relatively affordable price point. Accordingly, Ibanez continues to sell upwards of 10,000 Tube Screamers a year, and the pedal has been a popular “first pedal” for hundreds of thousands of beginner guitarists embarking on their gear journeys.¹⁴ Yet, despite its populist circulation, the Tube Screamer has been a staple within many professional guitarists’ rigs, popularized by blues rock guitarists Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Johnson, and John Mayer, who all count the pedal as a core component of their overdriven guitar tones.

Delay

Many years before guitarists began experimenting with overdriven guitar tones, the earliest non-pedal effects available to guitarists were reverb and delay units. Time-based effects, as they are called, have figured prominently in the sound of recorded popular music, but until the late 1940s, they were initially restricted to use in recording studios. Many studios incorporated ambient “room sound” into their recordings via echo chambers—reverberant rooms into which the recording would be played, and the echoes recorded and mixed back into the production.¹⁵ In the late 1940s, jazz guitarist Les Paul devised a novel recording technique for producing artificial echo effects using magnetic tape.¹⁶ The reel-to-reel tape machines, then standard for recording audio, contained one head for recording and one for playback. Due to the physical distance between the two heads, any sounds captured by the recording head would play back after a short delay. When mixed with the original dry signal, this delayed signal created the illusion of an echo. By varying the tape speed and/or the distance between the recording and playback heads, the delay time could be made longer or shorter.

In the wake of Les Paul’s hit record, “How High the Moon” (1951), which features a rapid echo to add a subtle sense of space to the recording, tape delay machines became a popular fixture in recording studios and electric guitar rigs alike. The “slapback” echo produced by short delay times became an integral component of the early rock ’n’ roll sound in the mid 1950s. On early Elvis Presley recordings, like his 1955 hit “Mystery Train,” lead guitarist Scotty Moore can be heard using an EchoSonic amplifier with built-in tape delay, designed by legendary engineer Ray Butts, for his signature slapback echo. Though the EchoSonic has been called the “holy grail” of the rockabilly sound, Butts produced fewer than eighty amplifiers. Tape delay reached the masses in the early 1960s when Maestro released their widely influential Echoplex standalone tape delay machine, designed by Mike Battle and based on Butts’ original design. The Echoplex remains one of the most sought-after guitar effects, having been used on countless recordings by some of rock’s biggest musicians, including Eddie Van Halen (“Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love,” 1978), The Police’s Andy Summers (“Walking on the Moon,” 1979), and Eric Johnson (“Cliffs of Dover,” 1990).

Queen guitarist and famous tinkerer Brian May modified his Echoplex to produce a small number of long repeats with which he would harmonize, building layered canon-like harmonies similar to Les Paul’s sound-on-sound technique. Most clearly illustrated on the unaccompanied guitar interlude on Queen’s “Brighton Rock” (1974), May’s multipart self-harmonizing trick became a staple of his unaccompanied guitar solos during Queen’s live concerts (see “Brighton Rock Solo” from Queen’s many live recordings).¹⁷ During these performances, May’s “dry” guitar signal and the echoes are spatially separated in the stereo mix, so it is easy to distinguish between the notes he plays and those repeated by the Echoplex. Mirroring the evolution of fuzz described above, earlier uses of artificial echo sought to convincingly replicate existing sounds, namely reverberant room sounds. However, in May’s multipart harmonies, the tape delay becomes an instrument in its own right.

While tape delays remain highly coveted to this day, they prove impractical for most guitarists’ needs. Because they require a mechanical motor to spin a spool of magnetic tape, they are physically bulky (making them difficult to transport) and need frequent servicing to remain operable. Likewise, the tape can become crinkled, producing a fluttering, stuttered echo, and the fidelity of the repeats can degrade with repeated use, becoming darker and more distorted. In 1969, Philips Research Labs developed a new solid-state technology that would facilitate the development of pedal-sized delay effects that required no moving parts. The BBD is a small integrated circuit consisting of several hundred stages of capacitors and transistors. At each stage, a charge is momentarily stored in the capacitor, while the transistor acts as a gate, permitting the charge to progress to the next capacitor after a fixed amount of time, determined by an internal clock. With each “tick” of the clock, every other stage of the BBD circuit is either turned “on” or “off.” When on, the charge can pass. Because every other stage is off, the charge can only move one stage at a time, therefore regulating the rate at which the signal moves through the circuit. By conducting the voltage more slowly, the audio signal is effectively “delayed” for a period of time. Although these operations occur over fractions of a second, by stacking several hundred stages in series, the analog signal can be delayed up to 600 milliseconds or so. When this delayed signal is wired in parallel with the “dry” guitar signal, an echo effect is achieved.

With this newly available BBD technology, several manufacturers developed compact delay pedals in the early 1970s, including MXR and Electro-Harmonix. The latter’s Deluxe Memory Man (DMM), designed by Howard Davis in 1976, stands as the pinnacle of analog delay design. Utilizing the capabilities of BBD technology, the DMM produces all-analog repeats while also modulating the pitch of the repeats to create a warbly wash, similar to the fluctuations in pitch that occur with a tape echo. By imitating the warbly repeats of an old and crinkled tape machine, analog delay pedals retain what was once an unintended bug from an older technology and frame it as a desirable feature, much like how guitarists learned to adopt the unintended distortion of their tube amplifiers. This pattern continues for contemporary digital delay pedals, whose repeats can perfectly replicate an original signal. However, because listeners have become accustomed to hearing dark and warbly repeats, a pristine digital delay can be a bit uncanny. As such, some of the most popular digital delay pedals created today are accurate emulations of tape and analog delay units—bugs and all. That guitarists obsess over the quality of their echo repeats—whether they are dark and murky, or bright and pristine—is further testament to their gradually intensifying focus on the quality of sound itself.

Shortly after its release, U2’s The Edge became an early adopter of the DMM and developed his signature playing style around the pedal’s rhythmic affordances. Whereas earlier guitarists had favored quiet repeats that could sit unobtrusively beneath a main guitar part to produce a sense of space, The Edge recognized that he could use the pedal’s delayed repeats in the foreground as melodic and rhythmic complements to his undelayed guitar signal, an extension of Brian May’s self-harmonizing technique. In a scene from the 2008 documentary film, It Might Get Loud, The Edge describes how the DMM’s delayed repeats inspired him to explore new approaches to playing the electric guitar:

Using the DMM, The Edge composed riffs that exploited the pedal’s delayed repeats to create lines that would be otherwise unplayable.

On U2’s first album, Boy (1980), The Edge uses the DMM throughout, but the seeds of his idiosyncratic playing style are perhaps best illustrated by the opening riff to the song “The Electric Co.” With the DMM’s repeats set to the equivalent of a dotted eighth-note rhythm, The Edge plays a stream of eighth notes (“1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and … ”). With a dotted eighth delay, the two signals combine to create a steady stream of sixteenth notes (“1 e and uh 2 e and uh 3 e and uh 4 e and uh … ”). However, more than simply doubling the rhythm, the resulting sixteenth-note line is created by staggered repetitions of already played notes, producing a distinctive pattern alternating between played and repeated notes. This pattern would not only be difficult to play without a dotted eighth delay, but by playing eighth notes, each adjacent note can sustain and cascade over one another, a sound only achievable through delay. As Table 7.1 shows, the delayed repeats occupy the silence between the eighth notes played by The Edge, rendering his syncopated rhythm only playable with a delay pedal. Without the DMM, half of the riff’s notes would be missing. This delay trick became a favorite technique for The Edge and the foundation for subsequent U2 hits, especially “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Bad” from the band’s 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire; and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and the jangly guitar parts on “Where the Streets Have No Name” from Joshua Tree (1987).

Modulation

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the fundamental sound of the electric guitar changed, wedging the gap between the acoustic and electric guitar even further. Modulation effects in particular have permitted guitarists to alter their tone such that they can produce un-guitar-like sounds. The term “modulation” refers to an impossibly broad swath of technologies and sounds, making it difficult to define in brief, though simply, many modulation effects involve varying a guitar’s frequency or pitch in some way. As with delay, modulation effects began as mechanical standalone options that were later miniaturized and expanded upon with new BBD technologies.

Pedal-Based Music

Expanding on the approaches described above, wherein guitarists utilize effect pedals as compositional tools to create riffs and playing techniques, more recently, entirely new genres of music have emerged based on the integral use of effect pedals. As early as the late 1980s, groups such as My Bloody Valentine chained multiple effect pedals together to create lush walls of sound that pushed the electric guitar into uncharted territory. On their 1991 recording “Only Shallow,” guitarist Kevin Shields’ distinctive pedal-forward style can be heard on the heavily effected guitar melody in the song’s opening section. The “shoegaze” style, which My Bloody Valentine forged, is recognized as among the first genres of music to be defined almost exclusively by the liberal use of effect pedals.¹⁹ Many shoegaze guitarists construct their rigs around elaborate pedalboards consisting of dozens of different effects. In concert, these pedalboards can physically take up much of the stage floor, generating a visual spectacle of technical excess matched only by the equally over-the-top sonic textures created by said pedalboards.

Since the late 2010s, ambient and loop-based genres of music have developed around the idea of using a pedalboard as an instrument in its own right. In addition to the fuzz, delay, and modulation pedals described so far, ambient musicians have also favored newer digital “granular” and “micro” loopers, which can chop up and rearrange an audio sample into randomly generated combinations. Whereas traditional looping pedals faithfully reproduce an exact copy of a recorded audio sample, granular and micro loopers employ digital algorithms to alter the timbre, pitch, rhythm, and sequence of notes inputted by the player, creating new melodic sequences that are distinct from what the musician played. For this reason, Robert Strachan has described this class of pedals as “textural” effects, because they affect not only timbre but rather, “the effects pedal is a sounding agent in itself and has the ability to affect all of the parameters (such as timbre, melody, harmony, and time) that we find musically meaningful.”²⁰

This approach to looping can be heard on “Habit Tapes,” Volumes 1 and 2 (2022), two mixtapes curated by pedal maker Chase Bliss (whose Mood, Habit, and Blooper pedals are all central to this emerging genre) to show off the musical capabilities of their Habit pedal.²¹ They describe the Habit as follows:

Through granular and micro looping, the pedalboard becomes a kind of coauthor, operating with its own degree of agency, playing back new melodies and rhythms generated from a provided sample. Using a guitar, synthesizer, violin, bass, harp, etc. to generate a short sample on a looper pedal, players then send the audio loop to assorted effects on their pedalboard, often physically setting their instrument aside to focus on twisting knobs and engaging switches. Within this new performance landscape, musicians are encouraged to play the pedal, rather than the guitar. The knobs and switches on the pedal’s interface become a dominant playing surface, equal to (or at times more important than) the guitar’s fretboard. Here, the guitar behaves like a tone generator for a modular synthesizer, merely providing pitch content for subsequent stages of signal processing.

This shift in performance practice is growing in popularity, and since 2020, numerous granular/micro loopers and ambient pedals have made Reverb.com’s lists of best-selling effect pedals, representing a sea change among gear consumers.²³ Yet, despite the centrality of effect pedals in contemporary guitar practice, there persists among certain guitarists a belief that an over-reliance on technology is anathema to authentic musical performance. Embracing long-standing tropes about technology’s corrupting influence, some critics position effect pedal use and music making as two separate activities, suggesting that those guitarists preoccupied with chasing sound do so at the expense of “actually playing” their instrument. Indeed, as Jan-Peter Herbst and Jonas Menze describe in their study of “Gear Acquisition Syndrome,” for many musicians, “thinking about gear and finding strategies to improve one’s rig can take precedence over practising and playing, to a point when dealing with equipment becomes more important than making music.”²⁴ However, in light of the development of pedal-based musical styles, I suggest that the distinction between dealing with equipment and making music is becoming increasingly blurred.

Musicologist Mike D’Errico highlights a gradual shift taking place in “the structure of media design” from linear narrative to exploration. On the internet, for example, users are encouraged to follow distractions onto interlinked pages, and with maximalist feature-heavy software interfaces, “musicians explore the interface rather than use it for specific purposes or intentions.”²⁵ Likewise, a guitarist’s pedalboard behaves like a networked interface to be explored, rather than used. Beyond simply dialing in a sound and then making music, guitarists can now embrace distractions and find themselves lost in the endless sonic possibilities afforded by their equipment. Chase Bliss, for example, describe their Mood pedal as “a musical chemistry set,” inviting users to “transfer, combine, and get lost.”²⁶ Indeed, with many contemporary effect pedals, the goal, then, is not to find a sound for the subsequent creation of music, but rather to explore sound itself, as it is embodied in gear and hardware interfaces.

Conclusion

Since the mid 1960s, stompboxes have been ubiquitous tone-sculpting tools among electric guitar players across all styles, generations, and backgrounds. On live performance stages, in recording studios, and even in amateur bedroom practice sessions, effect pedals figure prominently in the everyday musical practices of electric guitarists who can spend hours at a time linking multiple effect pedals together and twisting knobs to find the elusive sounds in their heads. As opposed to traditional practice routines, through which a player might familiarize themselves with scales, melodies, or rhythmic gestures, practices based around effect pedals typically pursue a control over sound itself. As electric guitar historian Dave Hunter describes, the pleasures associated with a good sound can be somewhat hypnotic: “With truly outstanding guitar tone at my fingertips, I am capable of sitting for hours on end playing the same simple chords and riffs, just feeding off the way that the multidimensionality of the sound triggers whatever pleasure mechanism it is that exists within the human sense of hearing.”²⁷

What guitarists know and value about tone is often personal, subjective, sensual, even irrational. Whereas pitch, melody, and associated musical parameters invite logical contemplation, tone and timbre privilege the act of listening, of being present with sound. To know something about tone is to feel something in the complex encounters between body, sound, and technology.

Through their use of various sound-shaping tools, electric guitarists have learned how to listen, and what to listen for. By and large, the favorite of these tools for contemporary electric guitarists has been the effect pedal. In this sense, they are exemplary “instruments of theory,” which produce not only musical sounds, but also knowledge about musical sounds.²⁸ Certain musical instruments afford certain ways of thinking about music more than others. But whereas the piano keyboard, for example, readily affords demonstrations of harmony and voice leading, I suggest that effect pedals can generate knowledge about tone and timbre. With knobs for tweaking parameters of an instrument’s tone, effect pedals permit guitarists to explore sound itself and produce knowledge about it, much like a modular synthesizer might work for a keyboard player. With these affordances, electric guitarists have utilized effect pedals to develop new approaches to musical performance and composition that foreground sound itself.

As I have shown in this chapter, effect pedals have played an important role in how electric guitarists have come to understand sound itself as a controllable entity. From the earliest available fuzz pedals to the latest digital loopers, guitarists’ orientation toward sound has been influenced by the technologies through which they can shape and control it. Since the 1960s, effect pedals have been an integral technology in many electric guitarists’ creative practices. In this sense, guitarists approach effect pedals as instruments in their own right. The sounds these pedals produce are not mere byproducts of musical performance, but rather, for many guitarists, the sound of a particular pedal is, in fact, constitutive of their musical identity.