GUITAR

The guitar is the quintessential blues instrument, hence this being the largest section. The earliest known form of acoustic guitar was from the 15th century, although it had eight strings, being made up of fours sets of two, and was sized more on the scale of a viola. The modern format was only created in the mid 19th Century with six strings and a larger body. Early blues guitar was based entirely on the acoustic and often these guitars would be home-made, cheap, or damaged. The inginuity of the players in trying to make a sound with these instruments led to the methods known today, with harsh finger picking, coarse strumming, and the sliding of objects up and down the fretboard.

The resonator guitar first appeared in the 1920's and was produced in an attempt to create a guitar capable of delivering higher volume levels in noisy venues or while playing with or as accompanyment. Inside the body is built a metal cone which acts like a speaker or megaphone cone amplifying the sound and sending a louder and more robust tone out into the air. These guitars are often used to symbolise the blues, they have a unique metalic tone and provide a beautifully raw and vibrant sound.

Microphones and amplifiers soon came into use and while they provided a part solution to the volume problem they brought many other problems with tone, feedback and clarity for mic'd guitars due to the resonance in their hollow bodies - still a common problem today. This led a young man called Les Paul to invent a solid bodied guitar with a built in pick up using similar technology to that used in the microphone. He managed to pursuade the Gibson guitar company to make the guitar and hence the Gibson Les Paul was born.

Leo Fender took the concept several stages further, first creating the bolt on neck which made mass manufacture possible and also made it easier to change the neck if damaged, or warped. Starting with the Esquire he then went on to produce the telecaster and finally the stratocaster which was honed to the demands of guitarists with a cutaway both below and above the neck, three pickups, a floating tremelo, and a more streamlined body. This remains the most copied guitar shape in the world and has changed little from the original created on the 1960's and is the style preferred by many electric blues players including Clapton, Hendrix, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.