The New Rock Guitar Manifesto
How design affects music
When the first solid-body electric guitars and basses went into production around 1950, they were a revolution. Not just in sound, but in their design. Their shape and look were influenced strongly by the trends in Industrial Design of that generation. There is a good reason why a late 1950’s Stratocaster or Les Paul look so right next to a 57 Chevy Nomad; the designers of both were drawing from the same artistic well. Along with their amplifiers, these guitars had such a new sound and such a different image, that we almost cannot imagine Rock happening without their invention. Yes, there were brilliant songwriters and performers involved in the birth of rock, but without the new instruments, rock would have been very different, if it had happened at all.
Despite the fact that we live in the best of times to buy a great guitar (often at surprisingly cheap prices) there is something missing. Rock is becoming a period style, like 1950’s Rock n’ Roll has become. Today, to many people, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, and even Little Richard seem quaint and charming, like Dixieland or Swing. No one expects there to be new music in that style that will reach millions of people.
Baby Boomers have a hard time getting their minds around this happening to say, The Jefferson Airplane, or maybe The Beatles or the Stones. We want to believe that the music of our time is ageless; continually being renewed and remade as a way for each generation to express itself. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions in each decade, Rock is becoming quaint despite itself. Is it a lack of talent? I don’t think so. Perhaps Rock is an art form that has run its course?
I think design is part of the problem.
Design is the art you use every day. It is the way your computer looks and works, it is the shape, color, and texture of your car, your clothes, your toaster, your iPod, and your Stratocaster. Despite the fact that we live in an incredibly fertile time for industrial design, I believe that great Design has gone missing in current guitars. The Les Pauls, the Stratocasters, the Teles, SG’s, and 335’s are such great designs, but is there nowhere else to take this art of guitar design?
Yes, this could simply be the maturity of an instrument. After all, hundreds of years ago, violin design was experimented with too until the final shape and ideal sound was settled on and since then what defines a violin, is pretty much fixed in place. However, all electric instruments are subject to much more change and innovation than are acoustic instruments. Look at the change in electronic keyboards compared to acoustic pianos since the 1950’s and you can see what I mean. I think there is much more development of electric guitars available to us, both in their sound and also in their visual design.
I took a good look around on the Web, using Harmony Central and other link databases to find all the guitar builders I could find. I especially looked for the small, independent shops that can build anything they want. I saw lovely work from builders large and small. People like PRS, Terry McInturff, Tom Anderson, Don Grosh, and many others are building guitars of a quality that we only dreamed of in 1970, but they are still mostly variations on the same older themes. The genuinely new and different styles, and there were a few, were generally ugly.
Back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s there was some demand expressed, at least by the guitar magazines, for something different from the Strat/Tele and Les Paul/SG/335 tradition and designers tried to come up with something different for a while. Some, such as Parker and Steinberger, mostly succeeded. Today, it looks more and more like we have given up and left contemporary Design out of the guitar-building process pretty much completely. Today, guitars are treated either as jewelry, with breathtaking finishes, gorgeous quilted and flamed woods and gleaming metalwork on the same tired shapes, or as carefully created, glowing amber, perfectly-aged dream guitars from 1959.
I think this is helping to move Rock into the nursing home, along with its founders.
Is there room for improvement in electric guitars? Could new and innovative instruments help bring about great new music as it did in the 1950’s? I believe the answer to both questions is yes.
I would like to call on guitar builders to employ some of these brilliant young Industrial Design graduates to renew and revitalize our instruments. If they can evolve the Honda Accords of 1978 into the ones we drive today, I suspect that great designers can do the same for guitars if we give them a chance. Remember, when the Stratocaster was designed, De Sotos were contemporary! Compare a De Soto from the 1950’s to a new BMW 6-series coupe or a 1957 Zenith Royal 500 radio to an iPod and you can see how long ago guitar companies stopped caring about innovative design.
It’s our fault. We don’t ask them for something new. We don’t ask for innovation. So, we do not get it. No surprise there; they must bring us what we will pay for if they are to stay in business. Rock guitar design has become rigidly stylized and predictable, and we caused it. Ever met a singer who would not even try a 400.00 German mic because she wanted a “good ole SM58”? It’s like that. This rigidity is not the spirit that founded either companies like Fender or inspired musicians like Buddy Holly. Today, we really cannot understand Buddy’s musical vision in his own time, but we can buy a near-perfect copy of his Stratocaster. You can buy one of the books about the gear that the Beatles used at each stage in their career, and you can go buy reproductions of those guitar and amps, but you cannot tap into the Beatles’ meaning in their own time; it’s become a period style. Memories.
But it’s more than that. Just put The Beatles or Buddy Holly, or Little Richard on the player, crank it up, and it still resonates, even with young people. Just as Bach and Handel still light up our minds when we hear them, so does Rubber Soul. If we are to make great music for our own time that moves people like that, we need something new to play it on. And I am not talking simply about the look, although that is important. We also need to expand Design into the next generation of sounds.
Here’s some areas in guitar tonal design where I think we are 30 years overdue for growth.
1. True intonation. Guitars do not play in tune. Buzz Feiten has been promoting this for years now and his approach makes a real difference, but we still need truly intonatable nuts up at the headstock. Want to see something really scary? Tune your high E to perfection (using a good chromatic tuner), now fret the F at the first fret. It’s usually way off. If it isn’t, try the B, and so forth. You will find strings that are not intonated at the nut. This inaccurate intonation sounds awful and there is no fix for it at the other end of the string (the bridge). It must be fixed at the nut, by making each string length adjustable right at that point so the open and fretted notes are both in tune. No fixed, pre-compensated nut will really solve this problem for the majority of users any more than a fixed bridge will. You need to get the intonation just right. When you do, not only do you sound a lot better, but you can use chords and open/closed strings in new ways that sound very good. This inspires the writing of new music, and everyone knows how much we need that.
2. Almost all electric guitar bridges are complete junk. Yes, there are a couple of truly precise, well-engineered bridges out there, but not many. Tone Pros has raised the bar with their very solid, locked-down bridges and tailpieces. They improve your sound quite a bit to my ear at least. Yet, even with them, the precision really isn’t there that I want to see. Metals have tonal qualities just like wood, and there is even a correct amount of metal to use to get the tone you are looking for. Most of the time, the parts of a guitar bridge are too large, are made of bad-sounding metals, are not precision-machined or cast, and do not fit together tightly and accurately enough to really enhance the tone of a guitar. Look at your eye glasses, look at a Surefire flashlight, examine the innards of a computer hard drive, look at the machining and design quality of a modern car engine, and you can see how far behind guitar bridges are. I think there are major improvements in tone to be found by designing a very light, extremely precise yet rigid new guitar bridge made of a metal that truly complements the tone of a guitar rather than deadening it or adding unattractive overtones to it.
3. I was putting the neck back on one of my guitars one day (a Tom Anderson strat-style from 1987) and I overdid the torque, stripping out the wood in the neck. The traditional fix for this is to drill out the neck and put a slug of rock maple in there and re-drill the hole. Instead, I tried something different. I had a luthier friend put steel (not brass!) inserts in the neck and got a really nice stainless steel neck plate, and changed over to machine instead of wood screws. I was really worried that I had messed up the sound of a great guitar, but when we put the whole thing together, it actually sounded quite a bit better. I don’t know if it’s the metal in the neck, or simply the extra tightness in the neck joint I could now achieve, but the guitar sounded quite a bit better. More clarity and a stronger basic tone. It was like my guitar, but more so. I was so impressed that I had the inserts and machine screws put in 2 other of my guitars and the results were the same. Very light guitars, with extremely rigid neck/body joints. Amazing tone! My luthier friend, Dan Altilio, thinks the neck/body joint in these guitars is firmer and more rigid than even with a glued-in set-neck guitar, and I agree.
4. Chambering. Many guitar makers are offering chambered versions of their instruments. You should try one. Many electric guitars simply have more wood than they need to speak clearly and musically. I discovered this by accident because I have tried so many different pickups in my guitars that I ended up with one big rout from below the neck almost to the bridge. Every time I took out more wood to fit in another pickup, the guitar sounded better. Dan told me that they noticed the same thing when they would do a big “universal rout” when he was at DiMarzio years ago. Many builders know about this. Try the instruments they have developed with this knowledge. You will be surprised.
5. Pickups. As with guitars, we are in the best of times for pickups. Yes, many pickup guys are making “vintage style” pickups, but there have been improvements made as well. Chat up some of these guys and try out some of their new ideas instead of going for the “good ole” standards. Pickups are your guitar’s microphone. Don’t limit yourself.
6. Don’t listen to the naysayers, Stainless Steel frets sound wonderful and don’t lose their perfect intonation and clarity for years and years.
As far as the way guitars look, personally, personally I don’t care if I never see another fabulous ‘burst, single-cut, double-cut, or strat relic for as long as I live. Enough already.
Remember Andreas Guitars? Young industrial-design guy from Austria. He was at NAMM year after year with the only truly new-looking (yet attractive) guitars I have seen in a long time. His design virtues were ones of using new shapes and textures themselves as design elements along with contemporary colors and the contrast between satin and shiny surfaces. Pretty much every other guitar at NAMM was simply new colors and ever more ornate wood treatments of the old standbys (with of course, lots of skull and nudie paint jobs), and then you round a corner and here was Andreas with something truly new. It didn’t last of course. We all bought a ‘burst or another strat.
Now I do not care whether any individual liked Andreas’ guitars or didn’t. My point is that there must be something out there you will like, that is not an old standby. Where are they?
We are not asking for them so they don’t exist.
Worse, when someone builds them, we don’t buy them.
I am surely not the only player out there who finds almost all these admittedly really great guitars out there today to be boring and repetitive. I am certain that there are Design types who could change this if they could get a foot in the door of our psyches.
Unless, of course, Rock is all just a period style.
In which case, there will be no great new rock for our grandkids to grow up with. And that would be a real shame.
I don’t know about you, but Classic Rock bores me to tears. There are about 100 songs that it would take about 250 years for me to enjoy hearing again, yet the guitars these songs were made with cannot be improved upon? Of course they can.
We need new guitars to make new music with!
When the first solid-body electric guitars and basses went into production around 1950, they were a revolution. Not just in sound, but in their design. Their shape and look were influenced strongly by the trends in Industrial Design of that generation. There is a good reason why a late 1950’s Stratocaster or Les Paul look so right next to a 57 Chevy Nomad; the designers of both were drawing from the same artistic well. Along with their amplifiers, these guitars had such a new sound and such a different image, that we almost cannot imagine Rock happening without their invention. Yes, there were brilliant songwriters and performers involved in the birth of rock, but without the new instruments, rock would have been very different, if it had happened at all.
Despite the fact that we live in the best of times to buy a great guitar (often at surprisingly cheap prices) there is something missing. Rock is becoming a period style, like 1950’s Rock n’ Roll has become. Today, to many people, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, and even Little Richard seem quaint and charming, like Dixieland or Swing. No one expects there to be new music in that style that will reach millions of people.
Baby Boomers have a hard time getting their minds around this happening to say, The Jefferson Airplane, or maybe The Beatles or the Stones. We want to believe that the music of our time is ageless; continually being renewed and remade as a way for each generation to express itself. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions in each decade, Rock is becoming quaint despite itself. Is it a lack of talent? I don’t think so. Perhaps Rock is an art form that has run its course?
I think design is part of the problem.
Design is the art you use every day. It is the way your computer looks and works, it is the shape, color, and texture of your car, your clothes, your toaster, your iPod, and your Stratocaster. Despite the fact that we live in an incredibly fertile time for industrial design, I believe that great Design has gone missing in current guitars. The Les Pauls, the Stratocasters, the Teles, SG’s, and 335’s are such great designs, but is there nowhere else to take this art of guitar design?
Yes, this could simply be the maturity of an instrument. After all, hundreds of years ago, violin design was experimented with too until the final shape and ideal sound was settled on and since then what defines a violin, is pretty much fixed in place. However, all electric instruments are subject to much more change and innovation than are acoustic instruments. Look at the change in electronic keyboards compared to acoustic pianos since the 1950’s and you can see what I mean. I think there is much more development of electric guitars available to us, both in their sound and also in their visual design.
I took a good look around on the Web, using Harmony Central and other link databases to find all the guitar builders I could find. I especially looked for the small, independent shops that can build anything they want. I saw lovely work from builders large and small. People like PRS, Terry McInturff, Tom Anderson, Don Grosh, and many others are building guitars of a quality that we only dreamed of in 1970, but they are still mostly variations on the same older themes. The genuinely new and different styles, and there were a few, were generally ugly.
Back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s there was some demand expressed, at least by the guitar magazines, for something different from the Strat/Tele and Les Paul/SG/335 tradition and designers tried to come up with something different for a while. Some, such as Parker and Steinberger, mostly succeeded. Today, it looks more and more like we have given up and left contemporary Design out of the guitar-building process pretty much completely. Today, guitars are treated either as jewelry, with breathtaking finishes, gorgeous quilted and flamed woods and gleaming metalwork on the same tired shapes, or as carefully created, glowing amber, perfectly-aged dream guitars from 1959.
I think this is helping to move Rock into the nursing home, along with its founders.
Is there room for improvement in electric guitars? Could new and innovative instruments help bring about great new music as it did in the 1950’s? I believe the answer to both questions is yes.
I would like to call on guitar builders to employ some of these brilliant young Industrial Design graduates to renew and revitalize our instruments. If they can evolve the Honda Accords of 1978 into the ones we drive today, I suspect that great designers can do the same for guitars if we give them a chance. Remember, when the Stratocaster was designed, De Sotos were contemporary! Compare a De Soto from the 1950’s to a new BMW 6-series coupe or a 1957 Zenith Royal 500 radio to an iPod and you can see how long ago guitar companies stopped caring about innovative design.
It’s our fault. We don’t ask them for something new. We don’t ask for innovation. So, we do not get it. No surprise there; they must bring us what we will pay for if they are to stay in business. Rock guitar design has become rigidly stylized and predictable, and we caused it. Ever met a singer who would not even try a 400.00 German mic because she wanted a “good ole SM58”? It’s like that. This rigidity is not the spirit that founded either companies like Fender or inspired musicians like Buddy Holly. Today, we really cannot understand Buddy’s musical vision in his own time, but we can buy a near-perfect copy of his Stratocaster. You can buy one of the books about the gear that the Beatles used at each stage in their career, and you can go buy reproductions of those guitar and amps, but you cannot tap into the Beatles’ meaning in their own time; it’s become a period style. Memories.
But it’s more than that. Just put The Beatles or Buddy Holly, or Little Richard on the player, crank it up, and it still resonates, even with young people. Just as Bach and Handel still light up our minds when we hear them, so does Rubber Soul. If we are to make great music for our own time that moves people like that, we need something new to play it on. And I am not talking simply about the look, although that is important. We also need to expand Design into the next generation of sounds.
Here’s some areas in guitar tonal design where I think we are 30 years overdue for growth.
1. True intonation. Guitars do not play in tune. Buzz Feiten has been promoting this for years now and his approach makes a real difference, but we still need truly intonatable nuts up at the headstock. Want to see something really scary? Tune your high E to perfection (using a good chromatic tuner), now fret the F at the first fret. It’s usually way off. If it isn’t, try the B, and so forth. You will find strings that are not intonated at the nut. This inaccurate intonation sounds awful and there is no fix for it at the other end of the string (the bridge). It must be fixed at the nut, by making each string length adjustable right at that point so the open and fretted notes are both in tune. No fixed, pre-compensated nut will really solve this problem for the majority of users any more than a fixed bridge will. You need to get the intonation just right. When you do, not only do you sound a lot better, but you can use chords and open/closed strings in new ways that sound very good. This inspires the writing of new music, and everyone knows how much we need that.
2. Almost all electric guitar bridges are complete junk. Yes, there are a couple of truly precise, well-engineered bridges out there, but not many. Tone Pros has raised the bar with their very solid, locked-down bridges and tailpieces. They improve your sound quite a bit to my ear at least. Yet, even with them, the precision really isn’t there that I want to see. Metals have tonal qualities just like wood, and there is even a correct amount of metal to use to get the tone you are looking for. Most of the time, the parts of a guitar bridge are too large, are made of bad-sounding metals, are not precision-machined or cast, and do not fit together tightly and accurately enough to really enhance the tone of a guitar. Look at your eye glasses, look at a Surefire flashlight, examine the innards of a computer hard drive, look at the machining and design quality of a modern car engine, and you can see how far behind guitar bridges are. I think there are major improvements in tone to be found by designing a very light, extremely precise yet rigid new guitar bridge made of a metal that truly complements the tone of a guitar rather than deadening it or adding unattractive overtones to it.
3. I was putting the neck back on one of my guitars one day (a Tom Anderson strat-style from 1987) and I overdid the torque, stripping out the wood in the neck. The traditional fix for this is to drill out the neck and put a slug of rock maple in there and re-drill the hole. Instead, I tried something different. I had a luthier friend put steel (not brass!) inserts in the neck and got a really nice stainless steel neck plate, and changed over to machine instead of wood screws. I was really worried that I had messed up the sound of a great guitar, but when we put the whole thing together, it actually sounded quite a bit better. I don’t know if it’s the metal in the neck, or simply the extra tightness in the neck joint I could now achieve, but the guitar sounded quite a bit better. More clarity and a stronger basic tone. It was like my guitar, but more so. I was so impressed that I had the inserts and machine screws put in 2 other of my guitars and the results were the same. Very light guitars, with extremely rigid neck/body joints. Amazing tone! My luthier friend, Dan Altilio, thinks the neck/body joint in these guitars is firmer and more rigid than even with a glued-in set-neck guitar, and I agree.
4. Chambering. Many guitar makers are offering chambered versions of their instruments. You should try one. Many electric guitars simply have more wood than they need to speak clearly and musically. I discovered this by accident because I have tried so many different pickups in my guitars that I ended up with one big rout from below the neck almost to the bridge. Every time I took out more wood to fit in another pickup, the guitar sounded better. Dan told me that they noticed the same thing when they would do a big “universal rout” when he was at DiMarzio years ago. Many builders know about this. Try the instruments they have developed with this knowledge. You will be surprised.
5. Pickups. As with guitars, we are in the best of times for pickups. Yes, many pickup guys are making “vintage style” pickups, but there have been improvements made as well. Chat up some of these guys and try out some of their new ideas instead of going for the “good ole” standards. Pickups are your guitar’s microphone. Don’t limit yourself.
6. Don’t listen to the naysayers, Stainless Steel frets sound wonderful and don’t lose their perfect intonation and clarity for years and years.
As far as the way guitars look, personally, personally I don’t care if I never see another fabulous ‘burst, single-cut, double-cut, or strat relic for as long as I live. Enough already.
Remember Andreas Guitars? Young industrial-design guy from Austria. He was at NAMM year after year with the only truly new-looking (yet attractive) guitars I have seen in a long time. His design virtues were ones of using new shapes and textures themselves as design elements along with contemporary colors and the contrast between satin and shiny surfaces. Pretty much every other guitar at NAMM was simply new colors and ever more ornate wood treatments of the old standbys (with of course, lots of skull and nudie paint jobs), and then you round a corner and here was Andreas with something truly new. It didn’t last of course. We all bought a ‘burst or another strat.
Now I do not care whether any individual liked Andreas’ guitars or didn’t. My point is that there must be something out there you will like, that is not an old standby. Where are they?
We are not asking for them so they don’t exist.
Worse, when someone builds them, we don’t buy them.
I am surely not the only player out there who finds almost all these admittedly really great guitars out there today to be boring and repetitive. I am certain that there are Design types who could change this if they could get a foot in the door of our psyches.
Unless, of course, Rock is all just a period style.
In which case, there will be no great new rock for our grandkids to grow up with. And that would be a real shame.
I don’t know about you, but Classic Rock bores me to tears. There are about 100 songs that it would take about 250 years for me to enjoy hearing again, yet the guitars these songs were made with cannot be improved upon? Of course they can.
We need new guitars to make new music with!
posted by DC at 2:25 PM
6 Comments:
Very nice article, Don. I'll be out looking for a new tailpiece for my ES335. Are you going to talk about acoustic guitars as well? If so, have you played a James Goodall acoustic guitar? If you haven't, you definetly should.
Gene Warren
Hi Gene!
I will check out a Goodall as soon as I can. (there goes my checkbook!) Hey, are you going to NAMM? If you are, we should have dinner when you are there.
Send me an email if you can make it.
best,
DC
Your precision-machined bridge is already being made by Steve Rowen of Pigtail Music. It is made of lightweight aluminum alloy in a wraparound design. Minimal inertia with maximum adjustability. Perhaps Steve could design the next-generation nut....
Carved guitar body shapes are very difficult to mass produce without CNC equipment, but there are a few builders exploring ergonomic designs. One of them is Vincent Guidroz of New Orleans Guitars. His designs could appeal to traditionalists as well as those looking for something unique. More radical still are the models from Pfifer Designs. Whether they are "ugly" or not is in the eye of the beholder. I find them to be beautiful.
Chambering in electric guitars is something that I personally appreciate, but I can accept that it doesn't work for all styles. Since we want musical diversity, perhaps it's best to leave room for the solidbody to continue as well.
Bill Lawrence makes excellent, innovative, noise-free pickups. AGI-Lace also have a number of innovative designs.
Something not brought up by your article at all is the materials used for guitar construction. Parker Guitars, Catalyst Instruments, and Modulus have all innovated in the use of composite materials. However, even sticking to wood itself it is surprising how few species have been explored for musical instrument making. I am personally disgruntled with the lack of softwoods in electrified instruments. Spruce, douglas fir, noble fir, hemlock, and cedar all have a place in building good acoustics, but very few builders choose them for electrics. The softwoods have inherently superior sound transfer characteristics, so why not use them? Douglas fir is strong and stiff enough to build a bass neck.
-Ben Furman
Hi Ben,
The Pigtail bridges look very interesting. I am glad he is doing them, but I would like to see a more radical, almost skeletonized approach using something besides aluminum, perhaps titanium. Still, I need to hear one of those. I hope he goes to NAMM.
Solidbodies, and chambered guitars are both here to stay, and I too would like to hear more types of wood used. I'll bet there are some cool sounds to be found there.
As far as composites go, I want to hear more. Every year there are more examples of guitars made from them, but so far I have been disappointed tone-wise. I suspect that will change. The design possibilites are simply too great to ignore these materials.
I took a look at the Phifier guitars. I bet they feel terrific to play, but I do not like the look. I think an industrial designer could help him refine the visuals. Not to be more traditional, but to work better visually. Just my .02.
Thanks for visiting.
DC
DC
I hear what your saying. Always loved those big finned bullet Caddilacs and Super Jumbo Guitars. I went with a remake of a classic with a Super Jumbo 200 with a Cutaway and a Super 400 Neck.
Ferringtons own design and a real player. On the subject of Guitars more Modern in their design approach I bought a guitar made by Stuart Spector. Stu brought forward thinking and precision design to Bass guitars in the seventies working with Ned Steinberger and turning things upside down with tonewoods, chambering, active electronics and Graphite reinforced neck thru designs.
Strange thing is after 30 years he is still making some of the finest instruments available. Many others followed his lead and that of his contemporaries so the designs don't always stand out as radical departures, we have gotten used to them and so the Tie dye caps are sneaking into the mix to pizzazz up what was once a radical departure.
Now Stuart has turned his attention to Guitars (once again) and on his own brought a newly refined approach to the Instrument.
Wrap around Bridge, Mahogany Body, Walnut capped, Maple integrated neck and chambered body. I asked Stuart to install a 59 type HB set from Peter Florance and the guitar most reminds me of a LP Junior that never goes out of tune. Its Body has a big Horn on the top upper bout that adds balance and grace to the Guitar and it as light as a feather.
Have you found anything that makes you feel the luthiers art is growing since you wrought the Manifesto ?
Viva Che Comrade
GrooVey RecOrds
I have not found anything really new in design in recent years. I know I am not alone, so I suspect it will happen.
thanks for visiting!
DC
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