Guitar
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Music and technology has always been intertwined and this statement can be illustrated by tracing the history of the guitar. From the time it was first discovered that a vibrating string tied over a wooden box could produced pleasant sounds, plucked instruments of the guitar family have existed (Tyler 33). The way a guitar produces sound already reflects technology itself. When a player plucks a string, the string vibrates and most of the energy is transferred to the soundbox via the bridge. Resonance in the soundbox and the radiation of the soundboard then amplify the weak sound of the string and carries it through the surrounding air. For centuries, guitar makers have worked on these principles to improve the quality of sound played by the instrument (Tyler 34). This essay aims to show how the interaction between technology and music had influenced the development of the much popularized and versatile electric guitar. The beginning will briefly illustrate the formation of the guitar by describing a few of its earliest ancestors, then the main focus will shift to how pressure from the musical community fusing with great technological advancements of the 20th century had resulted in the guitar of today.
Two of the earliest known ancestors of the modern guitar came from the 16th century, which includes the vihuela and the four-course guitar. Of the two, the four-course guitar most closely resembles the guitar of today. Because it was expensive to own a vihuela due to its meticulous construction by hands, the vihulea became an instrument of the aristocrats. On the other hand, the four-course guitar was easier to produce and was more economically to own making it more popular with the general public. You would hear it in the villages while the more refined vihuela was usually preferred in the courts. The vihuela with six courses and the four-course guitar were all played with strings tuned in pairs, each pair being called a course. Toward the end of the century, the addition of a fifth string gave the guitar a broader range and greater sound. The five-course guitar eventually replaced all other types (Tyler 36-37).
From the early 17th century to the 18th was not a very productive time for the guitar, yet it was during this period that an important advancement to the guitar took place. The guitar was first used purely as a strummed instrument. Its five courses, tuned in octaves, made it an ideal accompaniment to the popular songs and dances of the time (Grunfield 11). Gradually, it began to adopt its present method of stringing, by using single strings instead of the courses that had originally given plucked instruments their characteristics tone colors. The six-string guitar became extremely fashionable. Two great players in the early 19th century, Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani toured Europe and astounded audiences with their skill and brilliancy. However, they played on smaller guitars than what we are accustomed to nowadays. The vibrating string length was only about sixty centimeters. The methods of construction were also not sufficiently developed to allow the guitar to achieve its full potentiality of resonance and volume (Evans 15). Thus, the instrument would have remained in the backwaters of musical creativity if Antonio de Torres Jurado did not attempt to create a more expressive kind of guitar. He increased the depth of the instrument, giving it more sonority. He also altered the shape of its curvatures and increased the overall size of the guitar, ultimately producing a more mathematically accurate structure with a vibrating length of about sixty-five centimeters. This measurement is still regarded by craftsmen today as an ideal size for the instrument in terms of volume, tone production, and ease of playing (Evans 16). Torres used of available tools at the time to craft his guitars to such precision signify one of the early interaction between music and technology. The need to produce better music had led to the modification of the current instrument through new technology.
The development of the steel-string acoustic guitar and the electric guitar greatly symbolizes the technological advancements that have shaped the instrument. The use of steel strings instead of the nylon ones, used by the classical guitars, brings about a fundamental change in the sounds of the guitar. Steel strings produce a loud volume, and a twanging and jangling tone. The reason is that steel strings are very true and efficient vibrators, whereas a nylon string only produces a note with about six to ten overtones. A note struck on the steel string can have in excess of fifty overtones. As steel-strings exert a heavy pull on the neck and table with great vibration efficiency, they can transfer a lot of energy to the top of the guitar and produce more volume (Grunfield 35).
Early in history, the nylon-string guitar was restricted to classical music. The steel-string guitar produced a new sound and became an important influence on the development of the blues. Blues was first and foremost a vocal art with the instrumental accompaniment in a subordinate role. The guitar was most suitable for this purpose as it has some of the flexibility of the human voice. You can bend and flatten a note. and the use of the droning sound of the guitar played by sliding down the strings can achieve the necessary interaction of sound. In the early 20th century, the steel-string guitar was adopted by almost all of the blues singers and was synonymous with this genre of music (Grunfield 37).
From the development of the steel-string guitar leading to the electric guitar is a clear evidence of how music and technology is always intertwined. When the dance-band guitarists of the late 1930s wanted to be heard above the rest of the band, they attached microphones to the body of the guitar. But this resulted in too much feedback (Evans 20). With the application of advanced electronic and engineering techniques available in the 20th century, magnetic pickups were developed through experimentation with Gramophone pickups. Coupled this with the use of amplifier and loudspeaker have given the guitar better versatility than ever. The body of the guitar was made to be very heavy, by using a metal bridge, to keep the vibration in the string and to radiate as little of the energy acoustically as possible. Metal strings are more flexible and have less internal damping than do nylon strings, and they are able to vibrate much longer in high-frequency modes. The next step is to have the magnetic pickup transforms the mechanical motion of a vibrating string into a varying voltage. The basic pickup consists of a magnet, of which one pole points toward and one points away from the strings, with a wire coil wrapped around the magnet. When the gap between the string and the pole piece changes, a voltage is created in the coil proportional to the velocity of the strings motion.