Acoustic guitar....................................................................................
Because an acoustic guitar is not electrically amplified, one of its most impor-
tant features is the wood it was made from. The soundboard of an acoustic
guitar especially needs to be made of high-quality wood to get the best sound
across.
This isn’t to say that your average cheap plywood guitar is no good, but it’s
not concert quality. Laminated and plywood soundboards give a guitar great
durability and might work just fine as practice instruments or in bar bands,
but they don’t have the natural vibrato or amplification that a fine wood
soundboard gives a guitar. For example, a spruce soundboard gives a guitar a
crisp, high-end sound and a loud bottom end, with the overall sound much
bigger, fuller, and louder than any other type of soundboard. A cedar or red-
wood soundboard gives an acoustic guitar a beautiful ringing tone, and a
mahogany soundboard produces a sweet, thick, mellow sound. Koa-based
soundboards have a really strong mid-range, with thick, warm-sounding high
and low tones.
Of course, once you stick an electric pickup on an acoustic or a microphone
in front of it, its natural sound will be altered according to the quality of the
amplifying device. Look for pickups and microphones that amplify the acoustic
with the least amount of interference.
Electric guitar .....................................................................................
Although there were certainly inventive bluesmen who experimented with
electrifying their git-boxes — such as Blind Willie Johnson and One String
Sam — Adolph Rickenbacker is credited with inventing the first solid-body
electric guitar in the 1930s. Les Paul tinkered with the design in the 1940s,
and the electric guitar we know and love today was born.
The electric guitar was initially built for volume, so that it could both be heard
over other instruments and crowds of noisy people. As the body of an elec-
tric guitar is completely solid and usually made of resin, there’s no empty
wood chamber for the sound of the strings to be amplified in. Therefore,
when it is unplugged, the best sound you’re going to get from it is about as
noisy as a beehive. Plug that sucker in, though, and you’ve got an instrument
that plays even faster and easier than an acoustic, due to the lower action
(closer proximity of the strings to the guitar neck).
A large variety of types of music can be played on guitar, due to pickups and
amplifiers that can either distort the guitar’s natural sound to the crackly
hiss of a surf guitar or reproduce it so clearly that it sounds like an amplified
acoustic — all from the same guitar.
Chapter 15: Composing for the Nonstandard Orchestra 191