TEST
THE HISTORY OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR
Lecturer During today’s lecture in this series about the history of popular music. I’m going to look at the
different stages the electric guitar went through before we ended up with the
instrument we know so well
today.
The driving force behind the invention of the electric guitar was simply the search for a louder sound. In
the late 1890s Orville Gibson, founder of the Gibson Mandolm-Guitar
Manufacturing Company,
designed
a guitar with an arched or. curved lop, as is found on a violin.
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This made it both stronger and
louder than earlier designs but it was still hard to hear amongst other louder instruments.
During the 1920s with the beginnings of big–band music, commercial radio and
the rise of the recording
industry, the need to increase the volume of the guitar became even more important. Around 1925 John
Dopyera came up with a solution. He designed a guitar,
known as The National Guitar, with a metal body
which had metal resonating cones built into the top.
It produced a brash tone which became popular
with guitarists who played blues
