Quilter 101 Mini Reverb User Manual - page 4

A quick review of how the electric guitar came to be a great instrument.

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND THE HUMAN VOICE: All well-estab-

lished musical instruments share a natural property of the human voice – 

the tendency to become brighter as effort and volume increases. A good 

singer’s voice becomes more “brilliant” or “ringing” at high volumes, and 

the natural acoustic instruments we all enjoy behave the same. They 

develop more overtones or harmonics as you push them harder.  This 

provides an expressive quality that we can all relate to. Breath-driven 

instruments (horns) and bowed instruments (violin) inherently produce 

more harmonics with higher volumes, and even the piano develops more 

“clang” as you play harder. However, plucked instruments such as the 

guitar are a little less expressive in this respect. They get louder when 

plucked harder, but once plucked, the overtones are fairly similar at loud 

and soft levels. 

ACOUSTIC GUITAR: The basic concept of a hand-held instrument with 

a fretted neck using relatively few strings to produce many notes has 

many practical advantages which explain its popularity. You can play 

complex chords and melody lines in many keys, you can bend notes, 

and you can move around and sing while playing. However, acoustic 

guitars get lost in a large band, and notes quickly die away, which initially 

limited the guitar to a barely audible rhythm instrument in large bands. 

ELECTRIC GUITAR: Electronic amplification using vacuum tubes 

became practical in the 1920’s, and it did not take long for innovators to 

think about amplifying the acoustic guitar. The early experimenters just 

wanted to make the acoustic guitar “as loud as any piano”, but the first 

practical technology used coil-type pickups and primitive low-fi amplifiers 

which gave the electric guitar a distinctively round and “bloopy” tone. 

Purists did not embrace this “artificial” tone, but Hawaiian steel-guitar 

players, followed by country players, and finally early jazz guitarists 

awakened to the possibilities of the new sound. History was made. Even 

today, the round fat tone of these early rigs is accepted as the classic 

“jazz guitar” tone. Electric guitar pioneers such as Charlie Christian 

learned to play bluesy runs and extended jazz chords, at a volume level 

that competed with horns and drums. 

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