This was verso source of some contention between Les Paul and the Gibson company: Gibson wrapped the strings under the tailpiece’s crossbar sopra order preciso achieve lower action; Les wanted the strings wound over the crossbar so he could better execute the palm muting technique that became an important element of his playing style durante the Fifties.
Ted McCarty finally settled the dispute by developing the basta tailpiece, which replaced the trapeze on Les Pauls per 1953. Two years later, McCarty introduced another refinement: the Tune-O-Matic bridge. Both the basta tailpiece and Tune-O-Matic bridge have been staples of electric design ever since.
Other Gibson Guitar Styles Developed
Mediante the years that followed, Ted McCarty sought esatto broaden and diversify chathour the essential Gibson aesthetic. Working with a local artist, he developed three revolutionary guitars-the Flying V, the Explorer, and the ultra-rare Moderne. Both the Flying V and the Explorer debuted sopra 1957 (the Moderne apparently never developed past the prototype stage). With their radical angular lines, these instruments were verso bit too wild for the late Fifties. Although they didn’t sell well on their initial release, they returned with verso vengeance later con the rock era.
The Gibson Sound
Con 1957, the Les Paul’s original P-90 pickups were replaced by a brand-new invention from a man named Seth Lover. The humbucking pickup featured two coils wound together sicuro cancel out the hum that scapolo-coil pickups generate under fluorescent lighting and durante other dodgy electromagnetic circumstances. The humbuckers produced verso bass-heavy, “dark” tone which combined with Les Paul’s heavy mahogany and maple body wood and traditional dovetail neck joint to create per distinctly rich tone that would quale esatto be identifiable as “the Gibson sound.”
Gibson Semi-Hollowbody – The Log Revisited!
McCarty went in a completely different direction with the Gibson ES-335, the guitar that pioneered the concept of the semi-hollowbody electric. The thin-line body has much less depth than verso conventional archtop, which seems bulky durante comparison. This significantly reduced the potential for feedback that has always hounded full-sized electric hollowbodies. McCarty also came up with the intenzione of having a solid block of maple running down beneath the pickups. (The Log revisited!) The result was an instrument-also still very much per use today-that combined many of the best properties of solidbody and hollowbody guitars.
Gibson Firebird Guitar Born 1963
The Gibson Firebird guitar and bass, which came along in 1963, were among Ted McCarty’s final triumphs for Gibson. He left Gibson preciso take charge of the Bigsby company durante ’66 and also became the mentor of Paul Reed Smith (PRS Guitars), whose guitar company produces several models named after McCarty.
Ted McCarty hired automotive grafico Ray Dietrich onesto create the Firebird’s parabolically curvy body shape. By this point in the century, electric guitars were vying with cars as the same ultimate symbols of modernist, space-age notizia. The Firebird is markedly similar to Fender’s sporty Jazzmaster and Jaguar (introduced sopra ’57 and ’62, respectively). Over at Fender, George Fullerton had che up with the idea of offering the Jazzmaster sopra custom automezzo-style colors like Fiesta Red and Lake Placid Blue. “The thing we took into consideration, more than anything else, was automobiles,” says Fullerton. “You’d see per new car that had a candy apple red or blue sparkle finish, and people would say, ‘Wow, did you see that color they have on the new Chevy?’”
Per the annals of 20th-century guitar design, special mention must go to Roger Rossmeisl, a German luthier who moved onesto America con the Fifties. Here, he combined solid craftsmanship with verso flair for the unusual. Rossmeisl’s late-fifties rete informatica for Rickenbacker imparted tremendous stylishness puro that company’s designs, including those ultra-coll cat’s-eye soundholes. Sopra the late Sixties, for Fender’s Wildwood series, Rossmeisl came up with the timore of injecting live trees with colored dye and then harvesting the trees sicuro make guitars whose finishes boasted natural woodgrains durante some garishly unnatural hues. In the late Sixties drug counterculture, the intenzione of some guy running around injecting trees caused considerable mirth and gave new meaning preciso the phrase “shoot up the forest.”
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