Jon Chappell - Blues Guitar For Dummies

Output jack (electric only): The insertion point for the cord that connects the guitar to an amplifier or other electronic device.

Pickup selector (electric only): A switch that determines which pickups are currently active.

Pickups (electric only): Barlike magnets that create the electrical current, which the amplifier converts into musical sound.

Sides (acoustic only): Separate curved wooden pieces on the body that join the top to the back.

Strap pin: Metal post where the front, or top, end of the strap connects. (Not all acoustics have a strap pin. If the guitar is missing one, tie the top of the strap around the headstock.)

Strings: The six metal (for electric and steel-string acoustic guitars) or nylon (for classical guitars) wires that, drawn taut, produce the notes of the guitar. Although not strictly part of the actual guitar (you attach and remove them at will on top of the guitar), strings are an integral part of the whole system, and a guitar’s entire design and structure revolves around making the strings ring out with a joyful noise. (See Chapter 16for more information on changing strings.)

Top: The face of the guitar. On an acoustic, this piece is also the sounding board, which produces almost all the guitar’s acoustic qualities. On an electric, the top is primarily a cosmetic or decorative cap that overlays the rest of the body material.

Tuning machines: Geared mechanisms that raise and lower the tension of the strings, drawing them to different pitches. The string wraps tightly around a post that sticks out through the top, or face, of the headstock. The post passes through to the back of the headstock, where gears connect it to a tuning key. Also known as tuners, tuning pegs, tuning keys, and tuning gears.

Volume and tone controls (electric only): Knobs that vary the loudness of the guitar’s sound and its bass and treble emphasis.

The practical differences between the two types of guitars is, in sum, that an electric guitar needs to plug in to an amp and have electricity to be heard, but it’s easier to play than an acoustic. An acoustic works with nothing but the fingers nature gave you, but its loudness is limited to a range of a few feet, and in a quiet environment — unless it has a mic, of course. Acoustics can’t sustain like electrics can, so their lead qualities are more restricted, too. As you can see in the preceding section, though, the bodies are quite different, owing to the way each converts a plucked string into audible sound. In this section, I cover both methods, but take note that the fundamental principles for acoustic guitars, and the way their strings produce notes, apply to electrics as well — acoustic is that baby’s daddy, after all.

The first blues guitars were acoustic because blues was invented before electricity had lent its powers to music. Gut and steel-string acoustics were used as a means to accompany a singing voice or another melodic instrument, like the fiddle. Gradually the rhythms evolved into single-note figures (riffs), and then finally into a solo instrument, where the guitar would carry the melody. But blues played on the acoustic guitar is a viable style today, as evidenced by the work of Rory Block, Roy Book Binder, John Hammond, Keb’ Mo’, and Chris Thomas King. So the first step in playing the blues is to understand how acoustic guitars work, and why they’re so perfect for playing the blues.

In blues guitar, as in other forms of guitar playing, the hands perform different functions — unlike, say, the piano or saxophone where the hands work the same way. In guitar playing, the left-hand fingers press down the strings at different frets, which creates different sounding pitches — the note names like A, C, F♯, B♭, and so on. But the left hand doesn’t make the sound.

The right hand is what actually produces the sound — by strumming or plucking the strings. The left hand make no sound on its own, but decides what pitches will be heard when the right hand plays. The right hand can make sound, but it can’t make organized, intelligent sound without the left hand providing the right notes to play. So the two hands need each other, and they must coordinate their efforts so that they move together to create chords and single notes in rhythm. In blues guitar playing, unlike large governmental bureaucracies, the right hand must know what the left hand is doing, and vice versa.

Look at the guitar’s fingerboard (the top of the neck; refer to Figures 2-3 and 2-4) and you see a gridlike structure of strings and frets (short metal wires underneath the strings, running perpendicular to them). Frets are like the black and white keys of the piano: They provide all the different pitches available on the guitar in half-step increments. Good guitar players, who “know the fingerboard,” can identify any string/fret location by its pitch (note name), no matter where it falls. The better guitar player you become the more you’re able to look at the neck and quickly see notes and patterns.

As soon as electric guitars were available, blues players of the day made the transition quickly and easily from their acoustic versions. An electric guitar uses the same approach to neck and frets and the way the left and right hands share separate but equally important roles (see the preceding section for the basics), but it provides some aspects that the acoustic guitar can’t do or can’t do as well, in addition to the most obvious advantage: increased volume through electronic amplification. The amplified electric guitar certainly changed the music world, but in many more ways than just being able to be heard over the rest of the band. The entire tonal character changed, in addition to the way you had to play it.

Technologically speaking, an electric guitar is no more complicated than an eighth-grade science project: A wire (the string) hovers over a magnet (the pickup), which forms a magnetic field. When you set the wire in motion (by plucking it), the vibrating, or oscillating, string creates a disturbance in the magnetic field, which produces an electrical current. This current travels down a cord (the one sticking out the side of your guitar) and into an amplifier, where it’s cranked up to levels that people can hear — and in some cases, really hear. Figure 2-5 shows a close-up of the sound-producing parts of an electric guitar: the string and pickup.

FIGURE 2-5:The makers of electric sound, reporting for duty.

Naturally, there’s a lot more to the way electric guitars make music than what I describe here, but what’s significant is that an electric guitar doesn’t make its sound acoustically. Even though you can hear the string when the guitar’s not plugged in, that’s not what the guitar “hears.” The guitar converts a disturbance in the pickup’s magnetic field to a current. This all-electronic process is different than “pre-electric guitar amplification,” which consisted of placing a microphone in front of a guitar.

In an electric guitar, you must use metal strings, because nylon ones don’t have magnetic properties. The fact that you need only a metal wire and a pickup to make sound — rather than a resonating chamber — meant electric guitars could be built differently from their acoustic counterparts. And they were played differently, though that took some time to evolve.