the.com/electric guitar
A plank of wood that turns electricity into teenage rebellion and genius.
means A guitar whose strings are sensed by magnetic pickups and turned into an electrical signal, which gets amplified and shaped into sound far louder and more flexible than the wood itself could ever make.
from The word 'electric' traces back to the Greek 'elektron,' meaning amber — because ancient Greeks noticed that rubbed amber attracted light objects, an early brush with static charge. 'Guitar' has a longer, tangled road, passing through French and Spanish back to the Arabic 'qitara' and ultimately the Greek 'kithara,' an ancient stringed instrument. The electric guitar itself is a 20th-century invention, born as inventors and musicians experimented with pickups and amplification to make guitars audible over loud dance bands — practical necessity that accidentally invented a cultural weapon.
- no hollow body
- solid wood, so it only sings through an amp
- invented
- popularized by Les Paul and Rickenbacker in the 1930s
- pickup magic
- magnets and coils convert string vibration into signal
- feedback accident
- Hendrix turned amp noise into an art form