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Easy Guitar Tabs
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Bass Guitar Players Who Changed The World

Some people think that if you want to change the world you don't become a bass player, but go into something more challenging and stimulating like the Post Office. But does this myth portray how bass players really are? Let's step back from our habitual way of seeing bass guitar players as necessary but boring members of the group. Like accountants. Sure we acknowledge the fine contribution they make to their bands by supplying the bass lines and paying for the beer, but do they actually do anything really creative? This brief listing of some prominent men (and woman) of bass will allow you to see that this apparently self effacing member of a musical group could be the creative powerhouse.

Let's start with the leather jacketed but overpoweringly feminine Suzi Quatro. A vocalist and bass player who had a bunch of hits in Australia and Europe in the early seventies, her popularity in the USA stemmed from her role as Leather Tuscadero in Happy Days.

John Entwistle pioneered the use of the electric bass guitar as an instrument for soloists. His aggressive approach to the bass guitar influenced many other bassists.

Flea of The Red Hot Chili Peppers impressed a lot of musicians with his popping and slapping technique which was originally invented by Larry Graham of Sly And The Family Stone. Flea's innovative use of effects pedals has also influenced many bass players.

Jack Bruce wrote most of supergroup Cream's hit songs. Among his other achievements are fighting constantly with Cream's drummer, Ginger Baker and surviving a liver transplant.

Greg Lake is another artist of the early seventies who played with a number of innovators from the glam rock era. Lake is best known for his vocals, bass and guitar work with Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

Rob Bailey is a bassist who plays loud and aggressive. His bass playing is an important element in the music of AC/DC.

Benny Rietveld, a Dutch musician who went to college in Hawaii, is admired for his musical and individualistic style of playing. He worked with Barney Kessell, Sheila E, Huey Lewis and Miles Davis. He has also made an album featuring Carlos Santana. Talk about diverse.

Paul McCartney played bass with The Beatles. Many bass players say he's quite good, but he changed the world with his romantic song lyrics.

Considered by some to be the king of bass players, Stanley Clarke employs a variation of the pop and slap technique to produce some truly innovative bass guitar music. His 1976 album, School Days, is acclaimed by many critics as one of the greatest bass albums ever.

A true bass lead guitar player, Billy Sheehan has won Guitar Player Magazine's "Best Rock Bass Player" readers' poll five times. Why a "bass lead guitar player"? Because Billy plays bass as if he were playing lead.

So if you are not familiar with bass guitar players I hope this article has whetted your appetite. Why not spend your next rainy Sunday watching some of their work on YouTube?

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Bass Guitar Tabs And Their Place In The Circle Of Life
Bass guitar tab is an extremely popular way of writing bass guitar music. If you are interested in becoming a bass guitarist you need to get familiar with bass guitar music by playing the bass lines of some of your favorite songs before you let your inner bass player off the chain. Utilizing this handy tool you can learn how to be the bass player in a band quickly without getting too much into boring theory.

The bass player's job is simply to keep time. Nothing could be easier. Until you try to do it. So what is actually involved? The bass guitar player keeps time by playing a 'bassline' which is usually a rhythmic' sequence of notes. The bass player brings together the rhythmic playing of the drummer with the melodies and chords played by the lead guitarist. Do  you need to be a talented musician to do this? Yes you do. The bass guitar player is the guy who switches off his brain and becomes one with the flow of the music. He then switches his brain back on and become the designated driver for the rest of the band.

A novice bass guitarist may not immediately be able to follow (or lead) the rest of the band right from the start. You might need some material to work with while you ease into the job. Bass guitar tab gives the guitar player written directions on what to play to give the bass line to a song. Tablature is a written representation of the strings of the guitar using numbers to show the frets. If you want to learn the bass guitar quickly tab will help you.  It is easy to pick up and to remember, and it enables you to learn the riffs and phrases you need to give structure to your band's music.

A bass guitar tab is a picture of the fret board which can be drawn using Notepad on your computer or, if you like, by hand. The frets are numbered on lines representing the guitar strings. If you have a four string bass, the upper string is the G string, next the D string, the A string, and the E string. The numbers below the lines are the frets where the notes are played. If there is zero below the line it means the open string is played. A chord is represented in bass guitar tabs by two numbers, one above the other. Most bass guitar tabs contain a legend which explains any unfamiliar terms.

With the history of rock music going back for generations tabs are available for any song you can think of. The internet is by far the best source for bass guitar tabs. Just do a Google search and you will have more material than you will ever need. All you have to do is learn and practice. Learn and practice your favorite songs first. Bass guitar is not a musical instrument you can approach without passion. Bass guitar riffs can be learnt from tab books but should be played from the heart.


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Basic Guitar Chords And How To Play Them

One of the challenges for the novice guitarist is learning the basic chords. You will not only need to know where to put your fingers, but also how to change from one chord to another. The technique of smooth transition between chords is a learning process we are never really finished with. Every time we learn something new on the guitar, that's another sequence of small movements our body learns, and these sets of movements must be executed smoothly through relaxed, calm practice.

Holding chords with your left hand is a new skill. It uses groups of muscles we do not normally use, so it takes time to learn the chord shapes without experiencing discomfort. There is light at the end of the tunnel, although sometimes the tunnel seems very, very long.

Another physical adaptation that has to be made when you learn your basic guitar chords is the left-hand fingers need to be toughened up. Callouses form on the tips of the fingers after a few weeks playing, but until they do you need to put up with the pain.

Fortunately learning the notes on the guitar is a job that does come to an end. As you learn more songs, chords and scales you will feel your ease with musical theory and notation growing even if you didn't directly learn much theoretical stuff. If you learnt in your own way the knowledge gets into you by way of constant practice and the enjoyment you bring to your guitar playing.

So the task at hand is to learn a basic group of chords. This is your toolbox you begin your guitar playing with.
Each chord is identified by a letter. If the letter is followed by the word, minor, it's a minor chord. If it is just the letter alone, it's a major chord.

Major chords contain the Root note, a major third above the Root plus a fifth above the Root.
Minor chords, which have a more "sad" sound, are the same except that they contain a minor third instead of a major third.

A basic rule of thumb for understanding major and minor chords is for a
major chord play the (1) (3) and (5) of the major scale, and for a minor chord play the (1) (3) and (5) of the minor scale.

A handy thing to know once you start playing barre chords is that if you learn the major chord shape, you only need to lift one left-hand finger to play the minor chord.

The basic chords come from the keys of A G C and D. The chords themselves can be played at all positions on the fret board, but beginners start with open chords at the first position. This means that at least one note is played on an open string.

We group the basic keys into families:
The A family contains the chords A, D and E.
The D family contains the chords D, E minor, G and A.
The G family contains the chords G, A minor, C, D and E minor.
The C family contains the chords C, D minor, E minor, F and G.

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Besame Mucho - Guitar Chords And Lyrics
Besame Mucho is one of the most popular songs of all time, being recorded by an extraordinarily diverse range of singers and instrumentalists.
It was written in 1940 by a sixteen-year-old Mexican girl called Consuelo Velasquez. The song was a steamy expression of a young girl's longing to be kissed. The title of the song means "kiss me alot" and it stirred the imaginations of men and women all over the world. In 1944 a young American singer named Kitty Kallen sang the song with Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra and it stayed for six weeks on the charts of Billboard Magazine.

Another key figure in the story of Besame Mucho is Sunny Skylar, composer and arranger who sang with big bands in the nieteen forties. He wrote music and lyrics for many popular songs including: Amor, And So To Sleep Again and Love Me With All Your Heart. There are other translations of the song but Skylar's seems to be a favorite. Here are the lyrics as interpreted by Sunny Skylar:
Bésame, bésame mucho
Each time I cling to your kiss, I hear music divine
Bésame mucho
Hold me my darling and say that you'll always be mine
This joy is something new
My arms enfolding you
Never knew this thrill before
Whoever thought I'd be
Holding you close to me
Whispering "It's you I adore"
Dearest one
If you should leave me
Each little dream would take wing, and my life would be through
Bésame mucho
Love me forever and make all my dreams come true

At the time of writing the song Consuelo insisted she had never been kissed but she certainly sounds like she knew what she wanted. I think Skylar was wise in not translating the words "besane mucho" into literal English like "kiss me much" or "kiss me alot".

Just to get the feel of the song, here are Consuelo's original words:
And here are the original lyrics by Consuelo Velazquez:
Bésame, bésame mucho
Como si fuera esta noche la última vez
Bésame mucho
Que tengo miedo perderte, perderte otra vez
Quiero tenerte muy
Cerca, mirarme en tus
Ojos, verte junto a mí
Piensa que tal vez
Mañana yo ya estaré
Lejos, muy lejos de ti
Bésame, bésame mucho
Como si fuera esta noche la última vez
Bésame mucho
Que tengo miedo perderte, perderte después

If you are a guitar player and you know how to play the A minor, D minor, A major and E major chords you will easily be able to play Besame Mucho.

As for the composer of the song, she was supposed to have been a classical concert pianist having learnt the piano when she was four years old.  Consuelo wrote many other popular Mexican songs including: Amar y vivir, Verdad amarga, Franqueza, Que seas feliz, Cachito and Enamorada.

The list of vocal and instrumental artists who have recorded Besame  Mucho goes on and on. Some notable ones are: Andrea Bocelli, Artie Shaw, The Beatles, Charles Aznavour, Chris Isaak, Edith Piaf, The Dead Brothers, Leslie Nielsen(!!), Sammy Davis Jr and Stan Getz.

For lovers of acoustic guitar, Besame Mucho is included on an album of latin standards by flamenco guitarist, Paco de Lucia. Other tracks on the CD include: Malaguena, Mantilla De Feria, Granada, Manha De Carnaval, Perfidia, La Virgen De La Macarena and Moliendo Cafe. Paco is one of the world's greatest guitarists and it would be well worth your while to have a listen to this excellent CD. Meanwhile, good luck with your own efforts at playing this luscious song.


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Easy Guitar Tabs
Guitar tabs are an easy solution for you if you have no idea of how to read sheet music but are constantly bugged by the notion that you want to be a guitarist. Guitar tabs are easy to learn and allow you to begin playing songs right away, even if you are not familiar with them. Once you have bought your first guitar, it is time to begin looking for easy guitar tab versions of some songs to find out what it feels like to be a guitar player. Which songs you need tabs for depends on how you see yourself as a musician. Do you want to play your favorite songs chiefly for your own amusement or do you want to aim your repertoire at a potential audience? Let us look at your audience for a minute. The most popular songs in the world are all from years gone by. If you sit a bunch of people aged between ten and fifty down and play songs at them you will find some universal favorites, and they will all be old songs. If you want to please a random audience, your ultimate goal should be to have about one hundred popular songs ranging from the 1940's to the present, but you could probably narrow the range to just include songs going back to the sixties.

So what are the easiest songs to learn from tabs? What can a beginner guitarist learn quickly without too much trouble? Well, I did a little searching on the internet concerning that question, and I found that "Horse With No Name" contains only two chords, and dead simple ones at that! You could be playing that song in a convincing fashion today! "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" makes use of the chords G D C and Am - all easy chords. Building on chords you have acquired learning these songs, you can go onto "House Of The Rising Sun" which uses Am C D F E and E7. Once you have learnt that, it's only natural to go onto another beautiful song, "California Dreamin'" which has the same chords. If you do not like the idea of beginning your guitar playing with these songs, do an internet search in the country music and blues genres. Actually a working knowledge of twelve bar blues is very useful for a guitar player just starting out.

Now for a short list of songs that are both easy to play and have proven to be popular with audiences of all ages. You can find tab arrangements for these songs by typing the titles into a search engine.
"Angie" by The Rolling Stones
"Blowin' In The Wind" by Bob Dylan
"Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison
"A Day In The Life", "Here, There And Everywhere" and "Hey Jude" by The Beatles
"I Walk The Line" by Johnny Cash
"Tears In Heaven" by Eric Clapton
"Gloria" by Van Morrison
"Hotel California" by The Eagles
"Behind Blue Eyes" by The Who
"Scarborough Fair" by any number of performers, and
"White Room" by Cream

Once you have some guitar songs under your belt, you could learn more popular favorites that do not fit into the "Easy Guitar Tabs" category. Wilson Pickett's "Dock Of The Bay" and "American Pie" by Don Mclean come to mind. But do not let the tastes of the masses be your only guide. If, for example, you decide you would like to do a folk guitar arrangement of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" then you could use tabs for the original electric guitar version as a basis for your new work. With a bunch of easy guitar tabs at your disposal, the only limits to your musical achievements are your imagination and your audience's supply of tomatoes.


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Electric Guitar Tabs Explained
Tablature as a means of writing music down has been with us for hundreds of years, but many people today look down on tabs as a third rate method of musical communication. In fact, tablature is not a dumbed down version of conventional musical notation, rather what we call sheet music grew from a need for more versatility in notation as music became more complex in medieval times. Electric Guitar Tabs have been a great help to the many people who have taken up the electric guitar and who wanted to get down to the business of playing as quickly as possible.

Conventional music notation has much more to communicate than tabs, but if you already know more or less how the song sounds, and are prepared to work at your own interpretation, then there is nothing wrong with using tablature.

Guitarists composing music using tabs and sharing the results of their work on the internet have brought a wide range of music within reach of amateur musicians who never learnt to read music. To some guitarists learning to read music is a waste of time that would be put to better use expressing their feelings through music. This attitude is at odds with the idea that the more theoretical knowledge you have, the greater the pool of resources at your disposal for expressing your ideas.

Tablature, on the other hand, allows the guitarist to get to know the basic piece of music in his own way, and use his musical intuition and flair for improvisation to produce a musical work which will be as much his own work as the original composer's. For that reason electric guitar tabs are a boon to the electric guitar player who does not want to just produce a copy of someone else's work.

You can find electric guitar tabs in music stores along with conventional written music, but the quickest and best place to look for electric guitar tabs is on the internet. Even though there's a legal dogfight going on about tab publishers infringing the rights of the original composer, many tabs are still available for free. However you need to exercise your discernment when making use of tablature produced by amateur guitarists. You might need to change things around a little if they don't sound right.

As for the electric guitar player who wants to broaden his musical knowledge, tablature also allows the guitarist to learn new chords, scales or modes very quickly.

Finally a reminder that using electric guitar tabs to learn new material is not a walk in the park - you need to supply some of the information which is otherwise written into sheet music. You need to have some idea of the note values and a basic understanding of time signatures and tempo. What that boils down to is that you can hear the music in your head, and you just want to know where to put your fingers on the fret board. That is what guitar tabs were originally made for.


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Learn To Play Guitar Fast
When you watch somebody play fast on the guitar do you always wonder if you could learn to do that? Let us look at what resources we need to increase our own guitar playing speed on a regular basis.

The very first thing you are going to need is a metronome. You can buy one from your local music store, steal one from a maiden aunt or download one for free on the internet. If you choose to steal one, then I am afraid you will not make much progress in your quest to play guitar fast because shortcuts just do not work. Most of us look for the quickest and most painless way to do things, and that is why most of us are not playing guitar at the speed of light.

Okay, you have your metronome and an attitude adjustment. You are ready to begin. The next thing you need is something to practice. It can be a solo passage from a song. It can be an exercise, like a series of arpeggios or a picking exercise. You need to choose your material carefully because you will need to know exactly how fast you want to play in terms of the settings on your metronome. You may or may not need to spend time learning your passage from scratch as some familiarity with the piece is necessary to start increasing how fast you play it. By familiarity I mean the muscles in your fingers, hands and arms need to be able to play your piece without hesitation.

So that is the next thing you need. In order to play guitar fast you need to be able to play slowly. The exercise you have chosen to play should not be too easy, but at the same time it should not have too many tricky bits. That  is why you are using an exercise or an isolated passage rather than a song or long solo.

Now you are starting to see the way ahead. If you have your practice passage ready, check it with your metronome. Make sure you know what your present speed is. The next thing is to take a metronome setting not too far above your present one and make that your goal.

Let us now talk about something you do not need. Muscular tension. You need to practice playing guitar fast without building a level of tension in the muscles that will work against your goal. In order to escape the possibility of too much tension you need to forget about time frames. You have your goal in the metronome setting. Leave the time open ended. The idea is not to actually PLAY guitar faster at sometime in the future, but to WORK A LITTLE BIT ON PLAYING FAST every day.

So if you choose a passage to practice in order to play fast, and you devote some time every day to practicing, your guitar playing speed will begin to increase. Once you have reached a level of skill on one exercise, choose another one with a couple more challenges. But remember to begin again from the beginning. Ascertain where you are now and decide on a realistic goal for your next step.



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Free Guitar Chord Charts
This article will show you how to make the best use of free guitar chord charts that you can find online. As the internet changes, sites go down and new ones come up, so I won't risk this resource going out of date by discussing where to find your free guitar chord charts, just how to use them to kick start your guitar playing.

You can easily get together a nice collection of chord charts and lyrics to your favorite songs to help you learn to play the guitar. If you feel that you should be learning a whole bunch of musical theory and how to read musical notation, but somehow feel it's just not you, then that's okay - start with what you feel most enthusiastic about.  Once you have started to learn using guitar chord charts you have bought or downloaded for free, you might see as you go along that you will need to know a little bit about musical theory to see how chords and scales fit together. If, however, you are comfortable learning chords to your favorite songs, then keep at it.

So let's start with the basic baby steps and work up to some really useful knowledge about guitar chords and how the dots on the charts relate to musical sounds. You know the frets on your guitar's neck somehow show you where the notes are, so let's get a little more technical. You will see when you use scale charts to learn to play guitar tunes that in a given position on the fret board, you will sometimes need to move up or down one fret or two frets. If you play the note at the first fret, and then move up to the second fret, you have moved up a semitone. If you have moved up two frets, it is called a tone. The distance between the notes E and F  or B and C is a tone.  The distance between the notes C and D is a tone. So as you learn songs in different keys you will start to see that what you are playing when you play scales is different patterns of tones or semi tones on the guitar neck.

If you have watched guitarists play you will have noticed that sometimes they place their index finger across all six strings. This is called a barre. When you begin to learn songs you will be making use of chords played in the FIRST position on the fret board. These are mostly open chords, that is chords that do not make use of the barre. You can try to play barre chords any time, but it's a bit ambitious to expect to be able to use them until after your hands have done some practice with open chords.

When you are learning chords to accompany songs, you will probably make use of your chord charts showing you chords that use all the guitar's strings. But if you want to get into playing solos start with the three note chords called triads. The three notes in a triad are the basic notes of your chord, so by learning triads you will begin to see how the guitar chords are structured. Also you can move your triads up and down the fret board to make new chords.
Here's an example:
The chord of A Major is made up of the notes A C# and E shown in tab form as:

E-----------------------------------------
B--------------2--------------------------
G--------------2--------------------------
D--------------2--------------------------
A-----------------------------------------
E-----------------------------------------

Move that shape one semitone (one fret) up the neck and you get A# or Bb.

E-----------------------------------------
B--------------3--------------------------
G--------------3--------------------------
D--------------3--------------------------
A-----------------------------------------
E-----------------------------------------

One fret higher is B Major.

E-----------------------------------------
B--------------4--------------------------
G--------------4--------------------------
D--------------4--------------------------
A-----------------------------------------
E-----------------------------------------


This shape played anywhere on the neck will give you a major chord. The fret it is played at tells you the key it is in.

Here are the notes for the triads of the basic chords:
C Major - C E G
D Major - D F# A
E Major - B E G#
F Major - C F A
G Major - G B D
A Major - A C# E
B Major - B D# F#

Now the minor chords:
C Minor - C Eb G
D Minor - D F A
E Minor - B E G
F Minor - C F Ab
G Minor - G Bb D
A Minor - A C E
B Minor - B D F#
Naturally, there will be some points you need to make a little clearer, so you will find more descriptions and illustrations available for free on the internet.


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Online Electric Guitar Lessons
Learning to play guitar online is arguably the most effective guitar teaching method ever. The only thing missing is a live person in front of you during your lessons, and for some people the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. A real live guitar teacher exuding coolness and dexterity can be handy, but technology has most of the process of passing on musical knowledge and guitar technique covered. So are online guitar lessons for you? Let's look at the advantages of learning in cyberspace, the tools available to you, and the kinds of guitar lessons you will find online.

So why is it better to take online guitar lessons rather than sit in front of a live person? For a start it is much, much cheaper. There are courses that will cost you one hundred dollars or more. Find out how many real-world lessons you get for that price. I can tell you now, it's not too many. Also there's the travelling. Time and money spent just getting to your teacher. Do you really need the aggravation? As far as personal cost goes, online lessons work out to be much less expensive than your local guitar teacher. And you don't have to laugh at your online teacher's lame jokes!

What kind of help and learning materials will you expect from online guitar lessons? Nice clear videos showing you where to put your left hand fingers on the guitar neck and what to do with your right hand to make the music come out. We're talking videos you can play over and over again until you understand what your instructor is trying to pass on to you. Usually some kind of backing tracks are available with online lessons. These are accompaniment for you to test your guitar playing skills. Basically backing music gives you a way of testing your ability to keep time while giving you the opportunity to see how you would sound playing guitar with a real band. By the way, most online guitar courses come with basic tools like a metronome and maybe some written lessons you can print out for future use. Additionally, a lot of guitar courses include some way of asking questions and getting answers back from your guitar teachers.

When you sign up for guitar lessons online, you should be getting a broad musical education. You might have a fair idea of the kind of music you want to play, but online guitar lessons are an ideal method of showing you what is available to guitar players who want to learn more than one musical genre. So just bear in mind you should be able to get a taste of some of the music available to you like jazz, country, fingerstyle, blues, R&B, and so on. Along with a wide range of music, your guitar course should offer you depth of guitar playing experience. You need to learn what it feels like to accompany songs, play solos, and improvise. The best online guitar lessons will give you the opportunity to get this kind of experience.

Okay, so now you know the advantages of online guitar lessons and the materials and tools you should expect to be included in any set of lessons, you can examine any course a little more closely now from a more informed viewpoint.



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The Evolution Of The Electric Guitar
References to the guitar more or less in its modern form date back to the 14th century. In its infancy it had four courses of double strings and a rounded body like a gourd or a pumpkin. Its mother would not recognize it today!

Around the sixteenth century the guitar was a popular musical instrument amongst the middle and lower classes of Europe, and as it increased in popularity it began to undergo a change of shape. Luthiers began making instruments with single strings instead of courses and experimented with its form until, by the 19th century, the body of the guitar was made wider, and flattened out. In the twentieth century the wooden tuning pegs which adjusted the tension of the strings were replaced by metal machine heads. Now we have the shape that the modern electric guitar is based on.

The first electric guitars were made in the 1930's in response to a demand from guitarists in bands whose rhythmic stylings could not be heard above the other instruments. The main problem with these electric guitars was that feedback was coming through the amplifier from the vibration of the guitar's body. This challenge began the evolutionary process  of the solid body electric guitar.

The early electric guitars had sound holes in the body that were smaller than the sound holes of conventional guitars. In 1924 Lloyd Loar, an engineer with the Gibson factory, used a magnet to change guitar string vibrations into electrical signals, which could be amplified through a speaker. Now it was possible to build guitars that did not possess sound holes but could be heard clearly through an amplifier. Amateur guitar players were able to get their hands on electric guitars through the efforts of Paul Barth, George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker who founded the Electro String Company in 1931. Their guitars resembled steel guitars, and were played in the guitarist's lap using a slide.

Modern electric guitars are made of many thin layers of wood glued together. The top layer is often a more attractive wood to give the guitar a pleasing appearance, and the other layers are of a wood which gives a good tone such as poplar or ash. The use of laminates endows the instrument with the robust body and tonal quality that would be impossible in one piece of wood. The original solid body guitar was however, made from one piece of wood. In 1941 Les Paul turned a railway sleeper into an amplified stringed instrument. He called it "The Log". When production of his instrument began he stayed with the conventional guitar shape to give his market a familiar image to relate to. Les Paul's invention marketed as the Gibson Les Paul is still extremely popular.

In the 1940's, the Fender Broadcaster Electric guitar came into the world. Nobody really noticed until Arthur Smith used a Broadcaster to record "Guitar Boogie" in 1949. After being renamed the Telecaster, it was put on the market in 1950. Another Fender model, the Stratocaster, caught guitarists' attention with its distinctive tone and light weight. It's still the second most popular guitar in the world.

Ibanez, Jackson, Paul Reed Smith, ESP and Yamaha have made solid body electric guitars with original designs, distinctive shapes and new materials mixed with modern technologies to produce more efficient and versatile electric guitars. Today’s electric guitars produce tones varying between futuristic music or quasi-acoustic sounds.
In the 1960's, effects boxes introduced fuzz, delay, echo and the wah-wah sound to the arsenal of sounds available to the modern guitarist. A pedal operated by the guitar player's foot turns the effects on or off. Now guitars contain software that lets guitars sound like other types of guitars or reproduce the sound of other musical instruments. With developments like the latest self-tuning guitars, maybe the old joke about a guitarist "phoning in" a solo will become a reality!


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