By Tom Mulhern
You probably have a favorite relative or a friend who you’ve always admired because they can solve just about any problem, figure out a way to do practically anything. Their solutions might not always seem elegant, but they get the job done. The United States used to be a hotbed of tinkerers, partly because the country was chock full of machinists, clockmakers, and so forth who had immigrated from Europe, which had a long tradition of tinkering. The other reason we had so many tinkerers was the lure of making money off of a great idea. Everyone thinks they have one great idea that could bring them fame and fortune, but as Thomas Edison once said, "Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." A final factor was the combination of the Great Depression and World War II. During the massive Depression, everyone wanted to make a buck, and it wasn’t easy, even if you had a skill. You needed a scheme. And World War II was the great "ramp-up" in productivity that required a lot of resourcefulness in a hurry.
We can thank Doc Kauffman for one of our favorite inventions that he tinkered on for many years: the whammy bar. Six decades ago, he was bending metal to bend notes on a guitar, and even did wacky things like hook a motor to one of his contraptions to make it do an auto-warble. O.W. "App" Appleton, Les Paul, Paul Bigsby, Adolf Rickenbacker, Leo Fender–they all tinkered, and we got the solidbody guitar as their legacy. And the Dopyera Brothers spun aluminum cones and put them into metal guitar bodies to produce some of the most brilliant and tantalizing (in the right hands) sounds that anyone has ever heard. Thank them for the Dobro.
But recently, there seems to me more re-invention than invention, and it should trouble guitarists–a group that has long been used to life at the cutting edge. Last NAMM show, I walked around the cavernous halls marvelling at how many companies were trying to "out-retro" each other. I saw lots of turquoise, tweed, metal-flake, and other trappings of the 1950s and ’60s, and most products bearing these symbols of retrodom had "hit you over the head with how retro it is" names.
Now, don’t mistake my amusement as commentary on the quality of the equipment. By and large, we’ve got some of the best stuff ever made, mostly due to strides in quality control, the application of computerized processes in manufacturing, and so forth. And some parts of the guitar biz, namely acoustic guitar manufacturers, have always shone brightest when they weren’t trying to reinvent themselves. However, I can remember periods in the 1970s and ’80s when some very cool new inventions hit the guitar kingdom and awed everyone. The impact of the Floyd Rose tremolo, the Hipshot Bender and D-Tuner, the Roland chorus pedal, the Steinberger (and the spate of headless guitars and basses to follow), and the channel-switching multi-preamp-stage amplifier lit massive fires under the guitar business. The recent cult of "pawnshop hipness" has not only made funky old good stuff astronomically expensive, but it has also sent the prices of bona fide junk skyrocketing as well.
Are we at a dead-end? Hardly. There are some amazing things going on in digital electronics. Only 15 years ago, such common effects as harmonization, flanging, and digital delay were still too expensive for most musicians to even consider owning. Now they’re almost as common and inexpensive as Walkmans. And I’m glad to say that, to a certain extent, I was wrong about the supply of tubes drying up. Some tubes are indeed unobtainable (except through collectors), but the top tubes like 12AX7s, 6L6s, etc., are probably going to be available for a good, long time, albeit at sometimes shocking prices to anyone who hasn’t retubed in a while. So, we’re seeing continued innovation (as well as re-creation) in the tube amp and tube effects end of the guitar biz.
What about guitars? With the exception of the Parker Fly, has there been anything to create a major buzz in recent memory? Where are the wacky approaches, like the Flying V, the SG, the Stratocaster? There are lots of retro reissues, retro conglomerations (the Jazz-Stang, for example), and variations on Strats. But altogether new approaches? Certainly not at center-stage.
Maybe the guitar has finally become a mature instrument. Come again? Look at the piano. At one time, it was the big buzz. The hot, new instrument. And, like the "arms race" in the guitar kingdom during the 1950s through 1980s, the race for the "perfect" or "best" piano raged on a couple of centuries ago. By the late 1800s, things had pretty much settled down, and refinement took over from innovation. Similarly, the violin (and other related stringed instruments) underwent periods of wild experimentation before settling into "refinement mode." The same thing happens with just about anything–musical instrument or other product–that gets really hot and spawns a lot of innovation.
And maybe, just maybe, there’s more to it. Maybe this is a lull before another storm of innovation. Some catalyst, some spark may come from nowhere to light a huge fire under the guitar industry’s inventors. Like digital signal processors, it may come from another industry, such as telecommunications. Sure, not every invention to come along is going to be of lasting interest or benefit to guitarists. Probably only a few percent of the inventions devoted to the guitar have ever had longterm impact. Case in point: Look back to the 1930s, when (under pressure of the Great Depression) inventors came out of the woodwork to create tons of new guitar-based contraptions. Few of the weird automatic fretting devices, acoustic amplifiers, string-bowing contraptions, or other oddities even survive in collections, let alone in the mainstream. But that’s the nature of invention, a unique combination of inspiration and risk that gets filtered by the marketplace so that eventually, we get some great stuff.