Electric guitar design

The first commercial electrified guitar was the Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts model produced from 1931 to 1936 by Rickenbacker, with one Beauchamp-designed pickup and an early "Vib-rola" hand vibrato created by Doc Kauffman.

[1][better source needed] Tutmarc is also credited as the co-inventor of the magnetic pickup along with Art Stimpson, and the fretted electric bass guitar.

Paul was unsuccessful at obtaining a patent for his magnetic pickup as it was too similar to the telephone microphone coil sensor device.

Audiovox production was handed over to Paul's son, Bud Tutmarc, who continued building these instruments under the "Bud-Electro" brand until the early 1950s.

[citation needed] In 1950 and 1951, amplifier builder Leo Fender designed the first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar with a single magnetic pickup, which was initially named the "Esquire".

It was positioned as a deluxe model and offered various product improvements and innovations over the Telecaster, often based upon responses from working musicians.

Features of the Les Paul include a solid mahogany body with a carved maple top (much like a violin and earlier Gibson archtop hollow body electric guitars) and contrasting edge binding, two single-coil "soapbar" pickups, a 24¾" scale mahogany neck with a more traditional glued-in "set" neck joint, binding on the edges of the fretboard, and a tilt-back headstock with three machine heads (tuners) to a side.

The earliest version had a combination bridge and trapeze-tailpiece design as specified by Les Paul himself, but was largely disliked and discontinued after the first year.

[citation needed] The instrument's trigger mechanism required a specially-wired plectrum that completed circuit connections to each fret, resulting in a very wide and unwieldy neck.

These instruments are supposed to offer an advantage over the classical fixed-scale guitars and basses by providing more freedom in setting the tension of each string at the design and manufacturing phases.

in a more uniform tension of the strings, as well as possibly[weasel words] offer timbre and tonal characteristics somewhat different from the usual fixed-scale instruments.

In 1979, for the Chicago NAMM trade show, Ibanez built a 76-pound solid-brass guitar, primarily as an attention-getting gimmick but also to demonstrate that while such extreme mass would provide very long note sustain (a characteristic sought by many guitarists), the tonal qualities suffered.

Adapted by players like Ty Tabor, Stone Gossard, Elvis Costello and Jeff Tweedy, the DuoTone was a full "duplex" instrument that could switch between acoustic and electric tones.