Solid body
Common woods used in the construction of solid body instruments are ash, alder, maple, mahogany, korina, spruce, rosewood, and ebony.
The fretboard is a piece of wood placed on the top surface of the neck, extending from the head to the body.
Some electric guitar necks do not have a separate piece of wood for the fingerboard surface.
The action, or the height of the strings from the fingerboard, is adjustable on solid body instruments.
Amplifiers allow solid body instruments to be heard at high volumes when desired.
While noting this, it will be assumed that electric lap steels without sounding boards are solid-body instruments for the purposes of this article.
The first commercially successful solid-body instrument was the Rickenbacker frying pan lap steel guitar, produced from 1931 to 1939.
The first commercially available non lap steel electric guitar was also produced by the Rickenbacker/Electro company, starting in 1931 The model was referred to as the "electric Spanish Guitar" to distinguish it from the "Hawaiian" lap steel.
The solid-body electric guitar is recognisable and features in rock, metal, blues, and country music.
The first commercially available solid-body electric Spanish guitar was produced by the Rickenbacker company in 1931.
The Songster electric guitar was made between 1936 and 1939 by the Slingerland Musical Instrument Manufacturing Company in Chicago, Illinois.
[1] Also it is reported that around the same time (1940) a solid body was created by Jamaican musician and inventor Hedley Jones.
In the 1940s, Les Paul created a guitar he called the "Log," which came "from the 4" by 4" solid block of pine which the guitarist had inserted between the sawed halves of the body that he'd just dismembered.
The Telecaster had a "basic, single-cutaway solid slab of ash for a body and separate screwed-on maple neck was geared to mass production.
It had a slanted pickup mounted into a steel bridge-plate carrying three adjustable bridge-saddles.
It is considered "the world's first commercially marketed solid body electric guitar."
"[4] It also had cutaway above and below the fretboard to allow players easy access to the top frets.
Some of the designs that Gibson and Fender created provide the basis for many guitars made by various manufacturers today.
Woods typically used to make the body of the bass are alder, maple, or mahogany.
"About 100 Audiovox 736 basses were made, and their distribution was apparently limited to the Seattle area.
"[5]: 31 Leo Fender heard these criticisms and took his telecaster model and adopted it to a bass guitar.
It had a slimmer neck at the nut, a different two pickup combination, and an offset body shape.
Many companies today produced models based on the body shapes first started by Fender.
It first appeared in 1967 when "Vinnie Bell invented the Coral electric sitar, a small six-string guitar-like instrument producing a twangy sound that reminded people of its Indian namesake.
