Chet Atkins - Guitar Innovator

[guitarchuck]

I just ran across this article:

http://www.gruhn.com/newsletter/newsltr25.html

Here's some excerpts from the article:

In terms of pure innovation, Chet’s most important achievement was the "solidbody acoustic" guitar he brought to Gibson in 1982. He had come to prefer nylon string guitars because he had brittle fingernails, but with a conventional acoustic guitar he experienced feedback problems onstage, using a microphone for amplification. By this time, piezo-electric pickups were developed to the point that an acceptable acoustic sound could be reproduced. Just the original solidbody guitar designers had done, Chet did away with the acoustic body and had luthier Hascal Haile build a solidbody. It worked, and Gibson put it into production in a nylon-string version. Five years later, a steel string version, the SST, found broad acceptance among rock and country artists, and it established the solidbody acoustic as its own genre of guitar.

Today, the plethora of artist signature models would seem to indicate that artists are active and influential in guitar design, but for the most part, these signature models only represent a new combination of existing features, such as a wider fingerboard, a hotter pickup or personal cosmetic touches. When it comes down to true innovation and influence as guitar designers, the only professional musicians who we would rank with C.F. Martin, Orville Gibson, Leo Fender and Ted McCarty are George Beauchamp and Chet Atkins.

George Gruhn and Walter Carter

[bill_h]

Thanks for the link Chuck. That was some interesting reading.

They did right by acknowledging Chet but I wonder if they overlooked Bigsby and Merle Travis. It's my understanding that Leo Fender borrowed Merle Travis's solid body electric that Bigsby made for him and Leo studied it for a time before building the Broadcaster.

I see they also left Les Paul out but ol' Les has already been credited with inventing everything from the toothbrush to multi track recording anyway

[guitarchuck]

Hi Bill,
The article did mention Merle's contribution, even though there has been great debate over the years about that guitar and if Leo really copied it or not.:

- Merle Travis, whose finger-picking style influenced Chet Atkins, drew up the headstock design for a custom guitar that Paul Bigsby built for him in the late 1940s. Travis’s design, featuring all the tuners on one side, appeared in a cut-down form soon afterward on the Fender Telecaster and in 1954 appeared on the Fender Stratocaster in a rendering that was almost identical to the original Travis/Bigsby design.

One thing that I think they did fail to mention, It was Merle Travis' idea for the Bigsby vibrola. I think the story goes that Merle was looking for a vibrola that wouldn't throw a guitar out of tune. Merle said something like, Paul Bigsby was a big talking guy that said something like: I can build anything! So Merle drew a picture of what he wanted on a napkin and Paul Bigsby built it! Also they were both motorcycle enthusiast and Paul Bigsby actually used a compression spring out of a motorcycle engine for that big spring in the vibrola!

And Les Paul was also mentioned in the article, there has been debate over the years as to really how much did Les invent:

Les Paul did eventually design some guitars in 1969 with his own personal specifications, most notable of which was the low-impedance pickup. It offered guitarists a more direct signal into a recording console, but by this time the amplifier was such an integral part of an electric guitar’s sound that players stayed with conventional high-impedance pickups.

I think the article did good pointing out that not only was Chet Atkins a professional musician, but he also had a major impact on guitar design.

In this day and time, with dozens of signature model guitars available, it may come as a surprise that very little in the way of innovation has come from most of the guitarists whose names have appeared on these guitars. With the notable exception of Chet, the designers of the electric and acoustic guitars, electric basses, mandolins and banjos that we consider classics today were either non-professional musicians or, in the case of many of the most important innovations, men who couldn’t play guitar at all.

[Mike Nye]

With today's advanced signal processing, it now possible to obtain any & every kinda guitar sound ever produced from just one guitar, instead of a roomfull . . .

About the only really technical aspect of guitar technology still left wide-open is pick-up design; the final gateway in translating mechanical energy into an electronic signal/tone.