In honor of Les Paul:

How Electric Guitars Work

At the same time, a few individuals began experimenting with a new kind of electric guitar, using the same pickup as earlier designs but mounting the pickup on a solid block of wood. Les Paul, who was already a well-known acoustic guitarist, built such a guitar on a four-by-four piece of pine and nicknamed it “The Log.” Leo Fender, a former radio repairman, introduced a mass-produced solid-body electric guitar in 1950, and Gibson introduced a model endorsed by Les Paul himself in 1952. The solid-body guitars didn’t have the feedback problems that characterized hollow-body electric guitars, and they had greater sustain.

In the 1950s and 1960s, rock stars secured Gibson and Paul’s designs, as well as Fender’s famous Stratocaster, a permanent place in American culture. Since then, every generation has found a surprising new way of making the instrument sing. By all accounts, its potential is limitless.

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