About Electric Guitars

Possibly one of the most famous musical instruments in the world, used in almost every genre, and limited only by imagination – it could only be the electric guitar

The electric guitar takes its roots from the early 1900s when, needing more volume for their guitars, jazz musicians used large, hollow-body instruments to create a louder sound for use with the swing bands of the era. As magnetic technology was developed, the pickup became a reality and the first hollow-bodied electric guitars were introduced in the 1930s with solid bodied models appearing in the mid 1940s.

Yamaha began making electric guitars around 1965, in the midst of Beatle-mania and the swinging 60’s. With their radical curves, extended headstocks and multiple switches, these guitars were a hit with kids eager to explore the brave new world of rock music.

Aside from the obvious differences afforded by shape and finish, there are many factors that make guitars stand apart from each other - every single part of a guitar, from the bottom of the body to the top of the headstock makes a difference to the finished sound.

This guide aims to explain the key elements of an electric guitar so that you can get closer to your perfect look, sound and feel.

This wood has a medium hardness and excellent workability. It usually comes in a light brown colour with a subtle grain and is found in North and Western America. This wood produces a very balanced sound with a strong midrange, perfect for a great guitar sound. Alder is widely used for guitar construction - on most of our Pacifica range guitars and many of our bass guitars.

Ash is a hard and heavy wood that often has a large, distinctive grain. Swamp Ash is an alternative that is considerably lighter in weight and is also used on a lot of guitars. Ash provides a clear response from low to high end and has a lot of presence and bite in the sound, allowing it to cut through a mix very effectively and give a bright, powerful tone.

Hard, heavy and dense, maple is creamy-white in colour. Available in quilted, flamed and several other grain types, it is an extremely attractive wood and often used as the top material on premium guitars. Maple bodies are heavy and have a hard sound with an extremely strong, powerful mid to high-end response. Maple is usually combined with other softer materials such as mahogany to tailor both the tone and the weight of an instrument.

Mahogany is a soft, medium weight wood. It varies in colour from grey to red-brown and grows in many tropical places around the world. Mahogany has a weaker high-end response but has excellent low to mid-range balance and sustain - mahogany is often combined with bright, hard woods such as Maple to extend the high-end response.

On a set-in neck guitar the neck is inserted into and bonded to the body. Since the area around the joint can be shaped after bonding, access to the higher frets can be much more easily achieved. This type of neck joint tends to provide a more pronounced bass and mid range.

A through-neck is one piece of wood which extends all the way from the top of the headstock to the end of the body. The body is then bonded to the sides of the neck. This gives the greatest strength of any neck joint and produces fantastic sustain and low to mid range response. Construction is difficult and expensive and requires extremely advanced guitar building skills. Through necks are relatively rare on electric guitars but produce a unique sound and offer the ultimate in sustain and rich tone.

Single-coils generally sound clear and bright, with a sharp attack, producing a distinctive ‘single coil’ tone.

Single Coils are very versatile and are often used with clean or low-gain sounds to get a very bright, ‘twangy’ tone. Great for rock, blues, country, funk – any style requiring a bright, clear tone.

While single coils are often used with high gain sounds to excellent effect (including famous players like Jimi Hendrix), they can sound somewhat hollow when used with extreme amounts of distortion – making them less ideal for modern rock and metal styles.

The most obvious disadvantage of single coils is that they are susceptible to hum and noise when used with a lot of gain. This is not a fault; but simply due to the pickup’s design.

To create a sound free from hum, in the 1950s guitar designers developed a pickup designed to be as quiet as possible, and so the humbucker was born.

Humbucking pickups, or humbuckers, are essentially two single-coil pickups which are wired together, but one is wired in reverse in order to cancel the hum.

Humbuckers get their name because they essentially cancel out the majority of the interference and buzzing usually found with single coils (they ‘buck the hum’).

Thanks to being essentially 2 pickups wired together - in addition to having almost no noise or hum - humbuckers produce a fat, powerful sound perfectly suited for use with higher gain distortion. Great for rock, alternative and metal sounds when used with distortion or smooth, rich jazz sounds when used with a clean sound they can sound much thicker but can also be darker, losing some of the clarity and snap of single coils

Combining the best of both worlds, a coil tap switches off one of the coils in a humbucker and makes the pickup sound just like a single coil. This offers the player a wide variety of sounds from the cleanest of cleans to the heaviest of overdrives, all in one pickup.

This type of bridge has no tremolo capability but it transmits the vibrations directly to the body producing a fat, well-rounded tone. Adjusting the height and intonation of the strings is also very simple. The stop tail piece is also the most reliable bridge due to no vibrato function.

This is the most traditional tremolo design and is also known as a synchronized tremolo. It features a simple design that achieves excellent sound and sustain in a compact lightweight assembly. The main disadvantage of a vintage tremolo, aside from a relatively limited range of vibrato – the strings can only be ‘bent’ a few notes up or down,  is that it can suffer from string slippage and lead to a lack of tuning stability.

In locking tremolo units the strings are securely locked at the bridge and nut to prevent slippage and detuning. The range of arm movement is much wider than with a vintage tremolo unit and tuning is incredibly stable – even with repeated up and down bends (Using a double locking tremolo it is even possible to drop the strings to be completely limp – known as Dive Bombing). The locking tremolo produces a slightly more metallic sound, weighs more and makes changing strings a lot more time consuming due to the necessity of tools. However, the performance advantages only available with a double locking tremolo are normally more than enough to overcome any inconvenience for players who need an ultra-wide range of tremolo movement.