TechStuff Shreds on the Electric Guitar

inventions of the twentieth century, the blender. No, that well, that could help the whole partying part. No, I'm talking about the electric guitar. Now, recently the world lost a great inventor, Les Paul, who was one of the people instrumental to use a pe in creating the electric guitar. He was not the first person to combine electricity with guitars, but we'll get to his contribution shortly. So why would you want to create an electric guitar in the first place.

There are a couple of reasons, the most, I would say, in my opinion, obvious of which is that if you want your guitar to be heard by people more than a few feet away, you're going to need to find some way to amplify it. That's a good point. And so you would want to be able to plug it into an amplifier so that the amplifier would project the

sound farther. That's a good point to which is, uh, you know why you have those giant speaker cabinets on the side of rock stages, right, because the only real alternative, at if we're talking about the earlier stages, is to put a microphone directly in front of the guitar and hopefully pick up the sound and and transmit it that way, which is not the best way to get a clean

sound out of your guitar. It's it's inefficient, to be honest, because the sound is not the sound waves are traveling from the guitar to the microphone, and of course, anytime sound travels through the air, there is the possibility that will become distorted, yes, which sometimes is something you want, but you want to be able to control it. You don't want uncontrolled distortion. Although uncontrolled distortion would be an awesome name for a rock band, it probably is one

already could be if not patent pending. Okay, so uh yeah, I guess we guess we do. We have a whole bunch of them pending, now, don't we at least three? So the way sound works, you've got something vibrating, right, and then that causes other molecules to vibrate. Eventually, these vibrating molecules hit our ears, causing little hairs to vibrate, sends little vibrations down to our ear drums, and that's

what we interpret as sound excellent. You've got to have some sort of molecules in the in the environment in order to be able to hear, which is why if you're in outer space, you're not likely to hear anything because the molecules are spread out so far apart that there's not much chance of one bumping into another. That would be the whole vacuum thing. That would be, yes, the vacuum thing. Yeah, yes, it's the hoover element of

say equation as I like to say. Yeah, I'm going to leave the science stuff to other folks, all right, Well, I of course wrote an article about can humans here in space? Spoiler alert they can't. Um. So, the the idea behind a regular guitar I mean, the reason why guitars have a hollow body, why many stringed instruments have a hollowed body body is so that creates a natural amplification chamber. Yeah, without it, you wouldn't hear very much.

And the the size and shape of that chamber, you know, has a lot of effect on the way a guitar sounds.

That's why some electric guitars maintain the hollow body while others go for a solid body, right, So you know, they both have their own merits and yeah, and early on in the the experiments in electrifying guitars, um many of the innovators tried to to alter existing guitars like hollow body guitars, but there was a problem with that and that you would often get distortion based upon the natural amplification from the hollow body and the electrical implication

you're getting from the electric guitar. Well, also depends on how you are trying to electrify your guitar too, because if you're just hunking up a couple of jumper cables to your guitar, that's probably not the best way. Not quite what I meant, okay, because I know that in early early electric guitars. They didn't always plug in in the same place, and they didn't always try to pick up the sound from the same place. Wait, you used a word there, pick up. Oh. Yes, it's not just

a truck. No, it's not. It's an important part of an electric guitar. Yes, because in in early guitars they tried to pick up the vibrations, the the sound vibrations up of you know, upwards, away from the guitar body and toward the neck and even at the end of the guitar. Yes, and now it's at the other end, the base of the guitar. That's where you're gonna find the pickups. Now a pickup. Uh, here, we've better explain, I guess the basis of an electric guitar, Like, what

makes the electric guitar work? I'd like to point out that electric guitars aren't, well, at least not in most cases themselves. Electric their passward, their passive exactly. Um, we're getting back to our old friend, the electro magnet here. Yes, I remember our old friend, the electromagnet. Yes, they got up and left the other day. Does I had to

pay for lunch? What a jerk? But electro magnets. Uh. You may recall from our previous episodes that if you have a UM, if you run an electric current through a coiled copper wire usually coiled around an iron core, not necessarily, but it can be UM, that can create a magnetic field. So electricity congeneraing magnetic field, and if you alter a magnetic field, you can induce electricity. So with a an electric guitar, you have a pickup at the base usually of the guitar that is a magnet

that has a coil around the magnet. And uh, that means there's a magnetic field magnet. That's what magnets produce. Right, So when you strum a string, the frequency the vibration of that that string um created distorts the magnetic field by destroying the magnetic field, oscillating it. Essentially, you create an electric current. The electric current runs through the little coil that's around the magnet. And then, Uh, if you don't have your guitar plugged into anything, it doesn't go

anywhere and all you won't really hear anything. If it's a solid body electric guitar anyway, UM, well you will, but you'd have to be very very close to it. You won't hear much. Yeah, it will sound pretty weak and uh, because there's nothing to really amplify the sound. Now, if you haven't plugged into an amp, that little electric signal will go to the amp which has a couple of different elements to it that can boost the signal and then convert it back into sound. And that's the

sound you hear when you strum the strings on electric guitar. Now, UM for an electric guitar to uh what I mean, assuming that we're not talking about an acoustic electric guitar in which you're basically attempting to amplify the sound from

the electric guitar. If you're talking about UM an electric guitar like, for example, a less paul Um, then the pickups are directly underneath the strings where you actually play, where actually strong or pick the strings UM, and that enables them to be very close to the origin vibration. And in some cases the pickups are designed to um move closer to or farther away from the string as you need to adjust them so that you can pardon

the pun for once uh fine tune your sound. You can sort of modify things too, as you need to to get the sound you're trying to get. That's not always the case. I mean, some of them are very very simple, where there is a single bar magnet that as you used as a pick up. But you'll notice too that some guitars use one set of pickups while

other guitars use several different sets of pickups. And you can actually you'll see switches on the guitar body that uh, you know, enables you to turn one set on or one set off, or modify the sound to to uh, you know, make changes to your sound without having to

sit there and you know, rewire the whole darn thing. Yeah. Essentially, you have controls that allow you to filter out certain frequencies, and so by choosing which frequencies you want and which ones you don't want, you can have your guitar sound

in you know, many different ways. You can have that really you know kind of crunchy rock sound that you hear from alternative rock bands, where you can have that more sort of twangy sound from uh, you know, a country western or even like the sort of the surf rock sound of a guitar. A lot of that is just through filtering out which frequencies you want to to

go to the app and which ones you don't. So it's kind of cool that with one instrument you can get so many different sounds out of you know, just by tweaking a knob or two. Yeah. And the one of the really cool things about an electric guitar as far as I mean just from a scientific standpoint, although apparently I'm not leaving the science to other people, UM,

is that you can make so many modifications. I mean that having it wired like that gives you a lot of control over the sound, and it actually enables you to uh share the sound and control of your sound with another p of your instrument puzzle, which is the amplifier, because once you plug it in, the amplifier becomes part of the electric guitar as the entire instrument. UM. In

some cases you're it's just simply going to amplify. But in a lot of cases, especially for rock musicians, UM, there are amplifier amplifiers you can buy that have a lot of the equipment built in that allows you to modify the sound. You can add reverberation for example, UM or distortion, which is very very popular depending on the

kind of music you're playing. UM. And then of course there are effects pedals um, some of which actually I know some people who have quite a few effects pedals UM and basically what these are doing enables they enable you to make slight changes to the way those vibrations are are distributed across the um, the electrical current from between the guitar and the amplifier, and then you know, from there to whatever else I guess technically the speaker,

but if you are in some cases playing saying arena show, you might have a microphone stuck up next to your actual guitar amp and then from there just going through the p A system out to the crowd. So there's a there's a lot of wiring and rock stars live lives I can only dream of. Yeah, I've had to haul around a lot of that gear so thankfully not usually the p A, but I just looked at that gear. Yeah,

it's heavy, a lot of it. What I think is cool about electric guitars as it does allow you to do things like have a guitar that has a solid body. I mean again, if if it weren't for the electrical amplification, then a solid body guitar would be pretty much useless because you would have to be sitting just a couple inches away to be able to hear anything that was

coming out of it in the first place. Um and uh Les Paul's is widely credited with creating the first real solid body electric guitar, which he called the log Um. It would it is it is. It was made by made out of a slab of wood, a solid block, and and uh, it actually could come apart in pieces. I've seen pictures of it. It was pretty impressive. And granted he refined that design lightly, that was not the design that Gibson picked up when they started to market

the guitars later on. Um. Yeah, and and the electric guitar has really revolutionized music. I mean there, it's that's

not a exaggeration by any stretch of the imagination. By pairing an electric guitar with an app and playing a note, uh, it's possible for you to get a vibration off the the speaker that continues to vibrate the string, and you get a perpetual note, a note that will last forever, or until the power runs out, or until the power runs out, or until your audience decides they've had enough of this and they're gonna go home. He just kind of play that one note. This is like the most boring,

grateful dead concert ever. He's jamming on one note and that's it. Well, you know whatever floats. Yeah, I think I could have manage managed that. You know, I bet there's a performance artists out there somewhere who's done this, and sure that I'm sure there are more than one. But yes, yes, I'm pretty sure. Um. You know, more power to you if that brings the grant money in

good luck. But um, if you've wondered, if you've watched a rock band play and then watched another rock band right after them, you go, why, you know, why does it matter what guitars they're using? You know, other than maybe a six swing string versus a twelve string or you know, uh, a regular guitar versus say, an alto or a bass guitar. Um, I'm sorry, a tenor versus a bass guitar. You might go, Okay, well, I get it. Once a little bigger than the other one has a

couple more strings, So you know, why are there? You know, what's the difference in a stratocaster versus the last Paul? Well, it all it's sort of all comes down to the things we were talking about before, the number of pickups, what kinds of pickups there are on it, whether or not it's a hollow or solid body, the kind of wood it's made out of, or other material that it

may be made out of, and um. You know, even Gibson changed things a couple of years ago when they offered an ethernet guitar because suddenly the connection is no longer analog, which is basically it's a you know, one quarter inch phono plug on either end. You plug one side in your guitar, one side and your amp. Well, Gibson changed that by incorporating an Ethernet connection. Well, that changes the sound even more, gives you an opportunity to play a really clean digital signal, which a lot of

purists really don't like the idea of. Um. You know, everything adds a little bit of change to it, so um. And that's why some people prefer vintage guitars over brand new guitars. They say, well, you know, it was made out of this kind of wood back in six five. It's made out of this kind of wood now is just not the same. And they may look the same to you or me, but that's not the same. And you saw one of those digital guitars over sea, Yes, didn't you? Yes, I did. I thought it was a

little weird. Um. Not not because there's anything necessarily wrong with it, but I thought, well, you know, I wonder if this is the kind of thing that's going to change, um, the way people play guitar. And I don't know that it has significantly. I haven't seen a lot of people with them. As a matter of fact, I've seen nobody in person with them. Um. But it was sort of the same kind of thing that you saw in the

nineteen eighties with electronic drums. They were all the rage back in the day because you could play all kinds of sounds on them. And now the purists I think have sort of maybe not one out because they still make electronic drums, but they have certainly taken the the electronic drum market back. And I think that acoustic or not acoustic, but uh, analog guitars, electric guitars are are

still predominantly the most popular. Yeah, I'm just waiting for the key tar to really really make an impact, right. And you know it's funny because I'm just gonna skip that um because it's there's a there's a website. I'm assuming it's still there. I can check real quick while we're talking. But um, there was a guitar website called guitar geek dot com um and basically, uh, it hasn't been updated in a while, but it allows you to

look at the rigs that everybody has set ups. You can see what kind of guitar that they that famous artist plays, along with the effects pedals they might use, and what kind of amplifier UM they might use. And it's really kind of cool because you learn things about certain guitar players like um Dave Davies of The Kinks, who liked to slit his um speaker and his amplifier cabinet so that it would provide just the right distortion sound.

And suddenly it's no longer about the guitar or the effects pedals, but um whether or not the speaker as a hole in it? Nice. Uh. Yeah, I'd like to see how how Queen got that amazing sound at the end of the with the guitar solo of UM we Will Rock You, because that's still to this day my favorite guitar solo ever. Yeah, no serious, it really is.

UM so here's a little trivia for you guys. Uh. We were talking about the oscillations of the string causing a change in the magnetic field, and that is what creates the electrical current. Um. That is based off of Faraday's law. So there you go. If you ever are watching a musician rock out uh on stage, you can turn to the person next to you and say, this is an excellent demonstration of Faraday's law, which is guaranteed to get you the ladies. Yeah, not actually guaranteed, your

ma y, some restrictions apply it. It worked on my wife, but she's taken So okay. Then, well are you Are you all rocked out? Yeah? I'm kind of rocked out for the moment. Well then I guess that takes us straight to a listener. Yeah, rock on this listener. Mail comes from Louis and or Louis Louis or Lewis. I don't know. You can write me and let me go hey me again. So you think I know how to pronounce his name? Bry Now finally got my modem working again,

so time to email you. In the video game podcast The New One, you said that the p S three had a cell based processor. What does this mean. Also, from what you were saying, it seemed that in the US Xbox three sixties are more expensive than the we. Is this true here? In New Zealand, a twenty gigabyte Xbox three sixties three hundred dollars, whereas a WE cost almost four fifty And I'm a bit confused. Well, Louie, Um,

let's talk a little bit about the cell based processor. Uh. It's a specific kind of microprocessor architecture, right, It's based off of the cell broadband engine architecture. It's just sell for short UM. And the idea here is that each cell and handle a certain amount of um of of calculations per second. UH. And the p S three has I believe, seven of these cells, So each cell is capable of handling a massive amount of information. The problem is you have to be able to design games that

take advantage of this. They're very good at handling parallel problems. So in other words, you've got a you know, one of them's handling graphics, another might be handling physics engine, another might be handling sound something like that, as opposed to all of them working together on one big problem. So so if you can divide it up if you can divide up duties for each cell. Uh, it really

takes advantage of the hardware. Um, otherwise you've just got a massively powerful machine that that you can't really take advantage of. But uh, you know, if you design the game the right way, that makes that system one in the most powerful system on the market right now or none. PS three would be the most powerful. But again you

have to design the software to match the hardware's capabilities. Now, as for the pricing, well back when the game consoles first came out and they didn't all come out at the same time, we should we should make that point. But the core system, the Xbox three sixty core system was two dollars and the Xbox three sixty the main system. Because the core system was the no frills version, the main system was three. P S three came out with

two different models as well. At that time. There was a twenty gigabyte version and that was four hundred and ninety nine dollars, But then there was the sixty gigabyte version that was five hundred and ninety nine dollars, pretty expensive states right in the US and the WE when it came out two nine dollars, So it was cheaper

by fifty bucks than the next least expensive console. I should also add many people have written in to point this out, and I think we mentioned it in an earlier podcast as well, but the those first PS three models were backwards compatible. You could play PS two games on them. It was only after they moved to the PS three eighty gigabyte version, and even some of the early ones of those were backwards compatible, but eventually they took that compatibility out of the p S three and

since then it has not been there. Yeah, and some of those older models are are much more um prized by PS three fans than the newer models because of backwards compatibility. Yeah, because it means one less machine that you have to have hooked up to your your system if you want to play all your games. Uh. And when we were recording that podcast, we were really concentrating on the systems that were available on the market as

of the recording of that podcast. And while you can find the sixty gigabyte p S three's, and you know, things like Craigslist or eBay or whatever, in general, your local game store, unless they're selling used consoles, they're not going to have one of those um in stock because they've been out for a while. Um, So that's really why we weren't talking about those and why we said that the p S three was not backwards compatible. It wasn't because we didn't know about these earlier models, because

you can't really get those in your average store. Yeah. Um, today the pricing is a little different. Uh. The Xbox three sixty Elite just got knocked down to two dollars. The Xbox three sixty Arcade is to forty nine. They are completely eliminating the core Xbox three sixty that's gonna go away once they sell out. That they're gone. Uh, then you've got the p S three Gigabyte Slim. That one is the and the Wei is still sitting there

at to forty nine hasn't changed, which is uh. If those for those of you who are listening in on our conversation with our single listener who lives in New Zealand, that's as of right now, recording a podcast three and twenty six cents in your US currency, uh for the four and or fifty dollars that it costs in New Zealand, So it is actually more expensive there he would have

to pay in US currency to get that machine. We would we would smuggle you and a us uh we and have you just pay us the equivalent, except that it wouldn't do any good because all the pictures will be upside down. Okay, then, so if you have any comments, questions, or you want to yell at me for making a horrible, stupid joke that was geocentric, you can write us. Our email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com.

We have articles on electric guitars and just about everything else you can imagine at how stuff works dot com. And Chris and I will talk to you again really soon for moral this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com And be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog Almum the house staff works homepage brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you