Hollow Body Guitars
Hollow Body Guitars Fast Facts
Throughout the electric guitar’s evolution, there have emerged three basic body styles: the hollowbody, the semi-solidbody, and the solid body. The first was the hollow body, since early electrics were f-hole arch-tops with pickups added. The hollowbody type is the most susceptible to feedback. Because of its large size, open cavity, and basically thin shell (all of which initially contributed to its function as an acoustic instrument), it resonates easily at moderate to high volumes and relatively low frequencies. However, recent advances such as graphic and parametric equalizers allow the guitarist to tame feedback to varying degrees by filtering out some of the offending resonant frequencies. If the like the comparatively mellow tone of an electric hollowbody – the instrument traditionally associated with mainstream jazz artists – be sure to try it out at the volume you estimate to be your usual playing level.
A Brief History of Hollow Body Guitars
The story of “electric-acoustic” guitars is thought to have begun with a man called Lloyd Loar. Between 1920 and 1924, when he worked for Gibson, Loar experimented with various prototype pick-ups designed to amplify the sound of an acoustic guitar. Unfortunately, he left Gibson to form his own Vivi-Tone company and his idea disappeared until the 1930’s.
It was then that the Rowe-DeArmond company began manufacturing the first commercially available magnetic pick-up simply designed to clip onto the sound hole of a flattop acoustic guitar and therefore to amplify its natural sound.
It was the Gibson Company who, in 1935, took things a stage further by introducing their ES-150 “Electric Spanish” model. This was essentially an f-hole, arch-top guitar fitted with a massive pick-up. Two strong magnets housed inside the guitar body were in contact with a single-fin pole-piece which was set beneath the strings. The fin, not the magnets, passed through the coil.
Other Gibson ES models followed during the 1940s – the single pick-up ED-125 and the twin pick-up ED-300 and ED-350. In 1949, they introduced their three pick-up ED-5, hailed as the “supreme electronic version” of the original L-5, and in 1952 it was joined by the Super 400-CES, an electric version of the Super 400 acoustic guitar. During the 1950s and 1960s, many famous guitarists endorsed Gibson electric-acoustics, and the company produced several “named” guitars – the “Johnny Smith” and “Howard Roberts”, for example.
From the end of the Second World War onwards, other
companies competed with Gibson for the hollow body electric guitar market.
The most successful were Epiphone (until they were bought by Gibson in
1957), Gretsch and Guild.
However, feedback has always been a problem with hollow body guitars.
In the late 1950s, Gibson brought out a range of guitars which were designed
to minimize this. They were called thin-bodied or “semi-solid” guitars
to distinguish them from the ordinary deep-bodied “electric-acoustic”
guitars. The first to appear (in August 1958) ws the ED-335T, although
others in what became known as the “300” series – the ED-355, 345 and
325 – soon followed. They all had double cutaways and thin bodies with
arched soundboards and backs made from laminated maple. They were true
“acoustic” guitars in that they were hollow and had f-shaped sound holes,
but they each had a solid block of wood set down the center of the body.
This was intended to increase sustain and prevent unwanted soundboard
vibration from causing feedback as in the hollow bodied style. The aim
of the guitars was to blend the sustain qualities of a solid body electric
with the warmer, more mellow sound produced by an acoustic instrument.
Semi-solid guitars were very successful. The modified ED-355 TD SV, first introduced in about 1959, had stereo wiring (which meant that the rhythm and lead pick-ups could be played through different amplifiers) and “varitone” circuitry (which allowed the treble cut-off on the tone control to be varied).
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