About this episode
For centuries, music was nice and clean…while different instruments gave notes different timbres, the frequencies of those notes was expected to be clear and pure…yes, you could add a little umph by playing fortissimo, but the dogma was “let’s not overdo it”… But sometimes the situation called for overdoing things…banging a piano turns a melody and a beat into some stompin’ boogie-woogie…a raspy, hard-blown saxophone brings energy to a performance… But creating pleasant distortion with either of these instruments—and we can name a few others—is limited to the abilities of the human body…volume and distortion and all the energy that comes with playing this way is restricted by how hard you can hit or blow into something… The electric guitar has no such limitations…it can be played so that the notes are pristine…or you can summon all demons of hell with volume, distortion, power, and glory and that is cool … The electric guitar is one of humankind’s greatest musical inventions…starting in the 1950s, it revolutionized many types of popular music: country, the blues, jazz, and most of all, rock…after it appeared, nothing was ever the same—and the sound of music changed forever…it’s impossible to imagine what today’s music would sound like had the electric guitar not been invented… But how did we get here?...let’s pick up the story….this is the story of electric guitar, part 2… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices