Rock Guitar
Rock Guitar
Apart from just the love of rock music, the flashy appearance of the rock guitar holds a lot of appeal for guitarists of all levels of skill. Playing techniques vary quite a bit in rock music from other types of guitar music. Many great rock guitarists have contributed to the evolution of these techniques. Every aspiring rock musician will practice tirelessly to perfect their interpretations of the most popular rock guitar songs. The guitar parts in songs like Hotel California, Freebird, and Stairway to Heaven are easily recognizable classics among hundreds. Most of us will never play like Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, or Slash but we can certainly appreciate their skill.
When you think about rock guitar the image of a solid body electric guitar immediately comes to mind. Aside from popular belief that rock and roll began in the fifties with Bill Haley and the Comets, the truth is that rock was already evolving from a fusion of the blues, bluegrass, and country music much earlier. A lot of the rhythm music of the forties sounds remarkably similar to the rock music of the fifties. Early rock musicians played acoustic instruments in the beginning, but the development of the electric guitar changed all that and by the thirties it was widely used by rock guitarists.
Les Paul was an extraordinary musician as well as a technician and he believed that a solid body guitar would solve many of the amplification problems of the hollow bodied models in use. In 1941, he began work on a solid body guitar appropriately called the log with the support of the president of Epiphone. Gibson began working on similar instruments and in 1950 delivered the first Gibson Les Paul edition to Paul. These are widely considered to be the most respectable electric guitars in the world.
In the late forties other companies got into the electric scene. When Fender first previewed its prototype; it was called the Broadcaster model. The name was later changed to Telecaster and finally to the more familiar Stratocaster, which is the most popular guitar among rock guitarists today. In the mid-fifties Chuck Berry rose to stardom with an innovative playing technique to contributed to guitar’s rise to prominence in rock music. When Jimi Hendrix took his restrung Stratocaster to the stage a decade later, there was no longer any doubt about the guitar’s position in the world of rock music. There a few rock bands today without at least one rock guitar.
