Growing up as a child of the Cult of Guitar, I always sort of assumed that various techniques, practices, and devices used in rock were pioneered by some committee or something. Actually, I never even put that much thought into it. I just assumed that things were the way they were just because.
Quite a naive view, actually. It occurred to me recently that someone had to be first. For instance, was the talk-box some crazy new invention by a faceless corporation and mass marketed to bands, or did a musician invent it for his own use? If so, who and when?
I think we can agree that the triple-finger hammer was invented by Eddie van Halen. But what about:
String bending
Whammy bar
Talk-box
Distorted guitar
Trashing hotel rooms
Leslie speakers
Stage explosions
Double bass drum
Leaping about the stage
Smashing instruments
Echo
Synthesizer use
The first synthesizer was made by Dr. Robert Moog in the '60s. From everything I’ve read, the first professional musician to get his hands on one and use it to record/perform was Keith Emerson.
Smashing instruments have got to be Pete Townsend and Keith Moon from The Who.
Trashing hotel rooms were probably done for a long time (blues or jazz musicians after a wild night of partying after a show maybe), but John Bonham of Led Zepplin turned it into an art form.
Sometimes it’s hard to say, because there’s “the first person to do it” and then there’s “the first person to popularize it”.
For instance, distorted guitar:
Dave Davies of **The Kinks ** often gets credit for popularizing that sound (he slit his speaker cones to get it) on You Really Got Me, but you can go back a little bit and notice that there were precursors, although not quite as savage sounding as Mr. Davies’. You can hear distorted guitar on Link Wray’s Rumble, Johnny Burnette & The Rock N Roll Trio’s Train Kept A Rollin’, The Ventures’ 2000 Pound Bee, and I’m sure there are others.
And, earlier still, a few blues records – I’m thinking of Pat Hare’s “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” and a few tracks by Joe Louis Hill (both of who were recorded by Sam Phillips as Sun, I think). These were not big-selling records, though.
Chet Atkins and Les Paul were early adopters of the Bigsby whammy bar, which goes back to the forties. There are similar devices on a pedal steel guitar.
There is a long history of electronic instruments, of which Theremin and Moog are high points but hardly alone. Electronic synthesizers were upgraded throughout the 1950s. Moog’s contribution appears to be the voltage controlled oscillators. From what I’ve read this was the breakthrough that made it possible to play like an instrument, but if there’s an expert out there I’ll happily stand aside.
The Moog moved into pop music through Paul Beaver of Beaver and Krause, who acted as Moog’s west coast salesman.
He was a friend of Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees, who used a Moog on the song “Daily Nightly” which appeared on Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. in 1967, a full two years before Emerson added a Moog to his keyboard repertoire.
Townshend is most famous for smashing his instruments, but he didn’t start it.
and:
And a third strike:
Keith Moon also had hotel room trashing down to an art form years before John Bonham.
Triple-finger hammerons, yeah, I’d agree. Depending on which interview you read, EVH attributes his first exposure to tapping (open string) to either Billy Gibbons or Jimmy Page.
Can you nail down"distorted guitar" for us? Otherwise we might get involved in a semantic debate concerning feedback, overdrive and distortion.
Leslies were in use by keyboardists before they were used by guitarists. Stevie Ray Vaughan tends to get a lot of credit for being the guitarist to popularize the use of Leslies, but the Beatles and Eric Clapton were using them long before Stevie Ray.
Nailing this down might be a good thing, too. Tremolo bars on guitars are nothing new, but using them in the way that EVH popularized is fairly new. Are you referring to Floyd Rose-style stuff with locking nuts, or just trems in general?
IIRC, Pete Townsend broke his first guitar accidentally, by swinging it around in a club with a very low roof. The crowd went nuts, and he though “Hmm… I might have a gimmick here”
Lots of good info so far; I won’t add where it doesn’t appear to be needed…
String bending
Whammy bar - concurrent with solidbody electric guitar construction; i.e., the 30’s and 40’s. Les Paul’s “Log” - a 4x4 hunk o’ wood with hollow-body guitar “wings” bolted onto the sides of it - had a primitive whammy bar, IIRC.
Talk-box - as stated, but Jeff Beck was using one by the Blow by Blow album - She’s a Woman…
Distorted guitar - An Arky did a good job on the commonly-cited early songs. John Lennon asserts that the beginning of I Feel Fine is the first example of feedback used in a commercial pop song - but feedback is different than distorted guitar…
Trashing hotel rooms - I bet opera divas trashed hotel rooms!
Leslie speakers
Stage explosions - again, opera, the 1812 overture, circus, etc…
Double bass drum - hmm, Ginger Baker of Cream was one of the first, but I am not sure if he got it from someone else…
Leaping about the stage - many performance types
Smashing instruments
Echo - invented by Les Paul in the mid-to-late 40’s
Synthesizer use - pioneered in rock by Pete Townshend, e.g., Baba O’Reilly and Won’t Get Fooled Again…
And as for Eddie innovating on two-handed tapping, well, I have not heard that he looked to Billy Gibbons, but I can say the lots of folks did both tapping and 12th-fret harmonics well before EVH did. Heck Ace Frehley did some tapping, and jazz guitarists like Joe Pass and Lenny Breau did 12th fret harmonic tapping. EVH took the techniques over the top and married them to hard rock pop tunes…
Leaping about the stage goes back to rock’s earliest days, if not further to jump blues and similar genres. Sonny Burgess at the inception of rockabilly was famous for cartwheeling and handspringing himself onto the stage–and he’s still performs today with almost as much energy!
Walker was clearly a progenitor of Hendrix, along with Buddy Guy (who was also influenced by T-Bone). But I don’t know if T-Bone invented those flashy moves, or was simply the first to apply them to electric blues / jump blues playing, which got him a lot of visibility, since electric guitars were louder and could be played up on stage yet still be heard and seen…
to my knowledge:
Feedback: When a guitar’s strings/pickups are stimulated by their own signal coming out of a loud amp, setting up a reinforcing cycle and a sonic squeel, howl or other huge noise depending on various factors
Overdrive: The act of pumping more signal into an amp’s circuit than it can handle, leading to distortion
Distortion: The byproduct of overdrive, when too much signal is sent into an amp’s pre-amp and/or power amp circuits, resulting in clipping - basically not processing the full signal efficiently, “clipping off” parts of signal and distorting it. It just so happens that this distortion can sound pleasing to some folks…
So you can overdrive an amp to get it to *distort *- and if it is loud enough, that can increase the likelihood of feedback. Got it?
Got it, though the distinction between overdrive and distortion is a little fuzzy (pun intended!), as they essentially sound the same. In fact, don’t fuzz pedals essentially force overdrive?
I should have worded that more carefully. I don’t know if Walker did it first, but I imagine those tricks became fashionable with the advent of the electric. It’s much harder to play one of those big acoustics or steel guitars behind your back.
There is enough of a difference between overdrive and distortion to keep the terms separate - but of course it doesn’t help that the terms are often used interchangeably (along with fuzz, gain, boost and a bunch of others) - and manufacters of amps and effects pedals will label knobs, amp models and effects somewhat indescriminantly.
Overdrive pedals - you can get overdrive/boost pedals that are not attempting to impart any tonal color on the signal, just boost it to increase loudness and/or lower the clipping threshold to get the amp to distort at lower volumes…
Distortion pedals - are intended to color the tone of the guitar either by shifting the EQ (most pedals come with one or more tone controls) or by “pre-clipping” the signal - i.e., they attempt to clip the signal the way an distorting amp would - but they try to do this before the signal gets to the amp. So an amp that is dialed up to deliver pure, clean tones can sound like it is clipping because the chips in a fuzzbox are doing that artificially (or even not artificially, since there is now a set of pedals that have their own tubes to naturally clip the signal…)
For the typical version of distortion, maybe Link Wray?