Physics of Electric Guitars

In today's music electric guitar plays a very important role. Without it, we will remain an acoustic guitar, it has a limited volume and can make a small sound. Accurately understanding how electric guitar works will not be as intuitive as sound. Through this website, I tried to develop the physics behind the people's electric guitar. There has been an acoustic guitar from Spain since the 16 th century.

Electric guitar was invented in the United States in the 1930's. The first patent of electric guitar was awarded to George Beauchamp, and in 1931 it cooperated with partner Adolph Rickenbacker to manufacture the guitar. Many other inventors and guitar makers are also working on electric guitars. The famous electric guitar maker includes Les Paul, a pioneer of solid guitar made by Gibson guitar.

If you have ever seen electric guitar so far, you will find that most of them have thinner (and sometimes smaller) entities than acoustic guitar. Most electric guitars are made of wood, but the material in which they are made is not important. As George Beauchamp (a pioneer of modern electric guitar) pointed out in the 1930s patent, "Bodies can vary greatly in size, shape and structure, making them without departing from the spirit of the present invention His initial design shows that the body can be made with "simple integral casting of metal like aluminum". Early electric guitars were made of various materials, such as molded piezoelectric wood (one of the earliest plastics) and welded brass pieces.

Why is material more important than using an acoustic guitar? Since the body of an electric guitar is not so important in the generation and amplification of sound, what is really needed to do it is to keep the strings tight enough long enough to produce the frequency of the sound we want to hear is. While resonance still plays an important role in giving tones to electric guitars, solid electric guitars create a large part of the sound through a completely different process from acoustic guitar. In fact, it looks like acoustic guitar and electric guitar look alike and even if you play them in roughly similar way, they are completely different instruments.