But this setup had limitations, so guitarists looked at ways to combine microphone and amplification technologies specifically for guitar. Many guitar players had stepped up to the microphone and had their playing amplified. PA units with amps and speakers were used to add volume to vocal performances, phonographs, and radios. Microphones were in wide use, and amplification was an accepted technology, particularly in entertainment. But, because it could not compete in volume with the drums and horns of the jazz age, it was limited on the bandstand. These and hundreds of other вЂњtinkerersвЂќ contributed to the eventual electrification of the guitar.Д«y the end of the 1920s the guitar was more popular than ever. The great guitarist Alvino Rey RickenbackerвЂ™s George Beauchamp Lyon & Healey technician John Kutilek and Frederick Dierdorf, who sketched out and applied for a patent on an electrified violin in 1924. But it was the generation prior who first saw electricity as the solution to the guitar problem. Leo Fender, Seth Lover, Walter Fuller, and Ray Butts, all to be revered one day as the great innovators of electric guitar, learned electronics in the 1920s and вЂ30s in part by tinkering. Tinkering with electronics motors came to rival sports, outdoor activities, and even making music in popularity. Electricity gave Americans a whole new way of living.

Now you could flip on a light, switch on a radio and keep your beer cold in a refrigerator.

The widespread availability of electricity that began in the early 1920s was an advancement so important itвЂ™s hard to find comparable events. This month, weвЂ™ll explore the early days of electric guitar pickups, looking at how and why it happened. Single-coil, dual-coil, and hum-canceling pickups tone and volume circuits tone-shaping effects and amplification all were first developed during this period. While even knowledgeable gearheads will begin the story of guitar electronics after World War II, the true genesis took place in a wave of innovation between 19.

Piezo electric pickups