Electric Guitar in 1890!

[Stratpicker]

V

Women air guitarists appropriate and disrupt rock culture’s consensus, undermining and subverting its gendered performance. This gender bending emphasizes women’s critique of rock culture’s masculinist attitude while asserting female power through the nonthreatening manipulation of an imaginary phallic symbol.

The Writer obviously found a book with long words in it.

[JimN]

How ingenious !
in looking at the patent the AC drive to the magnets is made by dragging a platinum point along a rough cut file thus making and breaking a crude circuit.
It must have sparked like buggery !
Here's the patent.... http://www.google.com/patents?id=7ZhdAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&dq=Breed+guitar&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=0_1#v=onepage&q=Breed%20guitar&f=false

Commutation-tastic!

[roger bayliss]

Well you live and learn new stuff all the time...

'Lorentz force' never came across that one before. Still notably about vibrating strings and magnetism in this design.

[JimN]

What we call an 'electric guitar' can be as simple as a pickup (a coil around a magnet) under metal strings - no 'electronics' are needed in the guitar itself.
Obviously, electronics are needed to convert the tiny electrical signals from the pickup into electrical signals big enough to drive a loudspeaker, which converts electricity back into movement (to push air around)
So I'm suggesting that an amplifier would certainly be classed as 'electronic', but the guitar would still be 'electric' - it is in the same category as a dynamo.
Ray

But the electric guitar is is not an instrument in its own, unadorned, right (save for the obvious exception of those electric guitars which are acoustic guitars which can also be played electrically, and I have a few of those).

The electric guitar is incomplete without the amplifier. The whole is an electronic system.

QED.

[ecca]

It gets cleverer and cleverer, the frets were wired so as to automatically start a motor that did the scratching across a file to generate the crude AC.
The 6 strings were split into 2 lots of 3 so as to enable a volume balance between the 2 lots.
Amazingly ahead of its time.

[RayL]

The electric guitar is incomplete without the amplifier. The whole is an electronic system. QED.

So what about other music makers which use movement in a magnetic field to produce a sound, like the Hammond Organ, or the Fender Rhodes, an electric piano? They also can only be used with an amplifier. If you use your argument and say the Hammond is an electronic organ, or the Rhodes is an electronic piano then how do you distinguish them from true electronic organs or true electronic pianos, which generate their sounds electronically?

Should a microphone be called an electronic microphone because it is incomplete without an amplifier?

There have been true electronic guitars, where a guitar-shaped instrument produces guitar-like sounds electronically but the thing with pickups under metal strings is what the world calls an 'electric guitar'.

Ray

[JimN]

Ray,

The Hammond (or any other electronic) organ is definitely an electronic instrument, whether it has an amp on board (like a Hammond) or has to be used in conjunction with an external unit (eg, like a Vox Continental).

It is true that the Rhodes piano (just about) makes a sound unamplified (the same was true for certain other electric pianos of the period, made by Hohner, Selmer, etc), but except that it needs a power supply of its own, it is entirely analogous to a solid guitar: it is not a complete instrument in itself. You could only describe it as a complete instrument if it had built-in amplification (and if I recall correctly, perhaps some models did).

I have never heard anyone refer to an "electric microphone". With one exception, though, microphones are another part of a (whole) electronic system since they are of no use without some sort of reproduction equipment at the other end of the cable, whether by way of amplification, recording or broadcasting. The exception is the original telephone system wherein a carbon microphone (in effect, a variable resistor with a value dependant upon received soundwave pressure) simply modulated an applied current so as to create a signal which could heard in a dynamic earpiece. No hint of thermionic valves or solid state semiconductors (until later).

In short, if what we hear depends on valves or solid-state devices, or both, it's an electronic instrument.

I'm sure I read all this when I was about 12 or 13 and newly interested in the electronic side of music and sound; I didn't make it up for myself (though I believe I am capable of having done so).

[ecca]

Anyway, forget all this hypothetical crap - now - shall I fit a 3 or a 5 amp fuse to my new guitar of this 1890 patent ?

[RayL]

Two 9 amp in series to make it humbucking.

[JimN]

Two 9 amp in series to make it humbucking.