The Story of the Free Guitar
In the sixties, guitarists discovered that they could extract the most wonderful sounds from their instruments, with the help of amplifiers and effects. Many more would follow. But someone had to have started with distorting that sound, a sound with which the guitar claimed a very prominent place in blues and rock. More importantly, without that distorted sound, there would have been no rock music, let alone extended improvisation solos. A story about pioneers and infernal, unstructured noise to which the Fender Stratocaster lent itself excellently.
In the recently released 4K version of “Pink Floyd at Pompeii,” it’s even more intense than it already was: as if the sound truly comes from all directions. It’s especially the sounds that David Gilmour manages to extract from his Stratocaster, as if the instrument is connected to something extraterrestrial. It howls, whines, roars, scrapes and grinds, seems to want to tear open the firmament. “A Saucerful of Secrets” is at that moment a daring experiment, a minute-long improvisation with only one goal: evoking emotion.
These are pieces that can divide a fanbase to the bone. Was there or wasn’t there an idea, a concept behind “A Saucerful of Secrets”? Anyone who places the live performance from Pompeii next to the studio recording must conclude that there is indeed a composition underlying it, and nothing is done arbitrarily. Yet Gilmour’s solo is largely improvised, where the way to distort the sound from the guitar is the guiding principle. No means were left unused.
One of the devices the guitarist used was the Binson Echorec, a tape-echo machine of Italian make. It was a tape delay, but the Binson Echorec was capable of making the delays sound rhythmic, allowing Gilmour to make a note pulsate. The Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face provided the thick sound, which Gilmour himself was influenced by mainly playing with the volume knob of the Stratocaster. But the true secret in the sound on “A Saucerful of Secrets” lay in the amplifiers the guitarist used: these were Hiwatt amplifiers known for their transparent sound and, in combination with WEM speakers, could handle the effects well, without the sound “closing up.”
Whammy-bar
Something else that stands out is the use of the tremolo arm. At moments, Gilmour seems to hold the guitar only by that metal pin attached to the guitar. That “whammy-bar” was one of the most important features of the Fender Stratocaster.
In 1954, Leo Fender brought his Stratocaster to market. It was precisely that guitar that was often used in the long, improvised solos. That’s not so strange. The Strat has properties that make the instrument particularly suitable for the free form, not least because the guitar is relatively easy to modify: virtually everything can be replaced, with the original Strat serving as a kind of canvas, but it’s especially the tremolo arm – the whammy bar – that made the instrument immensely popular.
Essentially, the “lever” does nothing other than change the tension of the strings and thus the pitch. That “vibrato-arm” wasn’t new: already in the twenties, the first variant appeared on string instruments. The only problem was that the instruments immediately went out of tune when used, a problem that was fixed by Bigsby. Partly.
The arm that Fender mounted on the Strat – the “synchronised tremolo” – differed considerably from the Bigsby. Characteristic of the Fender system is the bridge that is attached to the body in combination with a cavity containing three steel springs that pull the bridge back to the original position. It gave the player a palette of possibilities to influence the sound.
Feedback-explosion
Playing the electric guitar wasn’t just about finger dexterity, but also about ingenuity to influence the original clean sound in certain ways. A technique that certainly came in handy was feedback. A true feedback-explosion can be heard in another, purely improvised piece: “Free Form Guitar” by Chicago guitarist Terry Kath. It even landed on Chicago’s first album, then still called Transit Authority. Many fans can’t listen to it: too intense.
Unlike Gilmour, Kath barely used effects. The sound on “Free Form Guitar” is the result of a guitar connected directly to the mixing board. By turning the volume insanely high, the sound overdrove.
The guitar in question was incidentally a Telecaster that had been considerably modified by Kath, among other things by replacing the pickup with a Humbucker pickup that has a much higher output than the single coils with which the Telecaster is standard equipped. By holding the guitar toward the speakers, he made the instrument resonate: the feedback. Playing with the guitar’s volume knob does the rest. The piece was recorded in one take, only because the sound technician on duty was alert enough to let a tape run while Kath played.
Sit and Cry: The Blues
“A Saucerful of Secrets” and “Free Form Guitar”: two legendary improvisation pieces where the technical possibilities to influence the guitar sound were stretched. Someone had to have started with that.
That’s correct, but it was by accident. It happened to Willie Kizart, guitarist in Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. During a recording in 1951, Kizart’s amplifier breaks down, and the speaker membrane itself tears. It results in a raw, shrill sound that can be heard on “Rocket 88.” As if the guitar lick is played on a washboard. The solos are filled in by the horns, but in the final chord, you hear the distortion of the guitar sound. Instead of recording the song again, the band decides to leave it as it is. That distorted sound gave an extra dimension to the songs.
From that record, all brakes are released. And from that moment, anecdotes roll over each other: who really made the guitar and especially the raw improvisation solo, great?
Improvisation is already commonplace in jazz, but not with guitars. Moreover, jazz purists looked down on the guitar. But there was a genre in which the guitar was more than welcome and in which the fairly simple compositions lent themselves excellently to improvisation: the blues. Guitarists like Buddy Guy and Otis Rush gave the instrument a full place in their soul-stirring music. Without Kizart’s defective speaker, “Try To Quit You Baby” from 1958 would probably never have been recorded. In that song, we already hear that distorted sound.
Even clearer is it on the B-side of that single, “Sit and Cry,” with a real guitar solo in the middle section. It still sounds fairly clean in the low register, but in the high register, you hear the raw edge that Guy achieved by turning his tube amplifier up. Although Guy later switched to a Fender Stratocaster, the guitar was introduced in ’54; these first songs were recorded with a Gibson semi-hollowbody.
A guitarist who went one step further was Otis Rush: directly in “Double Trouble”, you can already hear him playing a solo. Like Guy, he got the raw sound by turning the tube amplifier up so that the sound overdrives. Furthermore, Rush’s secret lies especially in the fact that as a left-handed player, he played on a “reversed” – right-handed guitar, which led to a special fingering. If you have to name a guitarist who put the improvisation solo on the map, you end up with Otis Rush.
Crying after Hendrix
Guy and Rush were the inspiration source for a generation of young, mainly British guitarists who devoted themselves to the blues in the sixties. And this young guard gets access to technology that the old blues brothers on the other side of the big pond didn’t have: effects. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page walked in the vanguard and began with long, extended guitar solos.
But in the US, extensive experimentation was also taking place – and take that experimenting very literally. Under the influence of all kinds of mind-expanding substances, guitar playing was also “expanded” by, for example, Jerry Garcia in The Grateful Dead. Garcia’s playing was unique: psychedelic, where structures were thrown overboard by combining folk, country, jazz, psychedelica and bluegrass. He learned the improvisation technique mainly from jazz and specifically from Miles Davis; Garcia copied it to the guitar. His sound was partly determined by a considerable number of effects, including delay, echo and the Mutron III, an envelope filter with which Garcia could filter out frequencies at will.
And then there was a guitarist who turned everything upside down once more: Jimi Hendrix. Ad Visser also writes about it in his book “Strange Days,” where not all facts can be verified. The story goes about how Clapton, during a Cream performance, permitted to let the still unknown Hendrix to play along for a bit. Clapton stepped off the stage deathly pale after the jam session, according to the story that Visser records. Slowhand later admitted in interviews that he had seriously considered hanging up the guitar after hearing Hendrix. There was a new kid in town.
Fusion
We can be brief about it: what Hendrix did with the electric guitar was unparalleled, and maybe it’s still not equalled. Hendrix’s playing style was deeply rooted in the blues, but he combined that with jazz-like freedom, psychedelic effects, including the wah-wah and Univibe, and a masterful sense of timing and phrasing. His influence is felt in virtually every guitarist who dared to improvise after him… David Gilmour and Terry Kath included. “That guy is better than I am”: a statement about Kath that is attributed to Hendrix.
With Hendrix, Clapton, Page, Beck, Gilmour, Garcia and Kath, improvisation became an indispensable element in rock. Many more would follow, also those who elevated improvisation to art. John McLaughlin brought jazz fusion to the rock idiom with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Frank Zappa mixed satire with virtuosity in inimitable guitar solos. Carlos Santana brought a Latin feel to his improvisations. With advancing technology, new generations of guitarists also came who each added their chapter to improvisation. Steve Vai, Joe “Satchmo” Satriani, Eric Johnson. Nels Cline (Wilco) and David Torn are pioneers in the use of looping and live-sampling in improvisations.
Improvisation is freedom. Every note is a choice, every bend a sigh, every moment of silence a meaning. Improvisation is also risky. It can go wrong. It’s not always “beautiful.” It is real. That’s why it’s so powerful and so human. Whether it’s about Hendrix’s passion, Gilmour’s floating sound or Kath’s raw courage, one thing is clear: as long as guitarists keep searching for new ways to express themselves, improvisation will continue to live on. In those unpredictable sounds, perhaps lies the soul of rock music.
