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Rickenbacker
Frying Pan |
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Back
in 1931,
George Beauchamp wasn’t trying to change the world; he was simply
looking for a way to get his Hawaiian guitar heard above the much louder
drums, brass and wind instruments found in the dance bands of the day.
His solution was the electromagnetic pickup, the heart of the modern
electric guitar.
Together
with Southern California-based engineer and manufacturer Adolph
Rickenbacker, Beauchamp created the world’s first electric guitar,
famously known, due to its shape, as the “Frying Pan”. It has been
suggested that instrument was marketed under the name of “Rickenbacker”
because it was easier to pronounce than “Beauchamp”. While others were
experimenting about the same time with the electrification of stringed
instruments, Beauchamp’s design was the most technologically and
commercially successful, and his design is the one on which all modern
pickups are based. Beauchamp’s design was the first to be successfully
mass-produced and more importantly, to be used on a regular basis by
professional players.
Beauchamp’s pickups are known as
“horseshoe” pickups from the two horseshoe-shaped magnets placed
end-to-end through which the instrument’s strings passed through. The
genius of Beauchamp’s design is that used the instrument’s strings
rather than its soundboard (the part of the instrument that produces its
sound acoustically) as the immediate source of the electrical signal.
This made for a much more efficient and powerful design.
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Matthew
Hill at Rickenbacker working with the Frying Pan.
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While the production model of the Frying
Pan was made of aluminium, Beauchamp’s prototype (shown here) was made
from a single piece of wood (company lore says from a fencepost), thus
making the Frying Pan the first solidbody electric as well as the first
electric guitar. However, the true significance of the Frying Pan was
not that it was the first, but that it was successful, on both a
technological and commercial level. Beauchamp’s pickup is the direct
ancestor of all electromagnetic pickups found modern electric guitars.
From Leo Fender’s bright single-coils and Seth Lover’s smooth and bluesy
humbuckers, to hot-rodded modern designs from makers such as DiMarzio
and Seymour Duncan; all owe a big debt to Beauchamp’s horseshoe pickup.
In addition to the frying pan’s technological success, it was Beauchamp
and Rickenbacker’s commercial success with their nascent electric
guitars that paved the way for their widespread adoption by musicians
and, just as significantly, their manufacture by other companies. As
Adolph Rickenbacker himself said, “When everybody started making them,
everybody started playing them”
In July of
2007 Matthew presented a paper on the 1931 Rickenbacker “Frying Pan” at
the American Musical Instrument Society meeting at Yale University.
The complete paper can be accessed from the
'Papers and Publications'
page. |
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