The Changing Right Hand

Instruments can tell us stories that their players have forgotten. Although it seems counterintuitive, the ubiquity of culture or tradition can sometimes increase the danger of it being lost; Information that “everybody knows” isn’t written down or recorded simply because everybody knows it. However, it can quickly become lost once cultural transmission is interrupted. The classic example of this is ornamentation and other performance practice of the Baroque era. But there is another striking, yet almost completely overlooked, example from recent times; the evolutionary narrative of right-hand technique on the electric guitar and electric bass. Right-hand playing techniques on both these instruments have changed dramatically, and these changes are reflected and documented in instruments made during the last 80 years. On most fretted instruments right-hand technique is often not thought about much by players (Dick Dale excepted); the left hand is where it's at – that's where the notes are made! And yet an examination of electric guitars and basses from the 1930s to the 1970s shows a sea-change in the right-hand technique both instruments, one that appears to have gone mostly unnoticed by players and writers on the electric guitar.

The early electric guitar was dominated by the Hawaiian-style instrument (also known as a lap steel). Although most musicians are aware of distinctive (technique Hawaiian playing – the use of a steel bar to fret the notes – players often forget that the right-hand technique of the time was equally distinctive, in that players did not typically rest the right hand on the bridge or strings, the better to encourage the long ringing sustain typical of Hawaiian playing. Since the main sonic feature of the Hawaiian guitar is its singing sustain, it makes sense that manufacturers would design the instruments to maximise this effect by enabling them to be played in a way that didn't damp the strings. The patent for the 1932 Rickenbacker "frying pan" electric Hawaiian guitar states that its "horseshoe" pickup, which completely encircles the strings, was designed to also be used as a hand rest to just such an effect. Early electric players tended to use this tone-sustaining right-hand technique when playing Spanish-style instruments and playing other music genres such as jazz, and country and western. These early electric Spanish-style guitars typically had places to rest the palm in the manner of Hawaiian guitars. Exceptions were those electric guitars that were based on acoustic guitar – both flat-top and arch-top designs. Before the early 1950s, electric players, even when using arched-top guitars tended to use this type of right-hand technique, suspending the right hand over the bridge in order to not use the strings.

However, in the 1950s a playing style that utilised right-hand  palm muting – used by acoustic blues players – was adopted by rock 'n' roll electric guitar players, and has since become the standard technique for electric guitar. Although ubiquitous today, the new palm-muted style did not become dominant overnight. There was a gradual but constant change in playing techniques from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Electric guitars made during this time reflect in their designs to this new right-hand style. Indeed many well-established “classic” guitar designs popular today features which mystify today’s musicians who are unfamiliar with the original intended uses.

 The much maligned 1952 Les Paul tailpiece.

Probably the most notorious of these early right-handed designs is the "trapeze" bridge found on the earliest versions of the Les Paul in 1952 and 53. The bridge on this guitar was designed in such a way that the strings wrapped under the bridge, rather than over it, as was typical on other Gibson models. This bridge has been much maligned. Many, if not most of them have been replaced. Interestingly, the bridge is one of the few aspects of the guitar that Les Paul is reputed to actually had direct input into. If so, it's not surprising since it perfectly fits in with his playing style, which featured long, ringing, Hawaiian like tones.

The even more maligned Stratocaster “ashtray” bridge cover.

Early Fender guitars had a metal covering over the bridge – colloquially known as an "ashtray"– that most modern players do not use. In fact most modern players, if they think about it at all, wonder why Fender even includes such a useless accessory with the guitar. Fender electric basses from the 1950s and 60s also have a metal cover covering the bridge, but its purpose was different – it was to hold a piece of foam rubber against the strings to slightly muted them, in order to create a double bass-like effect. These covers are also discarded by most modern players.

The historical designs of the electric bass document a change in right-hand technique by the position of its finger rest. On the earliest electric basses by Fender the finger rest is on the treble side of the body, close to the G string. This indicates that the player was expected to use his farm to pluck the strings. During the 1960s, the finger rest moved across the body to the bass side of the instrument, close to the E string. This indicates that now it was the thumb that was supposed to rest, while the fingers pluck the strings. (Typical right-hand fingering technique of the time, which continues to be the most popular way of playing today, is to use the first and second fingers an alternating motion, similar to right-hand classical guitar technique.) Beginning in the late 1970s, many manufacturers start to omit finger rests altogether. This may be tied to the rise of funk-style "slap" based technique in which the right thumb is used to strike the string in a hammer-like action. Speaking from experience, it's very easy to accidentally hit a finger rest when slapping and popping. Finger rest on basses have not altogether disappeared, but when they are found today they are almost always on the bass side. The one exception to this are replicas of early 1950s instruments.

Unawareness by modern players of historical right-hand technique (we are now talking about 60 to 80 years ago – almost on the cusp of living memory) has resulted in modern players often regarding the earlier iterations of these instrument's configurations as just plain bad design. Nothing could be farther from the truth; the designs did exactly what the designers intended them to do. It's just that, for today's electric guitarists, the left-hand no longer knows what the right hand was doing.

In Praise of the Quarter-Inch Phone Jack

I am blessed/cursed with a mind that tend to see things a bit differently. A good friend of mine who is a famous rock journalist (Hi Alan!) says that he can always count on me for an alternative, usually contrarian viewpoint. One of the ways my contrarian-ism manifests itself is with a fascination with things that many others find trivial or dull, musicologically speaking.

Like the ¼ inch phone jack:

The humble 1/4 inch phone jack; often seen, never thought about.

Connecting cables using the ¼ inch phone jack are ubiquitous; if you have ever seen any type of electrified music performed live, you've seen one. If you've plugged an electric guitar/electric bass, electric keyboard or anything else into an amplifier, you've used a quarter-inch phone jack cable. Pretty much every music store I've ever been in, except for those that specialise in antique instruments, sell them. Even if an electric guitar player is playing wirelessly, the transmitter still is connected to the guitar, and the receiver is connected to the amplifier, by ¼ inch jacks.

The design and nomenclature of the ¼ inch phone is mostly self-explanatory; “quarter inch” is the diameter (roughly) of the business end of the male connector and the hole it fits into. The term “¼ inch” is typically used the to differentiate the quarter-inch phone jack from other similar connectors of different sizes, such as the mini phone plug. “Phone” refers to the fact that these connectors were originally designed to connect phone calls on old-fashioned manual telephone switchboards. The term “jack” is a little bit more obscure; one of the early types of electrical switches was the bladed throw switch, in which a hinged metal blade with a handle at the end would complete an electrical circuit when pushed into a metal receiving clip. If you have seen old Frankenstein movies, you have seen the good doctor use these at the dramatic moment when he brings his monster to life (although in this case, they are double throw switches with a single handle). The old name for these switches was “jack-knife switch”, since the pivoting blade resembled the blade on a jack-knife. From there, temporary electrical connectors of any sort became known as “jacks”. The proper old-school name for the ¼ inch phone jack is TS (Tip, Sleeve) connector; the tip of the jack is the contact point for the hot (positive) lead, while the sleeve and casing is the (negative) ground. Stereo quarter inch phone jacks – typically used for stereo headphones – are known as TRS (Tip, Ring, Sleeve) connectors; a ring on the shaft of the jack between the tip and the sleeve is the contact for the second hot lead, allowing a stereo connection.

Phone jacks were invented in the late 19^th century and changed little since then. The most commonly known variety of ¼ inch phone jack is the one designed and marketed by the Switchcraft company in 1946 (shown above). Considering how ubiquitous they are as musical connectors today, it’s strange to consider that phone jacks were just one of many options available for connecting nascent electronic musical devices to amplifiers. The 1929 Stromberg-Voisinet Electro guitar and its associated variants (the first amplified instruments with a pickup to be marketed) used so-called “banana plug” connectors – which are smaller and somewhat less robust than phone plugs, as well as being generally un-banana like – in which each end of the connecting cable ended in two individual plugs, one for hot and one for ground. Lloyd Loar’s ViViTone instruments of the mid 1930s also use these connectors. The wood-bodied prototype of the Rickenbacker frying pan – the first electric guitar – used a screw-down bare-wire connector, of the type that radio hobbyists often employed. However, the aluminium-bodied production version of the Rickenbacker frying pan used quarter inch phone jacks up to connect the instrument to the amplifier. And with very few exceptions (Russian electric guitars made during the Soviet era used a five wire jack similar to a modern 7 pin MIDI connector – possibly to assure non-compatibility with western instruments), every electric guitar, everywhere, since that time has done the same.

Yet there is no particular reason that this should be – there are lots of ways of connecting electronic wires to electronic devices and few modern electronic devices use the same connectors they did in the 1930s. Yet for instrument-to-amplifier connections, the quarter inch phone jack has reigned supreme since 1932. If it seems not strange to you that it is possible to plug an electric guitar from 1932 into an amplifier made over 80 years later, consider the difficulties you would have in trying to charge your mobile phone with any other charger other than that provided by the manufacturer, in spite of the fact that all phone-chargers essentially function in the same way; Apple, for example, seems to make non-inter-functionality of its iPhone accessories inherent in the design. And speaking of power supplies, even mains-power (plug-into-the-wall type for my American readers) has changed greatly over the past 80 years in both the United States and United Kingdom. The US has gone from a two-pin socket (which back in the day would allow certain types of two-pin plugs to be connected in such a way as to reverse the electric device's polarity – which sometimes had dangerous results) to the modern three-pin grounded-type. Although uncommon now, you can still sometimes see the obsolete two-pin type in older houses. Up until the late 1960s, the UK had several competing electrical connection systems; it was common for electrical appliances to actually be sold without the wall plugs – after you purchased your device, you would then have to install the correct plug for use in your house. (A slight digression here, I have seen some of these older-type sockets in homes built in the 1920s and 30s, and for some reason, the sockets are located at waist height, rather than near the floor. The light switches in these houses were also mounted at the same height, which seems rather low to modern eyes.)

And the ¼ inch phone jack wasn’t just the standard for connecting instruments to amplifiers; synthesizers of the 1960s and 70s which used a patch bay-type system to enable signal circuitry (modern modular analog synthesizers use the same system), use these quarter-inch cables in a manner very reminiscent of their original function: directing signals in a telephone switchboard. However, it's not clear if their 1960s and 70s use was due to the telephone switchboard connection or the quarter-inch jack's by-then ubiquity in electric music.

Now I understand my obsession with quarter-inch phone jack cables may be a little strange. As an undergraduate I composed an art-music piece for six amplified quarter-inch phone jack cables; the musicians played the cables by touching the live tips of the phone jacks, producing the buzzing 50 cycle hum (which would be 60 cycle hum in the US) that’s familiar to any musician who was plugged something into an amplifier. By judiciously selecting the amplifiers used for the performance by the quality of their earthing ("grounding" in the US), it was possible to create a quite varied sound-world.

So why, has the quarter-inch phone jack remained the go-to connector for electric musical instruments for over 80 years? There are actually two ways to answer that question. The first is with reasons; phone jacks were easily available, they were robust, and they did the job in a simple and elegant fashion. There was no need to invent something else. The second reason is… no reason at all; they probably remain the standard, not because of a conscious decision made by a person or organisation, but the lack of a decision to change to something else – since it worked, no one thought about it, so there was no reason to change it. Although common and unpretentious, the quarter-inch phone jack still bears thinking about; it’s hard to overstate how vital ¼ inch phone jacks are as tools of the contemporary musician.

If electricity is the blood that drives modern music, quarter-inch phone jack cables are the veins that keep that music flowing.