Bigsby / Travis guitar

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A Bigsby double neck guitar from 1956, made for guitarist J. B. Thomas (center)

A series of electric guitars that the American designer, mechanic and entrepreneur Paul Bigsby (1899–1968) made by hand from 1948 to 1965 is referred to as the Bigsby / Travis guitar and sometimes also as the Bigsby Solid Body. He used drafts by country musician Merle Travis (1917–1983) as a basis. The Bigsbys guitars are among the first of the guitar type called "Spanish" to distinguish it from Hawaiian guitars, the body of which no longer served as a sound box due to the sometimes massive design . With their novel construction form, the Bigsby instruments were influential forerunners of the solid body electric guitars with a solid body introduced in 1951 .

history

Merle Travis is said to have made design drawings of guitars as a child. One of the main features of his designs was a headstock in which all six tuning machines were arranged side by side on one side. Travis borrowed this feature from 19th century European acoustic guitars . The Viennese guitar maker Johann Georg Stauffer , whose acoustic guitar model Legnani, built in 1825, had this configuration for the first time, is considered to be the inventor of this “6-0 configuration” . The guitar maker Christian Friedrich Martin, founder of the Martin Guitar company, who emigrated from Germany to the USA in 1833, also used this headstock shape on some of his instruments in the mid-19th century.

When Merle Travis met motorcycle mechanic Paul Bigsby in 1948, Travis had been a sought-after country singer and guitarist for about ten years . In addition to his work as a mechanic, Bigsby had made a name for himself with self-made pedal steel guitars . His instruments were played by well-known musicians such as Speedy West and Bud Isaacs. Merle Travis first looked for ways to improve the tuning stability of the vibrato system of his Gibson guitar. Paul Bigsby then constructed a new type of vibrato system for Travis, which went into series production some time later and was widely used as Bigsby vibrato . In the summer of 1948, Travis and Bigsby finally teamed up to implement one of Travis' guitar designs - an electric guitar with a largely solid body. Travis intended to bring the sound of his guitar closer to that of a pedal steel . In addition, Travis had attached great importance to the flat body of the instrument so that he could get closer to the straight stand of his microphone while singing .

After completing the first Bigsby / Travis guitar, Paul Bigsby built several more copies of the model based on Travis' draft on behalf of other musicians. This includes a double - necked guitar made for the country musician Grady Martin, as well as double-necked instruments that combine an electric mandolin and an electric guitar or an electric bass and an electric guitar on one body. Other well-known musicians who had Bigsby guitars made based on the Travis design were Hank Garland (who helped design the Gibson Byrdland Thinline model in the mid-1950s ), Jack Parsons and Zeke Clements . The exact number of guitars made by Bigsby based on Travis' design is not known.

Construction form and design of the Bigsby / Travis guitar

The basis of the construction of the Bigsby / Travis electric guitar is a neck that goes through the entire body ( English : Neck-thru ). This design feature had already been used in a similar form seven years earlier: The guitarist Les Paul had used a wooden beam to lengthen the neck of the instrument in his experimental guitar prototype The Log in 1941 ; however, Les Paul's construction did not have a one-piece, continuous neck like the Bigsby / Travis model. Bigsby attached the ribs on both sides of the elongated neck piece made of maple wood . The thus shaped body with a single cutaway carries a glued-on top made of bird's eye maple; the bottom of the instrument consists of a screwed-on plastic plate. The lower ends of the strings of the instrument running through the elongated neck are anchored in this plate . The sides, top and bottom of the instrument each form a hollow chamber on both sides of the continuous neck.

The electrical system of the first Bigsby / Travis guitar consists of a single pickup, handcrafted by Paul Bigsby, in a single coil design ( single coil ), three rotary controls and a multi-phase toggle switch. Some instruments built later have multiple pickups.

The top of the instrument is provided with decorative applications made of walnut wood; The tailpiece, the foot of the bridge, the frame for the pickup and the pickguard are also made of walnut. The latter carries a marquetry of nacre the signature "Merle Travis" in capital letters.

The most striking feature of the Bigsby / Travis guitar at the time of its creation is its asymmetrically shaped headstock . All six tuning mechanisms for the strings and their tuning pegs are lined up on one side. The top of the walnut veneer headstock bears the same “Bigsby” lettering that is used on the brand's vibrato systems. The headstock is angled slightly backwards for greater pressure from the strings on the metal saddle of the guitar. The neck is provided with a fingerboard of rosewood provided, in which between the frets the symbols of the four playing cards colors are inserted as inlays.

Influence of the Bigsby guitar models

In 1948, Californian radio technician Leo Fender borrowed one of Bigsby's guitars from Merle Travis for a week. In the 1970s, Travis claimed that Fender had studied guitar construction in order to draw inspiration from it for his own solid body models. Travis' allegations culminated in the claim that it was actually he himself who designed the first electric guitar models for Fender Musical Instruments . The plagiarism allegation has never been proven, however, and the Fender models differ significantly from Travis' design in by far most of the design features. The main similarities in the construction forms of Bigsby and Fender guitars are only in the outline of the headstock of the Fender Stratocaster model launched in 1954 and in the string ends running through the body of the Fender Telecaster released in 1951 .

The main design feature of the Bigsby / Travis - the instrument neck running through the entire body with the side panels attached to it - was adopted in later years by some other guitar manufacturers in a slightly modified form. These include the Rickenbacker company with some models that have been designed in this way since the early 1950s (the German-born guitar maker Roger Rossmeisl , who worked for Rickenbacker from 1954 to 1962 , used the design principle for the Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar and the Rickenbacker electric bass, among others 4001 on) and Gibson Guitar Corporation , which launched the Firebird and Thunderbird models with a full neck in 1963 . In addition, the body of the Gibson Les Paul, introduced in 1952, and that of the Gretsch Duo Jet, launched in 1953, are very similar in outline to the Bigsby / Travis guitar. Inspiration from the shape designed by Merle Travis could be accepted in all of these cases.

The original Bigsby / Travis guitar is now in the instrument collection of the Museum of the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville , Tennessee . A replica of a Bigsby guitar was shown in 2004 as part of the touring exhibition Electric Guitars on the history of the electric guitar in the State Museum for Technology and Work in Mannheim and in the German Museum of Technology in Berlin .

literature

  • Tony Bacon: Guitar classics - all models and manufacturers . Premio Verlag 2007. ISBN 978-3-86706-050-9 .
  • Tony Bacon, Dave Hunter: Totally Guitar - the Definitive Guide ,
    Guitar Encyclopedia. Backbeat Books, London 2004. ISBN 1-871547-81-4 .
  • Paul Day, Heinz Rebellius (Eds.), André Waldenmaier: E-Guitars - Everything about construction and history . GC Carstensen Verlag, Munich 2001. ISBN 3-910098-20-7 .
  • Carlo May: Vintage guitars and their stories . In it: Chapter The prototype about the Bigsby / Travis guitar, p. 7 ff. MM-Musik-Media-Verlag, Ulm 1994. ISBN 3-927954-10-1 .
  • Richard R. Smith: Fender - A sound makes history . Therein: Chapter The connection Travis-Bigsby-Fender, p. 95 ff. Nikol Verlag, Hamburg 1995. ISBN 3-937872-18-3 .
  • Electric guitars . Special issue of the magazine Guitar & Bass on the history of the electric guitar. MM-Musik-Media-Verlag, Ulm 2004. ISSN  0934-7674

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Smith: Fender - A Sound Makes History, p. 95.
  2. ^ Paul Day, Heinz Rebellius (ed.), André Waldenmaier: E-Guitars - Everything about construction and history, p. 39. GC Carstensen Verlag, Munich 2001. ISBN 3-910098-20-7
  3. ↑ Bacon: Guitar Classics, p. 26 f.
  4. ↑ a b Merle Travis on the Country Music Hall of Fame website ( Memento from November 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
  5. ↑ a b c Bacon: Guitar Classics, p. 61.
  6. ↑ a b Bacon: Guitar Classics, p. 60.
  7. ↑ May: Vintage Guitars and Their Stories, p. 8.
  8. ↑ Bacon / Hunter: Totally Guitar, p. 311.
  9. ↑ a b May: Vintage guitars and their stories, p. 8.
  10. ↑ a b Day / Rebellius / Waldenmaier: E-Guitars, p. 254.
  11. ↑ Bacon: Guitar Classics, p. 60/61: Double-sided illustration and description of the Bigsby / Travis guitar.
  12. ↑ Smith: Fender - A Sound Makes History, p. 97.
  13. ↑ a b c May: Vintage Guitars and Their Stories, p. 9.
  14. ↑ Electric guitars , p. 13.