Hawaiian guitar
The Hawaiian guitar or lap steel guitar is an acoustic or electric guitar with steel strings , with or without a resonator. Unlike the usual guitar playing it is by sitting guitarist on the lap (ger .: lap down), the strings facing up. The strings are raised on the saddle so that they cannot be gripped. The lap steel (short name) is in an open tuning ( Open Tuning voted). The left hand does not grasp, but plays this form of slide guitar with a solid metal rod or pipe (steel bar). Typical of the Hawaiian guitar as a melody instrument is the singing tone , which is characterized by glissandi . The instrument is used in Hawaiian music , in the blues and, since the days of western swing, in country music . The pedal steel guitar was created in the 1950s through mechanical further development of the construction method, adding strings, necks, levers and pedals .
history
The playing technique of shortening a string not with your finger but with a sliding stick was already practiced in India with the eka tantri , a single-string zither that has now disappeared and has been known from literary sources since the 11th century. At the turn of the 20th century, South Indian musicians developed a variant of the long-necked vina , which is played with a sliding stick and called gottuvadyam .
The invention of this technique for the guitar is attributed to the Hawaiian student Joseph Kekuku , who around 1895 used the back of a knife to shorten the strings of his guitar - instead of grasping them - and create characteristic slide effects. At the turn of the century (after the annexation of Hawaii), the first musicians, including Kekuku, traveled to the North American mainland and performed in vaudeville shows. Other Hawaiian musicians who also used this technique were James Hoa and Gabriel Davion. Since the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco 1915), where Keoki Awai's Royal Hawaiian Quartets performed daily with great success, Hawaiian music has developed into the first (and longest-lasting) world music boom in recorded music history. Since 1915 the American record company RCA Victor has released Hawaiian records every month, e. B. published by steel guitarist Pale K. Lua and David Kaili. From 1916 on, all other companies with Hawaiian or pseudo-Hawaiian recordings followed. The steel guitar was soon represented not only in the USA but all over the world and Hawaiian music developed into an extremely popular style. Hawaiian guitars were part of the ensemble of the premieres of the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) by Weill / Brecht and the operetta Die Blume von Hawaii by Paul Abraham (1931). In 1932 Rickenbacker introduced the first electrically amplified Hawaiian guitar Rickenbacker Frying Pan ; this model was also the first series-produced guitar with an electromagnetic pickup . After the Second World War , a market for electric Hawaiian guitars, manufactured by companies such as Framus or Höfner , developed in Germany in the 1950s .
Guitar types
Basically any guitar can be used. An additional attachment on the saddle increases the string position so that there is no longer any contact with the fingerboard. Special Hawaiian guitars have a common structural feature of a rectangular strong neck (squareneck). A further three basic types can be distinguished:
- An acoustic Hawaiian guitar with a hollow neck was developed by Hermann Weissenborn . It has six or eight strings with the tuning E- (F #) - A- (c #) - ea-cis'-e '. Similar models today build z. B. the companies Manzanita, Fender , Gretsch (EBM) and recently also the Swabian companies Vando-Guitars and Bediaz-Music.
- Resonator guitars (e.g. Dobro ) are also available in the squareneck version.
- All-solid electric Hawaiian guitars are now being produced by many other electric guitar manufacturers based on models from Gibson and Fender. In Germany, paddle-shaped Framus or bulbous Roger guitars are among the early e-lapsteel guitars of the 1950s. Some models have three to four screw-on feet. They are then called table steel and differ from pedal steel guitars in that they do not have levers and pedals.
Guitarists
The most famous Hawaiian guitar players include Frank Ferera , Sol Hoopii , Bob Dunn , Leon McAuliffe, Roy Smeck , Don Helms, Jerry Byrd , David Lindley , Jerry Douglas , Bob Brozman , Santo Farina , Ben Harper , Cindy Cashdollar , Freddie Roulette and Scott Colby . Respectable secondary instrument lapsteelers are Pink Floyd's David Gilmour and John Paul Jones .
literature
- Mantle Hood: Musical Ornamentation as History: The Hawaiian Steel Guitar . In: Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 15, East Asian Musics (1983), pp. 141-148.
- Robert L. Stone: Sacred Steel: Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition . University of Illinois Press, Urbana 2010, ISBN 978-0-252-09030-1 . (In particular the chapter The Steel Guitar , p. 53ff.)
- Harald Thon: Ki Ho-alu. Some remarks on the development of the Hawaiian Guitar. Guitar & Laute 1, 1979, 2, pp. 28-34.
Web links
- Brad's Page of Steel
- Territorial Airwaves
- Hawaii Guitar & Lap Steel Guitar: The first guitars . Guitar & bass.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bigamudre Chaitanya Deva: Musical Instruments . National Book Trust, New Delhi 1977, pp. 88, 90
- ^ Tony Bacon, Paul Day: The Ultimate Guitar Book. Edited by Nigel Osborne, Dorling Kindersley. London / New York / Stuttgart 1991; Reprint 1993, ISBN 0-86318-640-8 , p. 50.
- ↑ Winfried Pape: Instrumenten Handbuch , Cologne (Hans Gerig) 1976, p. 43.