sal paradise wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 11:23 pm
What counts as innovation in guitars? Larry mentioned noiseless pickups. There have been plenty of adaptions like those over the years from fender: new woods, tummy cuts etc. Do they count?
You know, it's funny, because I used to complain about the limited frequency range of guitar pickups as a natural thing to address.
Without getting too far into it, electric guitars have high impedance pickups that capture the string's vibration in a linear fashion up until about 1-6 kHz, then there is what is in effect a very steep EQ curve by a fair amount of decibels, and then there is a very radical sloping off of the high frequencies after that.
Something along the lines of this, although I am including this image for reference to my point only:
In short, guitar pickups as we know them don't do a particularly accurate job of capturing the string.
So a noiseless pickup that was accurate from 20-20kHz would seem like a natural evolution.
What I didn't realize until fairly recently was that Gibson had done exactly that in the 70's, Les Paul was concerned about the same stuff that I am and so he and Gibson worked together on some guitars that had low impedance pickups, which are linear flat all the way through the human hearing spectrum and would capture the full range of the string's vibration.
Those models include the
Les Paul Recording and the
Les Paul Signature. There were others, and from some old catalogs I've read, it looked like Gibson was planning to branch of their guitars into low impedance and high impedance families.
It didn't seem to go anywhere, and frankly Norlin Gibson was much better at making plans then they ever were at executing any of them.
But my point is, the one major thing I would criticize Fender for not doing technologically is something that Gibson- always an innovative company throughout its history- had already done, and the market did not change.
This doesn't mean that the idea is bad, however, and I would still fault Fender for not making guitars with the same goal in mind. But in the face of a guitar market that has been taught to fear and reject technological changes rather than embrace them, and the fact that these companies have become sluggish and complacent around their success, I don't expect anything from Fender. I also feel that Gibson has finally been beaten down to where they will no longer attempt to innovate or lead the guitar market anymore.
But I am gonna get me one of them Les Paul Recordings, I tell you what.
Back in those days, everyone knew that if you were talking about Destiny's Child, you were talking about Beyonce, LaTavia, LeToya, and Larry.