Author: John Teagle

“No longer is the electric Hawaiian Guitar restricted to professional players – here is a genuine Gibson instrument that costs only $100, complete with instrument, case, amplifier with slip cover, and cord.”

So introduced in Gibson’s Catalog X of very late 1936, the EH-100 Hawaiian set cost a third less than the company’s EH-150 set, which by this point had the updated six-tube chassis and “Echo” extension speaker.

While National-Dobro had already released its lower-priced Supro line and mail-order catalogs like Montgomery Ward, Speigel, etc. offered early electric sets for under $100, they didn’t say Gibson. Like the competition, the earliest EH-100 guitar lacked the Alvino Rey-designed tone control, but it wasn’t long before Gibson added one to its lower-priced instrument, making the 100 set comparable in performance to the four-tube 150 sets from earlier in the year. Like these early 150 amps, the four-tube 100 amp lacked both volume and tone controls.

It should be noted Gibson did not offer a Spanish-neck electric guitar to go with the original 100 amp, as they were just releasing their first magnetic-pickup electric Spanish, the ES-150 (which wouldn’t be shipped to dealers until ’37). Despite their relatively late start, the company would quickly go on to dominate the pre-WWII electric market, with a full line of high-end instruments, such as mandolins, banjos, doubleneck Hawaiians, an early pedal steel, experimental violins and basses, etc.

Complementing these at the lower end of the market were the small line of 100 (and later 125) instruments and their matching amplifiers. Covered here on a year-to-year basis, it’s evident Gibson not only changed the EH-100 amplifier’s look annually (think automobile manufacturing), but the engineering department was continually upgrading the circuitry.

1936-’37 (Catalog X)
Offered on its own at $50, the first EH-100 amps were promoted as the mate to the new EH-100 Hawaiian guitars. Dressed in “Strong imitation black leather covering” with a white Gibson logo stenciled on the lower right corner of the face, the box housed a 10″ field-coil speaker and a bottom-mounted, rear-facing chassis. Embossed lines framed the perimeter of the cabinet, with metal corner protectors on the bottom.

Like the early E-150 model, only two stages of amplification were employed, with a 6N7 twin-triode (amplification factor 35) handling the gain department (again, run in parallel for Class A operation, as specified by the RCA tube manual). Twin 42 power pentodes operating in push/pull were probably fed by a transformer phase inverter, although there are other, less-than-ideal (but cheaper) ways to achieve this function. It’s doubtful whoever was designing Gibson’s amps at the time would have chosen such a circuit for a high-fidelity amplifier (anybody have one of these black-covered models?).

Also like the first E-150 amps, the first 100s got their juice from an 80 rectifier, came fitted with two parallel inputs and had no controls in the circuit. A fuse was the only other “feature” of this bare-bones model. It’s interesting there was no tone control on the first EH-100 guitars either, though this would soon change as the last of the black-finished 100 Hawaiians had the modern two-knob arrangement.

1937-’38 (Catalog Y)
By the release of the next catalog (which were being cranked out annually during this progressive era), Gibson offered both a new look and a new circuit for the now $110 EH-100 set ($55 for the amp alone). The new model amp was covered in “Very handsome tan aeroplane cloth covering – this material is tough and can be washed.” Dark stripes running vertically accented the light colored covering, as did the logo, the bottom-mounted leather corner protectors and the big brown leather handle, as seen on the EH-150 amp.

A three-stage circuit using five tubes was instituted, with the original 6N7 replaced by a 6C8 twin-triode (amplification factor 36) and a single-triode 6C5 (amplification factor 20). Again, two inputs were standard, but only one was for the instrument, with the second specified for use with a microphone. While not mentioned in the catalog, this version’s schematic shows a volume control operating on the mic input only (the AC power switch was shown built into the volume pot – turning the volume knob turned the amp on). Each channel used its own section of the 6C8 preamp tube.

Under “Tubes” in the “Electric Guitar Supplies” section of the catalog, the relatively new 6V6 beam power tubes were listed, implying a change in the output section occurred after the schematic was drawn up, but prior to the catalog’s release. This also suggests that either the first tweed 100s still used the 42 power tubes, or there were later version black-covered amps with the new five-tube circuit.

1938-’39 (Catalog Z)
A new look for ’38 featured “handsome dark brown Aeroplane cloth with harmonizing yellow stripes,” and a matching logo. The pattern of the stripes was the same as previously used, only rotated 90 degrees, to the horizontal plane. Dimensions were given for the cabinet as 12″ high, 14″ tall and 7″ deep. An enclosed back was added, as seen on the 150s, and the leather corner protectors were replaced with metal, although these were not included in the catalog shot.

“Has six tubes and three stages of amplification with 8-watt output.” Unfortunately, the tubes were not listed (and somebody here didn’t do enough research!). Gibson made no mention of “seven (or eight) tube performance,” so it’s hard to speculate whether they used any twin triodes in the new circuit. An extra gain stage for the mic channel seems a safe bet, but as to whether a transformer was still being used for the phase inverter, as on the seven tube 150, or the function was performed by a tube, as on the ’40 EH-100, we’ll have to check and report back later.

By ’38, it was obvious to Gibson that electric Spanish guitars were a viable offering and they expanded that portion of the line to include the new ES-100. Like the EH-100 Hawaiian, the Electric Spanish model was “designed for use with the EH-100 amplifier” (the first of these guitars may have come with the earlier five-tube 100).

1939-’40 (Catalog AA)
Cosmetically, the ’39 model appears similar to the ’38, except for the number and spacing of the “harmonizing” stripes. Again, the text also specified metal corners, although these were not included in the updated, retouched picture. The description of the electronics was unchanged.

Gibson provided their services to numerous wholesalers for “contract brand” instruments, e.g., Cromwell (C.M.I.) and Capital (Jenkins), who offered 100-style amps with the enclosed case. These are not to be confused with Gibson’s in-house bargain line, Kalamazoo. By the late ’30s, Gibson’s budget line had been expanded to include electrics, which allowed the company to put a better quality 100 line out and still offer a competitive line under it, as the cost of building amplifiers dropped in the second half of the decade.

1940-’41 (10/1/40 supplement)
Introduced around the same time as Gibson’s short-lived top of the line EH-275 amp (in natural maple – info/photos, please!!), the dark grained $60.50 EH-100 amp would, like the 275, not survive to the next catalog installment. National was already in the middle of a massive advertising campaign for its wooden-cabinet Model 100 Deluxe, Epiphone had released its ever-so-stylish curly maple models, and Vega was joining in with its redesigned two-tone woodies. So Gibson was merely keeping up with the fashions of the day.

A 12″ X 15″ X 8″ rectangular cabinet constructed of 3/8″ solid mahogany was Gibson’s mate for its new (and equally short-lived) unbound, slab-bodied EH-100 Hawaiian guitar; “Natural finish mahogany instrument and amplifier both perfectly matched in quality and appearance.”

The removable open-back lid housed a 10″ speaker, with the chassis also encased in mahogany; “Amplifier chassis and speaker in one case for ease in carrying, but may be detached to eliminate tube rattle and other noises.” There appears to be an inherent structural frailty to this design, compared to the enclosed cabinets that preceded and followed it. However, this is without a doubt the looker of the bunch! The example shown here, courtesy of Ray Pirotta, is reported to be a real screamer, too.

Tubes included a 5Y3 rectifier, twin 6V6s for outputs, a 6N7 twin-triode phase inverter, a 6C5 triode preamp common to the Microphone and Instrument channels, and a 6SQ7 triode (amplification factor 100) for additional microphone gain. As on earlier models, the volume control worked on the mic input only. What is now referred to as a “Fender-style” leather handle replaced the large variety that would continue to be used on the 150s.

EH-125 1941-’42 (May 20, 1941 Supplement and Catalog BB)
Gibson quickly reverted to its enclosed-back design for the wooden 100’s replacement, the newly named (and improved) EH-125, costing $125 for the Hawaiian set or $65 for the amp alone. The round-shouldered cabinet appears similar to the one used for the 150 amps, save for the “…rich cordoba brown covering.” The large handle was also reinstated and a 12″ speaker replaced the long running 10″, making the 125 more of an inexpensive 150 than an expensive 100.

Electronically, the 125 was based on the twin-6V6-powered 100 it replaced, albeit with a revised circuit. The 6SQ7 mic preamp and 5Y3 rectifier remained, but the 6C5 triode common to both Microphone and Instrument inputs was replaced with another high-gain 6SQ7. A 6J5 single triod replaced the previous 6N7 for the phase inverter function, with Gibson claiming four stages of amplification. Also like the 100, the 12 included three inputs, with the Volume control effecting the mic input only.

EH-110 1937-’42
As mentioned in last month’s EH-150 article, Gibson offered special-order universal AC/DC amps based on their regular line. Unfortunately, there is even less info on the 100’s offshoots than the 150’s. Catalog X made no specific references to a 100 variant, saying, “Write for information about Amplifiers made for AC/DC Current” at the bottom of the EH-150 page.

Catalog Y made a specific reference; “EH-110 Model – Same as EH-100 model but with special unit to be used on either AC or DC current.” All Gibson amps were available as Universal models until electric products were discontinued during WWII, with a $10 premium added to the regular prices. Besides the AC/DC models, Gibson also offered a six-volt DC battery-powered version of both the late-model 100s and the 125s. Since automobiles were equipped with six-volt DC electrical systems, it seems obvious what these amps were designed for.

Postscript
Due to the constant changes in models, none of the 100 amps were around long enough to be made in great quantities. Therefore, it seems safe to say all 100s and the 125 are now medium-rare to rare models. Although not generally associated with the big names and comparatively underpowered, the 100 amps (and their associated instruments) stand up favorably to Gibson’s higher line models, as well as the competition of the time.

Thanks to Experience Music Project for the catalog shots, Ray Pirotta for the ca. ’40 EH-100 amp, and Lynn Wheelwright for the matching Hawaiian guitar.

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1940 EH-100 set in solid mahogany. Amp courtesy Ray Pirotta, guitar courtesy Lynn Wheelwright. Photo: Bob Fagan.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s Aug. ’99 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

The influence and restraints of technology on amplifying the guitar
Let’s pretend for a moment that former Gibson historian Julius Bellson misinterpreted stories of Lloyd Loar’s experiments with electrified instruments during his brief stay in Kalamazoo. After all, there was 10 years between Loar’s departure and Bellson’s arrival, and almost another 40 before he wrote about it (think ’48 Broadcaster). Suppose the rumored photos of Loar playing electrically were from the early 1930s, not the early ’20s. Could his personal electric viola be one of his early-’30s Vivi-Tone designs? They did offer them for sale, and Gibson wouldn’t tackle the violin family until 1940.

Suppose the rumored Loar pickup Walter Fuller “found” in 1935, when he began his work on electrics, had not been laying around the factory untouched for over 10 years and was actually from just a short time before, when Gibson was installing test pickups under the soundboards of a few old archtops (Fuller claims to have never said it was Loar’s).

Considering just about every book on the subject that followed Bellson’s perpetuated the myth, or even exaggerated it more; can we ever accept that maybe Lewis Williams, future Vivi-Tone founder, lost his job at Gibson in 1923 for filling the company’s catalogs with page after page of nonsensical prose and for misjudging the market to the point of nearly bankrupting the company, and that Loar, with the ego of the accomplished musician he was (among other things), could have been released from his employment for not getting along with his “superiors,” and that it wasn’t for insisting the company put his prototype electric guitars – of which there are no records or pictures – into production? Bellson’s account has been implied repeatedly to the point many people today think Gibson invented the electric guitar, which is simply not the case.

You’ll notice in Walter Carter’s wonderfully-researched history that there is little mention of it. You would think the company would have wanted to play it up for their 100th anniversary. Loar may have experimented with electrifying stringed instruments during his short stay at Gibson, but his project would have been doomed because there was no amplifier available at that time to make it feasible. So which came first – the electric guitar or the guitar amp?

In Loar’s era, the only speakers made were radio horns of limited frequency range and low acoustic output. Acoustic versions were used for phonographs and had even been attached to harmonicas, violins and guitars in the early quest for volume. The cone speaker wasn’t available until 1925, and a spun aluminum version was soon integrated into the metal-bodied Nationals, and wood-bodied Dobros, being excited by the bridge’s vibrations instead of an electrically-stimulated voice coil.

Consider that the Fleming, DeForest, telegraph, telephone, radio, public address system, Vitaphone, batteryless-operation rectifier, push/pull screen grid output tubes progression of audio allowed for first, the transfer of electrical impulses; second, the reproduction of audio at less than original volume and; finally, the amplifying of audio. Once practical AC-operated amplifiers became available, it wasn’t long before they were used with musical instruments. Amplifiers were able to reproduce audio at a level higher than the original signal by the end of the ’20s, which is the only logical place to start a history of amplified instruments. If the source signal was louder than what came out of the speaker, as would have still been the case in the early ’20s, what would have been the point?

The first high-powered audio amplifiers were developed for public address systems and theater installations. The first versions were huge and expensive. As technology allowed for smaller, portable combo amps, without the bulky batteries required for operation before 1927, PA systems quickly became popular with musicians and are still preferred for certain instruments today. Even after the release of dedicated guitar amps, many players, including Leon McAuliffe (with Bob Wills) still used a carbon mic and a portable PA as late as 1935. There was actually little difference between a portable PA and a guitar amp at the time.

Presented here in chronological order of release are the commercially-available American guitar amps from 1928 to the end of 1934. Common features of these models include bent metal chassis with no control panels, a single volume control and one or two input jacks, field coil speakers with built-in output transformers for the power amp section, thin (1/4″ to 3/8″) wooden cabinets, and AC power cable with non-polarized two-prong plugs. Conspicous by their absence are tone controls of any kind, on/off switches, pilot lights, and fuses. All these single-channel amps had low power, under 10 watts, and small speakers, 10 inches or less.

PART I: Early Amplification For the Electrified Guitar
Stromberg-Voisinet (1928-’29)
The Stromberg-Voisinet company appears to be the first to market a functioning production model electrified stringed instrument and amplifier set. Promotion was directed to music dealers through an ad in the 1929 Purchasers Guide to the Music Industry and a full page in the Chicago Musical Instruments jobber book, which showed the $165 AC-powered portable “two stage amplifier” surrounded by a bevy of $40 magnetic pickup-equipped “Stromberg Electro Instruments.” Not much is known about the amp, as an existing example has yet to show up for inspection; would anyone even suspect they had the first of its kind if they found one? Looks more like an oscilloscope or an early television than a guitar amp, with the speaker appearing to have a shiny or metallic cone, as seen on the resonator instruments of the time. The input jacks were mounted to a panel on the side of the cabinet, at the top rear corner, using a pair of banana plugs instead of the 1/4″ and Amphenol connectors that would become standard in the ’30s. Who knows if it even had a name tag, logo, or anything with “Stromberg” on it, so put this image into your long-term memory and keep your eyes open the next time you visit Grandma’s attic!

Supplying signal to the amp was a “magnetic pickup built into the instrument which takes the vibrations direct from the sounding board.” As Vega, Vivi-Tone and Gibson would also discover, this “electrified” method of reproduction was not the best way to make a steel-stringed instrument louder. Suspicions as to why the Strombergs weren’t successful include unsatisfactory tone and volume, dependability problems, fear of such a product by the traditionalist music market, and the effects of the depression, which followed shortly after their release.

While generator-powered “farm radios” were available for the electricity-less rural portion of the general population, it seems doubtful designers of professional-use instruments would concern themselves with courting those few potential customers, no matter where they resided, who would be actually using the set outside of the cities. While not overly successful (a few hundred were reportedly made), Stromberg-Voisinet paved the way for future models by introducing and promoting what was, at the time, a very novel idea.

Vega (1928-’29)
Even less is known about the first Vega electrics, as all that has shown up is a mention in the January 1929 issue of The Crescendo; “The device consisted of a unit attached to the head of the banjo which transmitted the tone to a portable amplifying unit and radio speaker.” Anyone have anything in a catalog showing one of these? Vega’s market strength was in banjos, so it is understandable their R&D was in that direction, even if banjo mutes and mufflers were popular accessories for the loudest of the stringed instruments. By the way – the Vega Electric Model banjos of the early 1900s were neither electric or electrified.

PART II: Early Amplification For the Electric Guitar
Electro (1932) and Rickenbacker (1934)
Following the electrified guitar’s false start of 1928-’29 and the success of the National and Dobro resonator instruments with acoustically excited “speaker” cones, it was surprisingly long before the Electro String Instruments and amplifier (not to be confused with the Stromberg Electro Instruments) were released in 1932 by Ro-Pat-In of Los Angeles, a small group of men connected to National. Proclaimed by the company to be “The most Marvelous Musical Invention of all time,” the George Beauchamp designed, high output, string driven magnetic pickup was fitted to both a Spanish guitar and a small solidbody instrument set up to play Hawaiian style. Of course, an amplifier accompanied the instruments, only at a more reasonable price than the earlier makes. The proliferation and electronic advances of radio, not to mention the effects of the Depression, allowed for an affordable compact amplifier of appropriate volume for the era.

Most of the pre-WWII guitar amps would follow Electro’s design featuring a small chassis mounted inside a shallow rectangular wooden box with a cutout for the speaker and a handle on the top. According to Richard Smith’s thoroughly-researched The Complete History Of Rickenbacker Guitars, the building of the portable cabinets was originally subcontracted to Johnson Cabinet Works, while the electronics work was by Roy Van Nest’s radio shop. The circuit design is credited to C.W. Lane, who was the fifth major stockholder, along with Beauchamp, Adolph and Charlotte Rickenbacker and Paul Barth, all famous today in guitar lore.

The Great Grandfather of the electric guitar, Alvino Rey, used his dependable 1932 Electro amplifier on hundreds of gigs and recordings before being rewarded three years later with new equipment for his association with Gibson. While he held on to most of his original instruments, the amp went before WWII. A different grillecloth, the addition of metal corners and an ornamental “Rickenbacker” tag separated the 1934 Rickenbacker amps from the original Electro models (see pages 30 and 28 of Smith’s book).

Vivi-Tone (1933)
Although early Vivi-Tone ads made no mention of their amplifier, the instrument/amp sets were definitely getting into the hands of musicians during the early part of ’33, with mentions in The Crescendo magazine of actual guitar and mandolin use for church services, in radio broadcast studios and at outside engagements. A gut-string Vivi-Tone was played through a giant PA system called the “Singing Tower” at an amusement park where “…the volume was stepped up 3,000 times,” whatever that meant.

“A great success,” the performer stated. “It was quite a thrilling sensation to play the guitar and hear those deep, beautiful tones come rolling out. It was, of course, a far richer and deeper tone than obtained with the portable amplifier.”

Makes you want to go out and buy one, huh?
Not much is known about the standard 1933 amplifier, although a review of the set (“a dandy product”) included “The Vivi-Tone amplifier will take care of four instruments – thus a quartet need take only one power case with it on the job.” The company noted “…15 to 56 times more power than the corresponding instrument of the old type,” and “10.38 more power than the corresponding bow instrument.”

Following a short break, a new set of ads appeared in Downbeat magazine in late 1934, proclaiming “Guitarists! 30 times more volume with a Vivi-Tone Power Guitar,” “Enough power to lead a 15-piece orchestra-and any way you put it, that’s Power” and “the same mellow tone quality you would expect from the finest guitar, PLUS POWER GALORE!” No mention was made as to what made the Power Guitar so powerful until the ad in December 1934 for the release of the twin soundboard acoustic guitar. “We also have on display, the Vivi-Tone POWER (electrically amplified) GUITAR” appeared in small print at the bottom of the ad. Still no pictures to ponder. A surviving example of the “Aggrandizer” is pictured on page 358 of American Guitars, by Tom Wheeler.

Dobro (1933)
The first major push for electric guitars came shortly after the release of Electro’s first production models and was made by National’s nemesis/cohort, Dobro (note: George Beauchamp originally founded National with John Dopyera, who left to form Dobro, and despite losing his job at National before the Electros were released, he maintained his stock in the company and at the time of the Dobro electric’s intro, was actually the Vice President, with John’s brother, Louis, in charge; Dopyera resented Beuchamp’s success). A full-page ad in the April Musical Merchandise Review magazine showed the magnetic pickup equipped Dobro All-Electric guitar and amp set. The requisite amplifier featured two 8″ Lansing speakers and a five-tube chassis, encased in a cabinet not unlike Electro’s, save for the stylish cutout logo covering the speaker grille. Chances are good the matching corners, handles and covering were from the same source. Priced at $135 for the set ($75 for the amp), it seems obvious Dobro was going all out against the $175 Electro set, even extolling “Dobro challenges comparison” in large, underlined print. The competition would counter by eventually lowering its price to $125 for the set.

An article elsewhere in the issue told of the factory “…working overtime making up sample orders” and regular production would “begin at once,” using “the aid of their sound and radio engineers.” It’s doubtful the manufacturer of resonator instruments had much of a radio engineering staff, although the amp was “Designed by Dobro engineers, built in Dobro’s own plant,” according to the ad. Whoever built the amps wasn’t in the market for long and Dobro’s promise of “…mandolin, banjo, ukulele, etc.” versions was postponed or never fulfilled. The Dobro Twin Speaker Amplifier did predate (by over a dozen years) Fender’s twin-speaker Dual Professional/Super, thought by many to be the first amp with twin speakers.

Audio-Vox (1933)
Mention should be made of the Seattle-based Audio-Vox company of the 1930s, which was probably in its infancy at this point. The patent for Dobro’s All-Electric guitar pickup was credited to Arthur Stimpson, who worked with Audio-Vox founder Paul Tutmarc. These folks must have had an amp to go with their prototypes, but it is not known what the early model was like, or if it was the inspiration for the Dobro model. At that point, Audio-Vox was probably just a vision of Mr. Tutmarc’s, and certainly not in the national market.

Vega (1933)
An article in the May 1933 issue of The Crescendo stated “The new Vega amplifier also caught our attention. With this fine new instrument (pickup and amplifier set) it is possible to use any make of instrument with a Vega unit installed in it and the instrument may be played after equipping, either with or without amplification. Any number of instruments may be used on one Vega amplifier.” Vega’s practice of offering an amplifier and pickup to be used with someone else’s guitar was not that different from Rickenbacker taking someone else’s guitar (Harmony) and using it with their amplifier and pickup. Like the Vega amp from 1928, today little is known of this set.

Volu-Tone (1933)
While no one dared offer an electrified or electric guitar without also offering an amp to power it, the Volu-Tone company of Los Angeles, like Vega, manufactured an amplifier and pickup set designed to be used with any existing guitar. The idea was valid, as shown by the later success of the DeArmond pickups; however, Volu-Tone went about picking up the instrument’s vibrations using a unique, not to mention potentially deadly, method. The pickup, which mounted to your favorite steel-stringed instrument, had to be charged up with a short blast of high voltage current provided by a special jack mounted to the amp’s chassis.

On the inside wall of the amp’s cabinet was pasted an instruction sheet reading (text missing from damaged label is in parenthesis) “(plug AC power cable in) to convenient recepticle. (Insert instrument cable) plug into energizing socket at extreme right. (Remove) guitar plug from energizing socket almost immediately. This energizes the strings, without which the Volu-Tone is inoperative. The energizing operation must be repeated every time a string is replaced. DANGER: do not permit the guitar plug to remain inserted in the energizing socket for longer than a second or two or harm to the instrument will result. Insert guitar plug into one of the sockets on the left. IT IS NOW READY FOR USE.”

Considering the amp was not equipped with a fuse and the casing of the plug was metal, it’s hard to imagine that; a) Volu-Tone was allowed to even sell these, and; b) the company stayed in business from the summer of 1933 into at least the late ’30s without being shut down due to a wrongful death (or at the very least, a serious personal injury) lawsuit. The cable connecting the pickup to the amp was fitted with four-prong connectors at either end to ensure no other pickup would ever feel the 300-plus volts necessary for operation. Having a male plug at the amplifier-end of the cable protected the user from accidently touching the high voltage prongs in the amp’s energizing socket.

Unfortunately, having a male plug at the pickup-end of the cable meant if you didn’t plug the pickup in first, you had high voltage on the prongs!! If you didn’t follow the directions, and unplugged the cable from the pickup while it was still connected to the energizing socket, zapp!!

The different styles of connectors at each end did insure that no one accidently plugged the high voltage of one Volu-Tone amp into the high voltage or the inputs of another. A small red label above the jack read (in very small letters) “Caution. Do not permit plug to remain inserted in this jack for longer than two seconds.” Hopefully there was a thorough owner’s manual included, warning of the potential hazards to life and limb.

The model tested for this article appears to be from the mid ’20s, having one of the new 6L6 power tubes, but the earliest models should be similar. A 6C8 preamp tube and an 80 rectifier complete the tube complement, although an extra tube socket was plugged, suggesting the previous model had a second power tube. The 5″ speaker was made by Rola. A volume control was the only feature of what probably was the student model amp (“Why don’t you go play with our Volu-Tone, Junior…”), with no on/off switch, pilot light, or fuse. The cabinet is covered in a spiffy three-tone tweed with a leather handle and a Volu-Tone logo cut from wood as a speaker protector.

Dobro (1934)
Despite the commercial failure of Dobro’s All-Electric model, the company came back the following year with a less-outrageous, more acoustic, electric guitar. Adding a pickup, a volume control and a 1/4″ output jack to a stock resonator model made for more mass appeal. The guitar could be played with or without the amplifier, which was a new model, having a metal cover for the speaker opening that matched the guitar’s coverplate. The pair can be seen on page 290 of American Guitars (note: ignore the date).

The amp is described as being equipped with an 80 rectifier and a pair of 42 power tubes in part one of Michael Wright’s exhaustive Supro series (VG January ’97), but was incorrectly identified as the mate to the ’33 All-Electric, and vice versa, the initial twin-speaker amp of ’33 mistakenly wound up with the ’34 Electric Resonator. The revised guitar was probably about as loud acoustically as through the amp (which put out less than 10 watts), making it another commercial flop. By the summer of ’35, National and Dobro had joined forces and released nearly identical Spanish and Hawaiian guitars and a pair of amps similar to the ’34 model, but with smaller cabinets, different handles and upgraded chassis, as seen on page 301.

Gibson (ca. 1934)
Hey, where’s Gibson in this story, you ask? Well, at least two electrified prototypes were made up using guitars from the late ’20s/early ’30s, as seen on pages 10 and 11 of Andre Duchossoir’s Gibson Electrics – The Classic Years. These were never made available or promoted to the public. A surviving amp similar to the one pictured with the L-4 has been found to be from around 1933-’35, dating at least one of the experiments much later than 1929, as previously implied.

Enough said about Gibson’s lack of involvement in the formative years of the electric guitar; on to the amplifier. The builder is currently unknown, though probably from Chicago and almost certainly not Gibson.

The beautiful, carved mahogany, leather-handled cabinet housed two 5″ Utah speakers and a five-tube chassis. The two 25Z5 rectifiers suggest the amp was a “universal AC-DC model.” The twin 43 power tubes also were designed for AC/DC, as was the preamp tube. It would be interesting to know if these amps were made specifically for Gibson, or if they were already on the market for use as portable PA systems.

Postscript
By the start of 1935, things were about ready to take off in the electric guitar market. That year alone, Electro/Rickenbacher would sell more amps and electric guitars than all the amps and electrified/electric guitars made from ’28 through the end of ’34, combined! We’ll look at what was responsible for the enormous growth and all the amps from ’35 to WWII in the near future. Also look for a companion piece to this article, covering the guitars that came with these early amps.

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Portable PA system, $115 – 1931.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s Sep. ’97 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

The influence and restraints of technology on amplifying the guitar
Let’s pretend for a moment that former Gibson historian Julius Bellson misinterpreted stories of Lloyd Loar’s experiments with electrified instruments during his brief stay in Kalamazoo. After all, there was 10 years between Loar’s departure and Bellson’s arrival, and almost another 40 before he wrote about it (think ’48 Broadcaster). Suppose the rumored photos of Loar playing electrically were from the early 1930s, not the early ’20s. Could his personal electric viola be one of his early-’30s Vivi-Tone designs? They did offer them for sale, and Gibson wouldn’t tackle the violin family until 1940.

Suppose the rumored Loar pickup Walter Fuller “found” in 1935, when he began his work on electrics, had not been laying around the factory untouched for over 10 years and was actually from just a short time before, when Gibson was installing test pickups under the soundboards of a few old archtops (Fuller claims to have never said it was Loar’s).

Considering just about every book on the subject that followed Bellson’s perpetuated the myth, or even exaggerated it more; can we ever accept that maybe Lewis Williams, future Vivi-Tone founder, lost his job at Gibson in 1923 for filling the company’s catalogs with page after page of nonsensical prose and for misjudging the market to the point of nearly bankrupting the company, and that Loar, with the ego of the accomplished musician he was (among other things), could have been released from his employment for not getting along with his “superiors,” and that it wasn’t for insisting the company put his prototype electric guitars – of which there are no records or pictures – into production? Bellson’s account has been implied repeatedly to the point many people today think Gibson invented the electric guitar, which is simply not the case.

You’ll notice in Walter Carter’s wonderfully-researched history that there is little mention of it. You would think the company would have wanted to play it up for their 100th anniversary. Loar may have experimented with electrifying stringed instruments during his short stay at Gibson, but his project would have been doomed because there was no amplifier available at that time to make it feasible. So which came first – the electric guitar or the guitar amp?

In Loar’s era, the only speakers made were radio horns of limited frequency range and low acoustic output. Acoustic versions were used for phonographs and had even been attached to harmonicas, violins and guitars in the early quest for volume. The cone speaker wasn’t available until 1925, and a spun aluminum version was soon integrated into the metal-bodied Nationals, and wood-bodied Dobros, being excited by the bridge’s vibrations instead of an electrically-stimulated voice coil.

Consider that the Fleming, DeForest, telegraph, telephone, radio, public address system, Vitaphone, batteryless-operation rectifier, push/pull screen grid output tubes progression of audio allowed for first, the transfer of electrical impulses; second, the reproduction of audio at less than original volume and; finally, the amplifying of audio. Once practical AC-operated amplifiers became available, it wasn’t long before they were used with musical instruments. Amplifiers were able to reproduce audio at a level higher than the original signal by the end of the ’20s, which is the only logical place to start a history of amplified instruments. If the source signal was louder than what came out of the speaker, as would have still been the case in the early ’20s, what would have been the point?

The first high-powered audio amplifiers were developed for public address systems and theater installations. The first versions were huge and expensive. As technology allowed for smaller, portable combo amps, without the bulky batteries required for operation before 1927, PA systems quickly became popular with musicians and are still preferred for certain instruments today. Even after the release of dedicated guitar amps, many players, including Leon McAuliffe (with Bob Wills) still used a carbon mic and a portable PA as late as 1935. There was actually little difference between a portable PA and a guitar amp at the time.

Presented here in chronological order of release are the commercially-available American guitar amps from 1928 to the end of 1934. Common features of these models include bent metal chassis with no control panels, a single volume control and one or two input jacks, field coil speakers with built-in output transformers for the power amp section, thin (1/4″ to 3/8″) wooden cabinets, and AC power cable with non-polarized two-prong plugs. Conspicous by their absence are tone controls of any kind, on/off switches, pilot lights, and fuses. All these single-channel amps had low power, under 10 watts, and small speakers, 10 inches or less.

PART I: Early Amplification For the Electrified Guitar
Stromberg-Voisinet (1928-’29)
The Stromberg-Voisinet company appears to be the first to market a functioning production model electrified stringed instrument and amplifier set. Promotion was directed to music dealers through an ad in the 1929 Purchasers Guide to the Music Industry and a full page in the Chicago Musical Instruments jobber book, which showed the $165 AC-powered portable “two stage amplifier” surrounded by a bevy of $40 magnetic pickup-equipped “Stromberg Electro Instruments.” Not much is known about the amp, as an existing example has yet to show up for inspection; would anyone even suspect they had the first of its kind if they found one? Looks more like an oscilloscope or an early television than a guitar amp, with the speaker appearing to have a shiny or metallic cone, as seen on the resonator instruments of the time. The input jacks were mounted to a panel on the side of the cabinet, at the top rear corner, using a pair of banana plugs instead of the 1/4″ and Amphenol connectors that would become standard in the ’30s. Who knows if it even had a name tag, logo, or anything with “Stromberg” on it, so put this image into your long-term memory and keep your eyes open the next time you visit Grandma’s attic!

Supplying signal to the amp was a “magnetic pickup built into the instrument which takes the vibrations direct from the sounding board.” As Vega, Vivi-Tone and Gibson would also discover, this “electrified” method of reproduction was not the best way to make a steel-stringed instrument louder. Suspicions as to why the Strombergs weren’t successful include unsatisfactory tone and volume, dependability problems, fear of such a product by the traditionalist music market, and the effects of the depression, which followed shortly after their release.

While generator-powered “farm radios” were available for the electricity-less rural portion of the general population, it seems doubtful designers of professional-use instruments would concern themselves with courting those few potential customers, no matter where they resided, who would be actually using the set outside of the cities. While not overly successful (a few hundred were reportedly made), Stromberg-Voisinet paved the way for future models by introducing and promoting what was, at the time, a very novel idea.

Vega (1928-’29)
Even less is known about the first Vega electrics, as all that has shown up is a mention in the January 1929 issue of The Crescendo; “The device consisted of a unit attached to the head of the banjo which transmitted the tone to a portable amplifying unit and radio speaker.” Anyone have anything in a catalog showing one of these? Vega’s market strength was in banjos, so it is understandable their R&D was in that direction, even if banjo mutes and mufflers were popular accessories for the loudest of the stringed instruments. By the way – the Vega Electric Model banjos of the early 1900s were neither electric or electrified.

PART II: Early Amplification For the Electric Guitar
Electro (1932) and Rickenbacker (1934)
Following the electrified guitar’s false start of 1928-’29 and the success of the National and Dobro resonator instruments with acoustically excited “speaker” cones, it was surprisingly long before the Electro String Instruments and amplifier (not to be confused with the Stromberg Electro Instruments) were released in 1932 by Ro-Pat-In of Los Angeles, a small group of men connected to National. Proclaimed by the company to be “The most Marvelous Musical Invention of all time,” the George Beauchamp designed, high output, string driven magnetic pickup was fitted to both a Spanish guitar and a small solidbody instrument set up to play Hawaiian style. Of course, an amplifier accompanied the instruments, only at a more reasonable price than the earlier makes. The proliferation and electronic advances of radio, not to mention the effects of the Depression, allowed for an affordable compact amplifier of appropriate volume for the era.

Most of the pre-WWII guitar amps would follow Electro’s design featuring a small chassis mounted inside a shallow rectangular wooden box with a cutout for the speaker and a handle on the top. According to Richard Smith’s thoroughly-researched The Complete History Of Rickenbacker Guitars, the building of the portable cabinets was originally subcontracted to Johnson Cabinet Works, while the electronics work was by Roy Van Nest’s radio shop. The circuit design is credited to C.W. Lane, who was the fifth major stockholder, along with Beauchamp, Adolph and Charlotte Rickenbacker and Paul Barth, all famous today in guitar lore.

The Great Grandfather of the electric guitar, Alvino Rey, used his dependable 1932 Electro amplifier on hundreds of gigs and recordings before being rewarded three years later with new equipment for his association with Gibson. While he held on to most of his original instruments, the amp went before WWII. A different grillecloth, the addition of metal corners and an ornamental “Rickenbacker” tag separated the 1934 Rickenbacker amps from the original Electro models (see pages 30 and 28 of Smith’s book).

Vivi-Tone (1933)
Although early Vivi-Tone ads made no mention of their amplifier, the instrument/amp sets were definitely getting into the hands of musicians during the early part of ’33, with mentions in The Crescendo magazine of actual guitar and mandolin use for church services, in radio broadcast studios and at outside engagements. A gut-string Vivi-Tone was played through a giant PA system called the “Singing Tower” at an amusement park where “…the volume was stepped up 3,000 times,” whatever that meant.

“A great success,” the performer stated. “It was quite a thrilling sensation to play the guitar and hear those deep, beautiful tones come rolling out. It was, of course, a far richer and deeper tone than obtained with the portable amplifier.”

Makes you want to go out and buy one, huh?
Not much is known about the standard 1933 amplifier, although a review of the set (“a dandy product”) included “The Vivi-Tone amplifier will take care of four instruments – thus a quartet need take only one power case with it on the job.” The company noted “…15 to 56 times more power than the corresponding instrument of the old type,” and “10.38 more power than the corresponding bow instrument.”

Following a short break, a new set of ads appeared in Downbeat magazine in late 1934, proclaiming “Guitarists! 30 times more volume with a Vivi-Tone Power Guitar,” “Enough power to lead a 15-piece orchestra-and any way you put it, that’s Power” and “the same mellow tone quality you would expect from the finest guitar, PLUS POWER GALORE!” No mention was made as to what made the Power Guitar so powerful until the ad in December 1934 for the release of the twin soundboard acoustic guitar. “We also have on display, the Vivi-Tone POWER (electrically amplified) GUITAR” appeared in small print at the bottom of the ad. Still no pictures to ponder. A surviving example of the “Aggrandizer” is pictured on page 358 of American Guitars, by Tom Wheeler.

Dobro (1933)
The first major push for electric guitars came shortly after the release of Electro’s first production models and was made by National’s nemesis/cohort, Dobro (note: George Beauchamp originally founded National with John Dopyera, who left to form Dobro, and despite losing his job at National before the Electros were released, he maintained his stock in the company and at the time of the Dobro electric’s intro, was actually the Vice President, with John’s brother, Louis, in charge; Dopyera resented Beuchamp’s success). A full-page ad in the April Musical Merchandise Review magazine showed the magnetic pickup equipped Dobro All-Electric guitar and amp set. The requisite amplifier featured two 8″ Lansing speakers and a five-tube chassis, encased in a cabinet not unlike Electro’s, save for the stylish cutout logo covering the speaker grille. Chances are good the matching corners, handles and covering were from the same source. Priced at $135 for the set ($75 for the amp), it seems obvious Dobro was going all out against the $175 Electro set, even extolling “Dobro challenges comparison” in large, underlined print. The competition would counter by eventually lowering its price to $125 for the set.

An article elsewhere in the issue told of the factory “…working overtime making up sample orders” and regular production would “begin at once,” using “the aid of their sound and radio engineers.” It’s doubtful the manufacturer of resonator instruments had much of a radio engineering staff, although the amp was “Designed by Dobro engineers, built in Dobro’s own plant,” according to the ad. Whoever built the amps wasn’t in the market for long and Dobro’s promise of “…mandolin, banjo, ukulele, etc.” versions was postponed or never fulfilled. The Dobro Twin Speaker Amplifier did predate (by over a dozen years) Fender’s twin-speaker Dual Professional/Super, thought by many to be the first amp with twin speakers.

Audio-Vox (1933)
Mention should be made of the Seattle-based Audio-Vox company of the 1930s, which was probably in its infancy at this point. The patent for Dobro’s All-Electric guitar pickup was credited to Arthur Stimpson, who worked with Audio-Vox founder Paul Tutmarc. These folks must have had an amp to go with their prototypes, but it is not known what the early model was like, or if it was the inspiration for the Dobro model. At that point, Audio-Vox was probably just a vision of Mr. Tutmarc’s, and certainly not in the national market.

Vega (1933)
An article in the May 1933 issue of The Crescendo stated “The new Vega amplifier also caught our attention. With this fine new instrument (pickup and amplifier set) it is possible to use any make of instrument with a Vega unit installed in it and the instrument may be played after equipping, either with or without amplification. Any number of instruments may be used on one Vega amplifier.” Vega’s practice of offering an amplifier and pickup to be used with someone else’s guitar was not that different from Rickenbacker taking someone else’s guitar (Harmony) and using it with their amplifier and pickup. Like the Vega amp from 1928, today little is known of this set.

Volu-Tone (1933)
While no one dared offer an electrified or electric guitar without also offering an amp to power it, the Volu-Tone company of Los Angeles, like Vega, manufactured an amplifier and pickup set designed to be used with any existing guitar. The idea was valid, as shown by the later success of the DeArmond pickups; however, Volu-Tone went about picking up the instrument’s vibrations using a unique, not to mention potentially deadly, method. The pickup, which mounted to your favorite steel-stringed instrument, had to be charged up with a short blast of high voltage current provided by a special jack mounted to the amp’s chassis.

On the inside wall of the amp’s cabinet was pasted an instruction sheet reading (text missing from damaged label is in parenthesis) “(plug AC power cable in) to convenient recepticle. (Insert instrument cable) plug into energizing socket at extreme right. (Remove) guitar plug from energizing socket almost immediately. This energizes the strings, without which the Volu-Tone is inoperative. The energizing operation must be repeated every time a string is replaced. DANGER: do not permit the guitar plug to remain inserted in the energizing socket for longer than a second or two or harm to the instrument will result. Insert guitar plug into one of the sockets on the left. IT IS NOW READY FOR USE.”

Considering the amp was not equipped with a fuse and the casing of the plug was metal, it’s hard to imagine that; a) Volu-Tone was allowed to even sell these, and; b) the company stayed in business from the summer of 1933 into at least the late ’30s without being shut down due to a wrongful death (or at the very least, a serious personal injury) lawsuit. The cable connecting the pickup to the amp was fitted with four-prong connectors at either end to ensure no other pickup would ever feel the 300-plus volts necessary for operation. Having a male plug at the amplifier-end of the cable protected the user from accidently touching the high voltage prongs in the amp’s energizing socket.

Unfortunately, having a male plug at the pickup-end of the cable meant if you didn’t plug the pickup in first, you had high voltage on the prongs!! If you didn’t follow the directions, and unplugged the cable from the pickup while it was still connected to the energizing socket, zapp!!

The different styles of connectors at each end did insure that no one accidently plugged the high voltage of one Volu-Tone amp into the high voltage or the inputs of another. A small red label above the jack read (in very small letters) “Caution. Do not permit plug to remain inserted in this jack for longer than two seconds.” Hopefully there was a thorough owner’s manual included, warning of the potential hazards to life and limb.

The model tested for this article appears to be from the mid ’20s, having one of the new 6L6 power tubes, but the earliest models should be similar. A 6C8 preamp tube and an 80 rectifier complete the tube complement, although an extra tube socket was plugged, suggesting the previous model had a second power tube. The 5″ speaker was made by Rola. A volume control was the only feature of what probably was the student model amp (“Why don’t you go play with our Volu-Tone, Junior…”), with no on/off switch, pilot light, or fuse. The cabinet is covered in a spiffy three-tone tweed with a leather handle and a Volu-Tone logo cut from wood as a speaker protector.

Dobro (1934)
Despite the commercial failure of Dobro’s All-Electric model, the company came back the following year with a less-outrageous, more acoustic, electric guitar. Adding a pickup, a volume control and a 1/4″ output jack to a stock resonator model made for more mass appeal. The guitar could be played with or without the amplifier, which was a new model, having a metal cover for the speaker opening that matched the guitar’s coverplate. The pair can be seen on page 290 of American Guitars (note: ignore the date).

The amp is described as being equipped with an 80 rectifier and a pair of 42 power tubes in part one of Michael Wright’s exhaustive Supro series (VG January ’97), but was incorrectly identified as the mate to the ’33 All-Electric, and vice versa, the initial twin-speaker amp of ’33 mistakenly wound up with the ’34 Electric Resonator. The revised guitar was probably about as loud acoustically as through the amp (which put out less than 10 watts), making it another commercial flop. By the summer of ’35, National and Dobro had joined forces and released nearly identical Spanish and Hawaiian guitars and a pair of amps similar to the ’34 model, but with smaller cabinets, different handles and upgraded chassis, as seen on page 301.

Gibson (ca. 1934)
Hey, where’s Gibson in this story, you ask? Well, at least two electrified prototypes were made up using guitars from the late ’20s/early ’30s, as seen on pages 10 and 11 of Andre Duchossoir’s Gibson Electrics – The Classic Years. These were never made available or promoted to the public. A surviving amp similar to the one pictured with the L-4 has been found to be from around 1933-’35, dating at least one of the experiments much later than 1929, as previously implied.

Enough said about Gibson’s lack of involvement in the formative years of the electric guitar; on to the amplifier. The builder is currently unknown, though probably from Chicago and almost certainly not Gibson.

The beautiful, carved mahogany, leather-handled cabinet housed two 5″ Utah speakers and a five-tube chassis. The two 25Z5 rectifiers suggest the amp was a “universal AC-DC model.” The twin 43 power tubes also were designed for AC/DC, as was the preamp tube. It would be interesting to know if these amps were made specifically for Gibson, or if they were already on the market for use as portable PA systems.

Postscript
By the start of 1935, things were about ready to take off in the electric guitar market. That year alone, Electro/Rickenbacher would sell more amps and electric guitars than all the amps and electrified/electric guitars made from ’28 through the end of ’34, combined! We’ll look at what was responsible for the enormous growth and all the amps from ’35 to WWII in the near future. Also look for a companion piece to this article, covering the guitars that came with these early amps.

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Portable PA system, $115 – 1931.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s Sep. ’97 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

We dedicate this month’s column to the “legendary” Seattle line. Having never had the opportunity to play through one or take one apart, we’ll have to let catalog descriptions suffice (thanks to Peter Blecha for the early info and Bud Tutmarc for the late-’30s flyer).

The earliest known flyer for Audiovox showed only a single amp available, the Model 236. Guesstimates on year seem to be 1935-’36, a time when most other companies only offered one amp for use with their assortments of instruments. Five tubes with a pair of 6F6s for the outputs, a 5Z4 rectifier, plus a 6F5 single-triode and a 6N7 twin-triode for the preamp/driver stages. Twelve watts at three percent distortion powered a single speaker, apparently a 10″ (cabinet dimensions were 11 1/2″ high by 14 1/2″ wide by 5 1/2″ deep). The speaker opening was square, with a lattice grille. One to five inputs could be ordered and like most amps of the era, the back panel had only the input jack, a volume control and a fuse. A second flyer from slightly later described the same amp.

In the later years, the line grew to include three amps, including the Model 236, now equipped with a 12″ Lansing speaker. The rectifier changed to the popular 80 and the 6F5 was replaced with the similar 6SF5. Power increased to 15 watts at three percent distortion and a new cabinet with a round speaker opening and less-rectangular shape was shown (14 1/2″ x 13″ x 7 1/2″). No mention was made of a tone control.

A more powerful amp, the Model 936, was pictured with the Model 736 bass guitar and listed as having 18 watts and a “…heavy duty, High Fidelity, Concert Type, 12″ Jensen Speaker.” “Has three different tones,” implies some extra controls as became popular in the late ’30s. Striped Airplane Linen covered a larger cabinet, measuring 13 1/2″ x 17″ x 8″. Bud Tutmarc remembers the bass amps having a 15″ speaker, so perhaps the later top-of-the-line models did. He also mentioned 6L6 output tubes used for the larger amps, unfortunately, the specs for the 936 were not given.

At the bottom of the line sat the model 200, looking like a miniature 236, having an 11 1/2″ x 7 1/2″ x 10 1/2″ cabinet housing an 8″ Lansing speaker. Tubes were the new 6V6 beam power style for output, a 6SC7 twin-triode for the preamp, and an 80 rectifier.

Fortunately, the man who built a good portion of the amps and pickups (starting before he reached his teens) is alive and well and was open for a number of interviews over the last six months. Here are the highlights, as they relate to the amps and pickups.

Vintage Guitar: Many of the pioneers in electric guitars got there start with crystal radio sets. Did your dad build his own radios?
Bud Tutmarc: No, but I did. I was building those three tube amps when I was 12 years old.

How about the earlier amps, like the bass amp with the lightning bolts.
When he made the electric bass, he already had his amplifiers going. He was making amps for Hawaiians before the bass, making them for the steel guitars.

Any idea what happened to that first bass amp?
Oh, he made a lot of those. That’s where he got the name Audiovox – “loud voice.”

Who built the cabinets for the amps.
For my dad, Frank Galianese.

Who designed the circuits?
Bob Wisner. He made a radio into a guitar amplifier for my dad. Wisner worked on the atom bomb and then in Florida on the lunar mission, the man on the moon. He was there and it took off on a Monday and Friday it landed. He died on Wednesday -never knew they made it. He worked at Boeing, too.

He was trained, I take it?
Oh, boy. He graduated from high school when he was 13! He worked for General Electric, they sent him to New York for three days and he came back, they said he was a genius and could work in any department he wanted! He was an opera buff, knew everything about opera.

Did he play an instrument?
Nope, not a lick. But he and I became partners in my Bud-Electro company.

How about Arthur Stimson?
No, he didn’t play; I don’t think he had any electronic background, either.

Did you have any formal training in electronics?
Not in electronics, no. Just experimenting.

So when you were wiring these things up, how did you know what to do?
I was wiring ’em up just like the one in front of me! I got so that I knew the whole circuit, I didn’t have to look at it after a while. We had the big five-tube amps and the small one, too. We used the 6F6s in the small ones and the 6L6s, two of them, in the others. That was when the metal tubes first came out. The small amp sold with a guitar for $39.50.

We sold the guitar and a case and the three tube amp together. I was the one making all those amplifiers for him.

How was the reliability of the old amps.
Real good, that was Wisner’s design. I remember we had our group and we went out for two months, to New York and back and -we had the electric bass, if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have been able to carry anything anyway, five days out of Seattle we wrecked our car, ruined it, went around a corner too fast at four in the morning. The top was smashed, the windshield came right down on top of the steering wheel and we all got out, three guys in the front seat, two guys in the back and a trailer behind us.

And we never missed one of our concerts. We chartered a plane that afternoon to Minnesota, and then we took a train, a bus, finally I bought a new car in New York. Having the electric bass along really helped, with a regular bass we’d have never made it. All our instruments got out. Our luggage was torn apart and our P.A. got smashed, but most places had them anyway. And the records, 78s, about 400 of the 800 didn’t make it. But the amps worked great.

Were these the Serenader amps?
Yeah. The Serenader amps were about the same as my dad’s.

Did they have a little more power than the earlier amps?
Yeah, and better speakers, the Jensen A-12 and A-15s. Those were permanent magnet speakers, before the Alnico V. And they weighed a ton! The magnets were about six inches across and about three inches thick.

Did you use field coils for everything before the war?
Yeah. The Alnico V changed everything, they were so much lighter.

Do you know how many Serenader amps you made?
No. We had two styles, one for the steel and one for the bass. I wasn’t selling many of the amps to Heater, but I was selling the basses.

I notice the steel guitar and amp weren’t pictured with the bass in the L.D. Heater ad.
No. That ad is from 1947, they distributed them up and down the coast.

I remember Bob Wisner and I would drive down to Portland and deliver a bunch of them, about 10 basses at a time.

How many of the basses did you make?
I have no idea, maybe 75?

How about the amps for your dad’s basses. Were most of those sold with an amp.
Yeah, with the 15″ speaker.

Did you take over the business from your dad?
No. I just went on my own. He married Bonnie Guitar, a recording artist, his second wife, and that kinda separated the whole family for a few years. That ended the association building guitars in our house. Then I got married in ’45 and got into the business making my own in 1946.

How about during the war? Did you guys do much building?
No, not much. But again, I wasn’t working with my dad at the time. Now, I remember him coming down right at the start of the war, down to where I was working, at Fulton Machine, and saying, “What about this draft business?” And I said I was okay because I was working on the line, so he says, “Alright, that’s all I wanted to know.” He was worried about me and then later, we got back together and stayed close for the rest of our days.

Do you know where your dad got the idea for his pickup?
Probably out of a telephone (laughs)! Of course, Wisner was around. I remember they had to make the two polepieces so they didn’t connect. What we ended up doing was just soldering them, so they wouldn’t carry the magnetic field (between the two coils).

On the early ones, they were split in two sections, right?
Yeah, they had to be split. Later on we soldered ’em together and then could sand it to look like one solid piece of steel.

From the patent, it looks like it’s a humbucking design.
The only way you can make it hum is to hook it up wrong. It’s all in how you join the coils together, the outside to the outside and then the other ends go to the ground and the volume control. When I go into the recording studio, they say “Okay. Bud, turn your guitar up.” And I say it is and they say “It can’t be, we don’t hear any hum!’ It’s the most quiet pickup they’ve ever run across.

Were the coils all wound the same?
Yeah, it’s just how you connect them. I wound all those pickups, I have all that wire here still.

Did you change the design much over the years?
No. I record with my Serenader guitar; go direct into the board! And then I take my dad’s on the road with me, the Audiovox.

That’s great, you take a 60-year-old guitar on the road!
I’ve played it all over the world.

Have you had to put a new pickup in it over the years?
No! The volume control I had a little trouble with, so I replaced that.

What was it like trying to get electrical parts back in the early days?
I have more trouble getting the magnets now than I did then! The one my dad used was big and made a “U” shape. There were holes where you could put in a brace that held the polepieces. And it worked perfectly. I sure made a lot of those. I had about 50 of them out in the garage and my wife let ’em go to the junk man (laughs)!

Did you get all the parts locally?
Yeah, you could get anything. I still have a bunch of parts, the same ones I was working with 50 years ago!

Any big difference between the Audiovox pickup and the Serenader’s?
I slanted my pickup on the bass side, so you’d get more power in the bass notes. I put the pickup about four inches away from the bridge and got tremendous response from the bass strings; all my dad’s were right by the bridge.

Which was standard back then. My theory is that people put the pickups back there because there were no amps that could take that kind of bass output; and that’s for guitars! Gibson did their ES-150 with the pickup at the neck for a few years, but even that changed back to the bridge before the war.
Well, some players preferred a deeper sound.

How does it feel to see your dad finally getting his well deserved credit internationally, instead of just locally.
He deserves it and I’m very pleased.

Was it something you thought you’d see in your lifetime?
I’ve seen it in my lifetime – every time I’d see somebody playing an electric bass! I’d say, “I know where that came from.” That always meant something to me.

What would people say when you told them who created the bass, that it was your dad and not Leo Fender.
Oh, they’d kind of yell at me and that was it (laughs)! I don’t think I convinced everybody.

Which was my initial reaction, I must admit.
It was too big a thing to claim in some people’s minds, but that was it; I was there when it happened.

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Bud Tutmarc playing his father’s Audiovox lapsteel. Photos courtesy of Bud Tutmarc.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s March ’99 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

We dedicate this month’s column to the “legendary” Seattle line. Having never had the opportunity to play through one or take one apart, we’ll have to let catalog descriptions suffice (thanks to Peter Blecha for the early info and Bud Tutmarc for the late-’30s flyer).

The earliest known flyer for Audiovox showed only a single amp available, the Model 236. Guesstimates on year seem to be 1935-’36, a time when most other companies only offered one amp for use with their assortments of instruments. Five tubes with a pair of 6F6s for the outputs, a 5Z4 rectifier, plus a 6F5 single-triode and a 6N7 twin-triode for the preamp/driver stages. Twelve watts at three percent distortion powered a single speaker, apparently a 10″ (cabinet dimensions were 11 1/2″ high by 14 1/2″ wide by 5 1/2″ deep). The speaker opening was square, with a lattice grille. One to five inputs could be ordered and like most amps of the era, the back panel had only the input jack, a volume control and a fuse. A second flyer from slightly later described the same amp.

In the later years, the line grew to include three amps, including the Model 236, now equipped with a 12″ Lansing speaker. The rectifier changed to the popular 80 and the 6F5 was replaced with the similar 6SF5. Power increased to 15 watts at three percent distortion and a new cabinet with a round speaker opening and less-rectangular shape was shown (14 1/2″ x 13″ x 7 1/2″). No mention was made of a tone control.

A more powerful amp, the Model 936, was pictured with the Model 736 bass guitar and listed as having 18 watts and a “…heavy duty, High Fidelity, Concert Type, 12″ Jensen Speaker.” “Has three different tones,” implies some extra controls as became popular in the late ’30s. Striped Airplane Linen covered a larger cabinet, measuring 13 1/2″ x 17″ x 8″. Bud Tutmarc remembers the bass amps having a 15″ speaker, so perhaps the later top-of-the-line models did. He also mentioned 6L6 output tubes used for the larger amps, unfortunately, the specs for the 936 were not given.

At the bottom of the line sat the model 200, looking like a miniature 236, having an 11 1/2″ x 7 1/2″ x 10 1/2″ cabinet housing an 8″ Lansing speaker. Tubes were the new 6V6 beam power style for output, a 6SC7 twin-triode for the preamp, and an 80 rectifier.

Fortunately, the man who built a good portion of the amps and pickups (starting before he reached his teens) is alive and well and was open for a number of interviews over the last six months. Here are the highlights, as they relate to the amps and pickups.

Vintage Guitar: Many of the pioneers in electric guitars got there start with crystal radio sets. Did your dad build his own radios?
Bud Tutmarc: No, but I did. I was building those three tube amps when I was 12 years old.

How about the earlier amps, like the bass amp with the lightning bolts.
When he made the electric bass, he already had his amplifiers going. He was making amps for Hawaiians before the bass, making them for the steel guitars.

Any idea what happened to that first bass amp?
Oh, he made a lot of those. That’s where he got the name Audiovox – “loud voice.”

Who built the cabinets for the amps.
For my dad, Frank Galianese.

Who designed the circuits?
Bob Wisner. He made a radio into a guitar amplifier for my dad. Wisner worked on the atom bomb and then in Florida on the lunar mission, the man on the moon. He was there and it took off on a Monday and Friday it landed. He died on Wednesday -never knew they made it. He worked at Boeing, too.

He was trained, I take it?
Oh, boy. He graduated from high school when he was 13! He worked for General Electric, they sent him to New York for three days and he came back, they said he was a genius and could work in any department he wanted! He was an opera buff, knew everything about opera.

Did he play an instrument?
Nope, not a lick. But he and I became partners in my Bud-Electro company.

How about Arthur Stimson?
No, he didn’t play; I don’t think he had any electronic background, either.

Did you have any formal training in electronics?
Not in electronics, no. Just experimenting.

So when you were wiring these things up, how did you know what to do?
I was wiring ’em up just like the one in front of me! I got so that I knew the whole circuit, I didn’t have to look at it after a while. We had the big five-tube amps and the small one, too. We used the 6F6s in the small ones and the 6L6s, two of them, in the others. That was when the metal tubes first came out. The small amp sold with a guitar for $39.50.

We sold the guitar and a case and the three tube amp together. I was the one making all those amplifiers for him.

How was the reliability of the old amps.
Real good, that was Wisner’s design. I remember we had our group and we went out for two months, to New York and back and -we had the electric bass, if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have been able to carry anything anyway, five days out of Seattle we wrecked our car, ruined it, went around a corner too fast at four in the morning. The top was smashed, the windshield came right down on top of the steering wheel and we all got out, three guys in the front seat, two guys in the back and a trailer behind us.

And we never missed one of our concerts. We chartered a plane that afternoon to Minnesota, and then we took a train, a bus, finally I bought a new car in New York. Having the electric bass along really helped, with a regular bass we’d have never made it. All our instruments got out. Our luggage was torn apart and our P.A. got smashed, but most places had them anyway. And the records, 78s, about 400 of the 800 didn’t make it. But the amps worked great.

Were these the Serenader amps?
Yeah. The Serenader amps were about the same as my dad’s.

Did they have a little more power than the earlier amps?
Yeah, and better speakers, the Jensen A-12 and A-15s. Those were permanent magnet speakers, before the Alnico V. And they weighed a ton! The magnets were about six inches across and about three inches thick.

Did you use field coils for everything before the war?
Yeah. The Alnico V changed everything, they were so much lighter.

Do you know how many Serenader amps you made?
No. We had two styles, one for the steel and one for the bass. I wasn’t selling many of the amps to Heater, but I was selling the basses.

I notice the steel guitar and amp weren’t pictured with the bass in the L.D. Heater ad.
No. That ad is from 1947, they distributed them up and down the coast.

I remember Bob Wisner and I would drive down to Portland and deliver a bunch of them, about 10 basses at a time.

How many of the basses did you make?
I have no idea, maybe 75?

How about the amps for your dad’s basses. Were most of those sold with an amp.
Yeah, with the 15″ speaker.

Did you take over the business from your dad?
No. I just went on my own. He married Bonnie Guitar, a recording artist, his second wife, and that kinda separated the whole family for a few years. That ended the association building guitars in our house. Then I got married in ’45 and got into the business making my own in 1946.

How about during the war? Did you guys do much building?
No, not much. But again, I wasn’t working with my dad at the time. Now, I remember him coming down right at the start of the war, down to where I was working, at Fulton Machine, and saying, “What about this draft business?” And I said I was okay because I was working on the line, so he says, “Alright, that’s all I wanted to know.” He was worried about me and then later, we got back together and stayed close for the rest of our days.

Do you know where your dad got the idea for his pickup?
Probably out of a telephone (laughs)! Of course, Wisner was around. I remember they had to make the two polepieces so they didn’t connect. What we ended up doing was just soldering them, so they wouldn’t carry the magnetic field (between the two coils).

On the early ones, they were split in two sections, right?
Yeah, they had to be split. Later on we soldered ’em together and then could sand it to look like one solid piece of steel.

From the patent, it looks like it’s a humbucking design.
The only way you can make it hum is to hook it up wrong. It’s all in how you join the coils together, the outside to the outside and then the other ends go to the ground and the volume control. When I go into the recording studio, they say “Okay. Bud, turn your guitar up.” And I say it is and they say “It can’t be, we don’t hear any hum!’ It’s the most quiet pickup they’ve ever run across.

Were the coils all wound the same?
Yeah, it’s just how you connect them. I wound all those pickups, I have all that wire here still.

Did you change the design much over the years?
No. I record with my Serenader guitar; go direct into the board! And then I take my dad’s on the road with me, the Audiovox.

That’s great, you take a 60-year-old guitar on the road!
I’ve played it all over the world.

Have you had to put a new pickup in it over the years?
No! The volume control I had a little trouble with, so I replaced that.

What was it like trying to get electrical parts back in the early days?
I have more trouble getting the magnets now than I did then! The one my dad used was big and made a “U” shape. There were holes where you could put in a brace that held the polepieces. And it worked perfectly. I sure made a lot of those. I had about 50 of them out in the garage and my wife let ’em go to the junk man (laughs)!

Did you get all the parts locally?
Yeah, you could get anything. I still have a bunch of parts, the same ones I was working with 50 years ago!

Any big difference between the Audiovox pickup and the Serenader’s?
I slanted my pickup on the bass side, so you’d get more power in the bass notes. I put the pickup about four inches away from the bridge and got tremendous response from the bass strings; all my dad’s were right by the bridge.

Which was standard back then. My theory is that people put the pickups back there because there were no amps that could take that kind of bass output; and that’s for guitars! Gibson did their ES-150 with the pickup at the neck for a few years, but even that changed back to the bridge before the war.
Well, some players preferred a deeper sound.

How does it feel to see your dad finally getting his well deserved credit internationally, instead of just locally.
He deserves it and I’m very pleased.

Was it something you thought you’d see in your lifetime?
I’ve seen it in my lifetime – every time I’d see somebody playing an electric bass! I’d say, “I know where that came from.” That always meant something to me.

What would people say when you told them who created the bass, that it was your dad and not Leo Fender.
Oh, they’d kind of yell at me and that was it (laughs)! I don’t think I convinced everybody.

Which was my initial reaction, I must admit.
It was too big a thing to claim in some people’s minds, but that was it; I was there when it happened.

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Bud Tutmarc playing his father’s Audiovox lapsteel. Photos courtesy of Bud Tutmarc.

This article originally appeared in VG‘s March ’99 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

Even if Rickenbacher’s 1935 Bakelite Spanish model wasn’t the first solidbody electric, it would still be important in the evolution of modern guitars as the inspiration for Fender’s 1949 entry into the world of Spanish-neck instruments. During WWII, a crude test model was made in Leo Fender’s radio shop, using a prefab fingerboard and a Spanish-style neck, but this directly led to the K&F Hawaiian (lapsteel), with no apparent influence on the much later Spanish release. However, a piece-by-piece comparison with the Rickenbacher leaves little choice but to concede this is where Leo got his design for the Esquire.

Build an Esquire out of Bakelite and you basically have a Model B Spanish (as the Rick was referred to in its later years). Or build a Model B out of wood and you basically have an Esquire, which inspired the Broadcaster/Telecaster, which is all the further in the evolution of the electric guitar many feel is necessary.

The fact Leo started with Doc Kaufman as his business partner points to an acute awareness of Rickenbacher. Kaufman was involved on a number of projects prior to meeting Fender, including the motorized vibrato version of the standard Model B. Performing on his personal Vibrola Spanish Guitar prior to, during, and after WWII (which includes the entire time he was involved with Mr. Fender), Doc reportedly wore out at least one of the easily replaceable necks. It seems ridiculous to think Leo could have been unaware of the Bakelite guitars. So just how close are they?

Parts is Parts
Necks
One of the distinguishing features of Fender guitars has always been the neck; a solid piece of maple that could be screwed securely to the body but was easily removed for replacement should the frets wear out or a warp develop. No more expensive or amateur refrets or necksets – remember, in many parts of the country, quality repair work was an oxymoron.

And because there was no separate fingerboard on the ’50s maple-neck models, mass production was made even more efficient.

A brilliant idea, but credit its refinement and popularization to Rickenbacher. While others had failed with bolt-on neck acoustics, Adolph’s skills with non-wood materials yielded a sturdy, consistent, inexpensive, and easily installed neck with the frets and nut installed. Adjustable truss rods were not necessary, even with the heavy strings of the day, but replacement necks were available for $2.75 (less than five percent of the instrument’s total price) in case of accidental breakage or worn frets.

Like the Rickenbacher, the first Esquires did not have a truss rod of any kind. But, unlike the Rick, they would need them. The prototype Esquire from late ’49 (which more than any instrument, represents Leo’s conceptualization) also had a Rickenbacher-ish headstock, in that tuners were fitted three to a side; plus the shape was simple, with straight lines across the top and down the sides. No graceful curves or frills on either utilitarian peghead.

Nuts
Manufacturing with Bakelite allowed Rickenbacher to mold in a perfectly formed nut, having a cross-section where the strings make contact that was much thinner than the traditional style. On its lapsteels, Fender used a metal plate that covered most of the headstock before bending up to form the string spacers. But the Esquire essentially had a Rickenbacher-sized nut installed after the neck was shaped (try mass-producing a nut-sized protrusion at the end of a wooden fingerboard!).

Rickenbacher gracefully molded the headstock face to curve up into the nut instead of the traditional flat peghead veneer; Fender mimicked the curve almost to a T. Since their necks started as a straight piece of wood, pegheads ran straight back from the nut; as opposed to the Rick’s gentle backwards slope – just enough to keep strings from popping out of the nut.

While Fender’s design made efficient use of wood, following Rickenbacher’s more closely could have alleviated the future need for string retainers.

Neck Joints
The famous Fender neck pocket is less intricate but still similar to that of the Model B, particularly in concept. On most pre-CBS instruments, friction alone can usually hold the neck in place while screwing it to the body and the same is true of the perfectly molded Rick, which has no side-to-side play. Later Fender guitars often had 1/8″ gaps up on either side that required aligning the neck with the strings in place before final tightening.

On Fenders, the use of a clunky metal plate keeps string tension from pulling the mounting screws through the wood body, but this additional part was not necessary with the dense, hard Bakelite. The ability of Bakelite to withstand massive pounds per square inch of pressure was critical to a bolt-on arrangement, and because the bolts were threaded into tapped holes (as opposed to screws being forced into wood), the minimal number of two was sufficient. Four screws sunk into maple is the standard configuration today for detachable wooden necks, though interestingly, they are still referred to as “bolt-ons.” The rounded heads of the two Rickenbacher bolts were recessed flush with the voluptuous back, instead of sticking up 1/8″ along with the neckplate off the otherwise flat surface.

Bodies
Which came first, the solidbody or mass production? Before the solidbody wooden Fenders, or the prototypes of Bigsby, App, Polfus, the solidbody wooden Slingerlands, the solidbody wooden Audiovox cutaway prototype, the solidbody Bakelite Ricks, the solid neck-through portion of the prototype/first issue ViviTones, or the solidbody aluminum Frying Pans (whew!), there were the fretted Spanish-neck, handmade, solidbody wooden Electro prototypes by George Beauchamp (with the help of Harry Watson and Paul Barth; see Richard Smith’s The Complete History of Rickenbacher). Unfortunately, Adolph Rickenbacher didn’t do wood. His shop cranked out metal parts all day for National, but he was the wrong man to ask about making wooden instruments. He and Beauchamp’s relationship in National even led to experiments with Bakelite necks for a totally woodless resonator guitar. Therefore, the first Electro Hawaiian guitars were aluminum and the manufacture of wooden Spanish guitar bodies was subcontracted out.

Why did they not make a Spanish-necked solidbody model from the start, using aluminum? Aluminum has been experimented with by numerous companies since the Frying Pan, but the public’s reaction to holding it in the palm of one’s hands and against their bodies has traditionally been lukewarm at best. It’s just doesn’t feel, like wood. Or even Bakelite, which is a vast improvement over metal for both comfort, and stability. Hawaiian guitars, wood or aluminum, require no fretting. Plus, tuning problems related to temperature changes are not as noticeable, since you use your ear to find notes, with left-hand vibrato masking small pitch variations.

So Rickenbacher included a round neck with molded frets on the aluminum “fingerboard,” a slot for easy installation of a Spanish-style nut, and made mention of adaptability in their patent applications from January, 1932 ,and June, 1934. But they chose to release a wooden-ody Spanish guitar with the caption “The conventional shape is retained for convenience,” which can be interpreted as “The conventional shape has been retained so that we have a snowball’s chance of having players at least comfortable with the feel, if not the strange sound and sustain.”

Richenbacher’s business savvy was probably responsible for the traditional Spanish-style instead of a solidbody along the lines of the prototypes. The only people thinking even remotely along the same plane as Beauchamp were Williams and Loar of ViviTone, who made it explicitly clear in their July ’33 patent application that solid was the way to go. And that resonant air chambers were the root of all evil. Then reality smacked them across the face, as the initial reaction from violinists, violists, mandolinists, mandocellists, and guitarists was a nearly unanimous rejection. Sales of perhaps a handful or two of the different solidbody instruments led to the majorly reworked patent application filed less than six months later for an acoustic instrument that could also be used electrically. Another patent was filed three and a half months later for an even more acoustic instrument with a pickup, followed shortly thereafter by Loar’s experimental “fairy fret” acoustics with no pickups. Two failed businesses in three years later, they gave up, while Rickenbacher’s business was up in 1935 almost 400 percent from ’34 (ViviTone’s inferior pickup design was also to blame).

How does Fender’s body compare to this multitude of earlier attempts? For one, it had a cutaway, useful to future guitarists, but then, electrified archtops had been fitted with both Venetian and Florentine styles in the preceding 10 years, so Fender was merely in keeping with the times (a prototypical Bakelite Spanish with cutaway from the late ’40s has also turned up recently). Circa 1930 Epiphones and KayKrafts come to mind for cutaway pre-Electro (which had 24 frets clear of the body!) guitars, although mandolins had them for years prior to that. Nothing clever about Leo’s body design.

Like the Bakelite Spanish-body that preceded it, the first two prototype Esquires attempted to deal with the excess weight of a solidbody, with the first being two pieces of pine and the second being two pieces of ash, with hollow chambers like the Rick. Rickenbacher had taken out all the excess Bakelite from their bodies they feasibly could while maintaining the structural integrity of solid Bakelite, but Leo eventually opted for a heavier, but easy-to-manufacture solid instrument. Guitarists have gotten used to the weight over the last 50 years, but it was a major concern of Rickenbacher and Fender – Rickenbacker in ’35 and Fender in ’49.

Backloaded Tailpieces
Beauchamp’s early-’30s prototype instituted a novel approach to mounting strings to a guitar body, the backloaded or string-through style, as it is referred to today. Practical on solidbody instruments only, for obvious reasons, the incredible string tension is spread out through the depth of the instrument, with hot spots where the ball-ends rest and where the strings make a sharp break to the bridge (see Bridgeplate section). The ball ends sit firmly in the Bakelite body’s individual recesses, with no apparent strain on the pressure points over the last 64 years.

Fender also used an identical backload arrangement on his Esquire, but with recessed metal cups to keep the ball-ends from having direct contact with the wood (a potentially unstable arrangement over time).

Bridges
Here the guitars really differ. The Rick got by with a simple metal combination bridge and saddle, with a string angle going over the bridge similar to a Tune-o-matic Les Paul’s. This piece was chrome-plated to match the rest of the hardware and the saddle was compensated for longer bass string distance.

Fender used a relatively new design of adjustable saddles, allowing individual height adjustment and accurate intonation…kinda. Instead of one for each string, there were only three. Six strings, three saddles. With a wound third, this arrangement almost works as intended, but with a plain third, the angled bar worked better, ala Rickenbacher, wraparound Les Pauls, late-’50s Gretsch, etc. Neither work as well as six individual saddles, as seen on Melita bridges and National’s patented post-WWII device.

Following the release of Gibson’s Tune-o-matic, Leo’s next design, the Stratocaster, used six. Why didn’t they change the Tele’s bridgeplate and saddles after the Strat’s release, who knows? There are those who feel that having the force of two strings pulling down on two adjustment screws is better than only one string pulling down on two adjustment screws, which makes sense in theory. But why six on one guitar and three on the other for the next 30-some years?

Bridgeplates
The distance between where the strings come through the body and where they break over the bridge is relatively close on both guitars, particularly when compared to the multiple inches generally separating a standard trapeze tailpiece and the bridge. All of the early solidbodies mentioned above, except for the one-off Audiovox, still relied on floating trapeze tailpieces, missing one of the most important benefits of solidbody construction. Perhaps the steep angle over the ridge on the Esquire was intentional to generate a great amount of downward pressure on the bridge saddles. Or possibly it was just to help keep the metal bridge/pickup unit from taking up any more space on the face of the guitar. For whatever reason, the break coming out of the body, even though less than on the Rick, still required a metal plate with six holes for the strings to keep them from digging into the wood. This plate also held the pickup and its top mounted height-adjustment bolts (see below for the merits of the sharp metal edges on the sides of the bridgeplate).

Rickenbacher’s pickup, too, was height-adjustable from the top, but used separate metal brackets (instead of the large combination plate) with two small bolts securing each to the body and a thumbscrew-style adjustment nut on each, allowing either side of the pickup to be manually raised or lowered. Although Fenders require use of a screwdriver, both arrangements accomplished the same task and connected to metal plates underneath the pickup. While Rickenbacher designed this arrangement, it was industry standard by the time Fender implemented it.

Bridge/Pickup Covers (a.k.a Handrests)
Whether Beauchamp included half of his pickup’s magnets on the topside of the strings for performance reasons (magnetic) or utilitarian (handrest), there they sit, as they left the factory during its first 20 five years of operation (and some later than that). You probably wouldn’t want one of these in the neck position on a Spanish guitar, but there is a spot, right where they put them, that allows the hand to firmly and evenly mute the strings when desirous and still have room on the other side of the pickup to pluck in the bright range when not muting. There’s also room to fit a pick between the bridge and the pickup for special, effect if you’re careful.

But the popular right-hand technique of the era was to use the pickup or bridge cover as a handrest, either for plectrum playing in the imaginary rhythm pickup vicinity or to fingerpick from, as the thick horseshoe magnet provides an extremely stable base to work from.

This was mimicked by countless other companies for lapsteels and numerous times for Spanish-necks. Fender’s pickup cover, reverentially referred to as the ashtray, stretched from the bridge in a similar fashion, but without allowing for mutations! Luckily, it was removable to facilitate string changes, but the original intention was for it to be returned to place. Even Leo’s prototypes had these covers, so they weren’t merely cosmetic. Removal became accepted practice, however, allowing the Telecaster to become one of the most popular guitars of all time, despite the major design flaw. Unfortunately, the portion of the bridgeplate designed to hold the cover securely in place can wreak havoc on the hands of players with an ambitious right arm.

Pickups
Rickenbacher’s horseshoe pickups have garnered a great reputation for their tone, with many players feeling the original models have never been topped by any maker. Fender’s pickups, with their Rickenbacher-like single coils (and un-Rickenbacher-like individual magnets), have instilled the same feeling in numerous Hawaiian players, but the real market strength, bordering on domination, has been for their Spanish-style guitars. Unfortunately, neither the pre-WWII Model Bs or F.C. Hall’s mid-’50s Combos were sold in enough quantities to make much of an impression on the Spanish market, although there are those who swear by them (special thanks to VG contributor Peter Stuart Kohman for letting us disassemble and publicly slander one of his favorite guitars!).

Jacks
Both instruments have a recessed 1/4″ output jack on their sides, with the wood-bodied Fender requiring the addition of a metal cup and an internal brace, force-fit into place as it digs into the wood – and notorious for coming loose (did a man often referred to as a genius really design this primitive solution?). The perfectly molded Model B did not require anything more than a flat washer, plus it lacked the metal cup’s protruding edges.

Controls
The controls on both instruments are mounted to a metal plate secured to the top with either bolts (Rick) or screws (Fender). While the Bakelite pictured here was only fitted with a single control for volume, the later models also employed a tone knob on the opposite side (Alvino Rey was still developing the first commercially available tone circuit for Gibson when the Bakelite models were introduced). However, the last of the Rickenbacher Hawaiians had both volume and tone pots in the same plate, as perhaps did the very last Spanish models, as would the Esquire 10 years later. There was no three-way switch on Leo’s prototypes, just volume and tone, making the top-mounted control panel yet another feature in the incredibly long list of original Beauchamp/Rickenbacher ideas that made up the first Fender.

Conclusion
These little guitars are screamers and have none of the student model/toy characteristic feel or sound some try to demean them with. Similar in many ways to a Les Paul Jr. or Firebird I, as well as the Esquire, the single-pickup Model B is a rock and roll guitar, albeit 20 or 30 years early. Limited access to the high frets would keep this from serious note benders, but noodling in E at the twelfth fret is wide open and two-fingered blues licks in G are quite playable, similar to playing in keys above A on a Les Paul.

The other 31/4 octaves are great, unless you’re used to monster frets, with intonation about what can be expected from a bar bridge (remember any guitar is by nature an imperfect, slightly out-of-une instrument, and it won’t get you down).

With a scale length of 221/2″, the neck is considered short-scale, but the feel is very similar to a ’50s Les Paul Junior, having a good-sized width (13/4″ at the nut) and depth with that almost round feeling Gibson lost in 1960; miles away from the baseball bats or exaggerated Vs of the guitar’s original competition. Note bending is comparable to a Gibson, radius-wise, and similar in feel to most original ’50s frets (you can feel the fingerboard), but not LP Custom Fretless Wonder-like at all. Plus the short scale length makes .011s respond like .010s, .010s respond like .009s, etc.

This was an important feature in the ’30s, when strings came in one gauge – big! Beauchamp used a short scale because he could, tradition be damned! With electrics, it was feasible and the theory was exploited by professionals like Tal Farlow, Billy Byrd, and Hank Garland in the ’50s, as well as Jimi Hendrix in the early ’60s.

As for the hollowed-out areas under the plates, it’s obvious they were dealing with excess weight and not creating tone chambers. The prototype/first run models had unobstructed neck-through solidness, but Bakelite is amazingly dense and when even more weight needed to be removed, they took it from between the pickup and the end of the fingerboard, plus a little bit under the bridge (the only places left), with no obvious negative effect. Fact is, the neck joint is a snug 4″ long and the bridge and strings mount into a square block of the rock-like miracle substance (at least for the ’30s), making this guitar solid and uneffected by the frivolous inclusion of extra mass to either side of the neck.

Next month, we’ll discuss the Rickenbacher/Electro Bakelite Electric Spanish Guitars. And don’t forget to check out this month’s “Vintage Amplifiers” column on the Pre-WWII Electro and Rickenbacher amps.

Neither this article or last month’s on the Audiovox bass were meant to belittle the memory of Leo Fender or try to negate the impact his Precision Bass and Esquire/Broadcaster/Telecaster guitars have had on musicians and listeners alike (I still rely on the ’66 Vibrolux Reverb I’ve had longer than my Gretsch). Hopefully, these exposes have come across as based in fact and not merely opinionated rantings – rewriting a half century’s worth of history books isn’t always easy.

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Backs of top-mounted control panels and hollow cavities in bodies. Later Ricks had both volume and tone controls; original Esquire also fitted with volume and tone controls, with no three-way switch. Photo by John Teagle

This article originally appeared in VG‘s April ’99 issue.

Even if Rickenbacher’s 1935 Bakelite Spanish model wasn’t the first solidbody electric, it would still be important in the evolution of modern guitars as the inspiration for Fender’s 1949 entry into the world of Spanish-neck instruments. During WWII, a crude test model was made in Leo Fender’s radio shop, using a prefab fingerboard and a Spanish-style neck, but this directly led to the K&F Hawaiian (lapsteel), with no apparent influence on the much later Spanish release. However, a piece-by-piece comparison with the Rickenbacher leaves little choice but to concede this is where Leo got his design for the Esquire.

Build an Esquire out of Bakelite and you basically have a Model B Spanish (as the Rick was referred to in its later years). Or build a Model B out of wood and you basically have an Esquire, which inspired the Broadcaster/Telecaster, which is all the further in the evolution of the electric guitar many feel is necessary.

The fact Leo started with Doc Kaufman as his business partner points to an acute awareness of Rickenbacher. Kaufman was involved on a number of projects prior to meeting Fender, including the motorized vibrato version of the standard Model B. Performing on his personal Vibrola Spanish Guitar prior to, during, and after WWII (which includes the entire time he was involved with Mr. Fender), Doc reportedly wore out at least one of the easily replaceable necks. It seems ridiculous to think Leo could have been unaware of the Bakelite guitars. So just how close are they?

Parts is Parts
Necks
One of the distinguishing features of Fender guitars has always been the neck; a solid piece of maple that could be screwed securely to the body but was easily removed for replacement should the frets wear out or a warp develop. No more expensive or amateur refrets or necksets – remember, in many parts of the country, quality repair work was an oxymoron.

And because there was no separate fingerboard on the ’50s maple-neck models, mass production was made even more efficient.

A brilliant idea, but credit its refinement and popularization to Rickenbacher. While others had failed with bolt-on neck acoustics, Adolph’s skills with non-wood materials yielded a sturdy, consistent, inexpensive, and easily installed neck with the frets and nut installed. Adjustable truss rods were not necessary, even with the heavy strings of the day, but replacement necks were available for $2.75 (less than five percent of the instrument’s total price) in case of accidental breakage or worn frets.

Like the Rickenbacher, the first Esquires did not have a truss rod of any kind. But, unlike the Rick, they would need them. The prototype Esquire from late ’49 (which more than any instrument, represents Leo’s conceptualization) also had a Rickenbacher-ish headstock, in that tuners were fitted three to a side; plus the shape was simple, with straight lines across the top and down the sides. No graceful curves or frills on either utilitarian peghead.

Nuts
Manufacturing with Bakelite allowed Rickenbacher to mold in a perfectly formed nut, having a cross-section where the strings make contact that was much thinner than the traditional style. On its lapsteels, Fender used a metal plate that covered most of the headstock before bending up to form the string spacers. But the Esquire essentially had a Rickenbacher-sized nut installed after the neck was shaped (try mass-producing a nut-sized protrusion at the end of a wooden fingerboard!).

Rickenbacher gracefully molded the headstock face to curve up into the nut instead of the traditional flat peghead veneer; Fender mimicked the curve almost to a T. Since their necks started as a straight piece of wood, pegheads ran straight back from the nut; as opposed to the Rick’s gentle backwards slope – just enough to keep strings from popping out of the nut.

While Fender’s design made efficient use of wood, following Rickenbacher’s more closely could have alleviated the future need for string retainers.

Neck Joints
The famous Fender neck pocket is less intricate but still similar to that of the Model B, particularly in concept. On most pre-CBS instruments, friction alone can usually hold the neck in place while screwing it to the body and the same is true of the perfectly molded Rick, which has no side-to-side play. Later Fender guitars often had 1/8″ gaps up on either side that required aligning the neck with the strings in place before final tightening.

On Fenders, the use of a clunky metal plate keeps string tension from pulling the mounting screws through the wood body, but this additional part was not necessary with the dense, hard Bakelite. The ability of Bakelite to withstand massive pounds per square inch of pressure was critical to a bolt-on arrangement, and because the bolts were threaded into tapped holes (as opposed to screws being forced into wood), the minimal number of two was sufficient. Four screws sunk into maple is the standard configuration today for detachable wooden necks, though interestingly, they are still referred to as “bolt-ons.” The rounded heads of the two Rickenbacher bolts were recessed flush with the voluptuous back, instead of sticking up 1/8″ along with the neckplate off the otherwise flat surface.

Bodies
Which came first, the solidbody or mass production? Before the solidbody wooden Fenders, or the prototypes of Bigsby, App, Polfus, the solidbody wooden Slingerlands, the solidbody wooden Audiovox cutaway prototype, the solidbody Bakelite Ricks, the solid neck-through portion of the prototype/first issue ViviTones, or the solidbody aluminum Frying Pans (whew!), there were the fretted Spanish-neck, handmade, solidbody wooden Electro prototypes by George Beauchamp (with the help of Harry Watson and Paul Barth; see Richard Smith’s The Complete History of Rickenbacher). Unfortunately, Adolph Rickenbacher didn’t do wood. His shop cranked out metal parts all day for National, but he was the wrong man to ask about making wooden instruments. He and Beauchamp’s relationship in National even led to experiments with Bakelite necks for a totally woodless resonator guitar. Therefore, the first Electro Hawaiian guitars were aluminum and the manufacture of wooden Spanish guitar bodies was subcontracted out.

Why did they not make a Spanish-necked solidbody model from the start, using aluminum? Aluminum has been experimented with by numerous companies since the Frying Pan, but the public’s reaction to holding it in the palm of one’s hands and against their bodies has traditionally been lukewarm at best. It’s just doesn’t feel, like wood. Or even Bakelite, which is a vast improvement over metal for both comfort, and stability. Hawaiian guitars, wood or aluminum, require no fretting. Plus, tuning problems related to temperature changes are not as noticeable, since you use your ear to find notes, with left-hand vibrato masking small pitch variations.

So Rickenbacher included a round neck with molded frets on the aluminum “fingerboard,” a slot for easy installation of a Spanish-style nut, and made mention of adaptability in their patent applications from January, 1932 ,and June, 1934. But they chose to release a wooden-ody Spanish guitar with the caption “The conventional shape is retained for convenience,” which can be interpreted as “The conventional shape has been retained so that we have a snowball’s chance of having players at least comfortable with the feel, if not the strange sound and sustain.”

Richenbacher’s business savvy was probably responsible for the traditional Spanish-style instead of a solidbody along the lines of the prototypes. The only people thinking even remotely along the same plane as Beauchamp were Williams and Loar of ViviTone, who made it explicitly clear in their July ’33 patent application that solid was the way to go. And that resonant air chambers were the root of all evil. Then reality smacked them across the face, as the initial reaction from violinists, violists, mandolinists, mandocellists, and guitarists was a nearly unanimous rejection. Sales of perhaps a handful or two of the different solidbody instruments led to the majorly reworked patent application filed less than six months later for an acoustic instrument that could also be used electrically. Another patent was filed three and a half months later for an even more acoustic instrument with a pickup, followed shortly thereafter by Loar’s experimental “fairy fret” acoustics with no pickups. Two failed businesses in three years later, they gave up, while Rickenbacher’s business was up in 1935 almost 400 percent from ’34 (ViviTone’s inferior pickup design was also to blame).

How does Fender’s body compare to this multitude of earlier attempts? For one, it had a cutaway, useful to future guitarists, but then, electrified archtops had been fitted with both Venetian and Florentine styles in the preceding 10 years, so Fender was merely in keeping with the times (a prototypical Bakelite Spanish with cutaway from the late ’40s has also turned up recently). Circa 1930 Epiphones and KayKrafts come to mind for cutaway pre-Electro (which had 24 frets clear of the body!) guitars, although mandolins had them for years prior to that. Nothing clever about Leo’s body design.

Like the Bakelite Spanish-body that preceded it, the first two prototype Esquires attempted to deal with the excess weight of a solidbody, with the first being two pieces of pine and the second being two pieces of ash, with hollow chambers like the Rick. Rickenbacher had taken out all the excess Bakelite from their bodies they feasibly could while maintaining the structural integrity of solid Bakelite, but Leo eventually opted for a heavier, but easy-to-manufacture solid instrument. Guitarists have gotten used to the weight over the last 50 years, but it was a major concern of Rickenbacher and Fender – Rickenbacker in ’35 and Fender in ’49.

Backloaded Tailpieces
Beauchamp’s early-’30s prototype instituted a novel approach to mounting strings to a guitar body, the backloaded or string-through style, as it is referred to today. Practical on solidbody instruments only, for obvious reasons, the incredible string tension is spread out through the depth of the instrument, with hot spots where the ball-ends rest and where the strings make a sharp break to the bridge (see Bridgeplate section). The ball ends sit firmly in the Bakelite body’s individual recesses, with no apparent strain on the pressure points over the last 64 years.

Fender also used an identical backload arrangement on his Esquire, but with recessed metal cups to keep the ball-ends from having direct contact with the wood (a potentially unstable arrangement over time).

Bridges
Here the guitars really differ. The Rick got by with a simple metal combination bridge and saddle, with a string angle going over the bridge similar to a Tune-o-matic Les Paul’s. This piece was chrome-plated to match the rest of the hardware and the saddle was compensated for longer bass string distance.

Fender used a relatively new design of adjustable saddles, allowing individual height adjustment and accurate intonation…kinda. Instead of one for each string, there were only three. Six strings, three saddles. With a wound third, this arrangement almost works as intended, but with a plain third, the angled bar worked better, ala Rickenbacher, wraparound Les Pauls, late-’50s Gretsch, etc. Neither work as well as six individual saddles, as seen on Melita bridges and National’s patented post-WWII device.

Following the release of Gibson’s Tune-o-matic, Leo’s next design, the Stratocaster, used six. Why didn’t they change the Tele’s bridgeplate and saddles after the Strat’s release, who knows? There are those who feel that having the force of two strings pulling down on two adjustment screws is better than only one string pulling down on two adjustment screws, which makes sense in theory. But why six on one guitar and three on the other for the next 30-some years?

Bridgeplates
The distance between where the strings come through the body and where they break over the bridge is relatively close on both guitars, particularly when compared to the multiple inches generally separating a standard trapeze tailpiece and the bridge. All of the early solidbodies mentioned above, except for the one-off Audiovox, still relied on floating trapeze tailpieces, missing one of the most important benefits of solidbody construction. Perhaps the steep angle over the ridge on the Esquire was intentional to generate a great amount of downward pressure on the bridge saddles. Or possibly it was just to help keep the metal bridge/pickup unit from taking up any more space on the face of the guitar. For whatever reason, the break coming out of the body, even though less than on the Rick, still required a metal plate with six holes for the strings to keep them from digging into the wood. This plate also held the pickup and its top mounted height-adjustment bolts (see below for the merits of the sharp metal edges on the sides of the bridgeplate).

Rickenbacher’s pickup, too, was height-adjustable from the top, but used separate metal brackets (instead of the large combination plate) with two small bolts securing each to the body and a thumbscrew-style adjustment nut on each, allowing either side of the pickup to be manually raised or lowered. Although Fenders require use of a screwdriver, both arrangements accomplished the same task and connected to metal plates underneath the pickup. While Rickenbacher designed this arrangement, it was industry standard by the time Fender implemented it.

Bridge/Pickup Covers (a.k.a Handrests)
Whether Beauchamp included half of his pickup’s magnets on the topside of the strings for performance reasons (magnetic) or utilitarian (handrest), there they sit, as they left the factory during its first 20 five years of operation (and some later than that). You probably wouldn’t want one of these in the neck position on a Spanish guitar, but there is a spot, right where they put them, that allows the hand to firmly and evenly mute the strings when desirous and still have room on the other side of the pickup to pluck in the bright range when not muting. There’s also room to fit a pick between the bridge and the pickup for special, effect if you’re careful.

But the popular right-hand technique of the era was to use the pickup or bridge cover as a handrest, either for plectrum playing in the imaginary rhythm pickup vicinity or to fingerpick from, as the thick horseshoe magnet provides an extremely stable base to work from.

This was mimicked by countless other companies for lapsteels and numerous times for Spanish-necks. Fender’s pickup cover, reverentially referred to as the ashtray, stretched from the bridge in a similar fashion, but without allowing for mutations! Luckily, it was removable to facilitate string changes, but the original intention was for it to be returned to place. Even Leo’s prototypes had these covers, so they weren’t merely cosmetic. Removal became accepted practice, however, allowing the Telecaster to become one of the most popular guitars of all time, despite the major design flaw. Unfortunately, the portion of the bridgeplate designed to hold the cover securely in place can wreak havoc on the hands of players with an ambitious right arm.

Pickups
Rickenbacher’s horseshoe pickups have garnered a great reputation for their tone, with many players feeling the original models have never been topped by any maker. Fender’s pickups, with their Rickenbacher-like single coils (and un-Rickenbacher-like individual magnets), have instilled the same feeling in numerous Hawaiian players, but the real market strength, bordering on domination, has been for their Spanish-style guitars. Unfortunately, neither the pre-WWII Model Bs or F.C. Hall’s mid-’50s Combos were sold in enough quantities to make much of an impression on the Spanish market, although there are those who swear by them (special thanks to VG contributor Peter Stuart Kohman for letting us disassemble and publicly slander one of his favorite guitars!).

Jacks
Both instruments have a recessed 1/4″ output jack on their sides, with the wood-bodied Fender requiring the addition of a metal cup and an internal brace, force-fit into place as it digs into the wood – and notorious for coming loose (did a man often referred to as a genius really design this primitive solution?). The perfectly molded Model B did not require anything more than a flat washer, plus it lacked the metal cup’s protruding edges.

Controls
The controls on both instruments are mounted to a metal plate secured to the top with either bolts (Rick) or screws (Fender). While the Bakelite pictured here was only fitted with a single control for volume, the later models also employed a tone knob on the opposite side (Alvino Rey was still developing the first commercially available tone circuit for Gibson when the Bakelite models were introduced). However, the last of the Rickenbacher Hawaiians had both volume and tone pots in the same plate, as perhaps did the very last Spanish models, as would the Esquire 10 years later. There was no three-way switch on Leo’s prototypes, just volume and tone, making the top-mounted control panel yet another feature in the incredibly long list of original Beauchamp/Rickenbacher ideas that made up the first Fender.

Conclusion
These little guitars are screamers and have none of the student model/toy characteristic feel or sound some try to demean them with. Similar in many ways to a Les Paul Jr. or Firebird I, as well as the Esquire, the single-pickup Model B is a rock and roll guitar, albeit 20 or 30 years early. Limited access to the high frets would keep this from serious note benders, but noodling in E at the twelfth fret is wide open and two-fingered blues licks in G are quite playable, similar to playing in keys above A on a Les Paul.

The other 31/4 octaves are great, unless you’re used to monster frets, with intonation about what can be expected from a bar bridge (remember any guitar is by nature an imperfect, slightly out-of-une instrument, and it won’t get you down).

With a scale length of 221/2″, the neck is considered short-scale, but the feel is very similar to a ’50s Les Paul Junior, having a good-sized width (13/4″ at the nut) and depth with that almost round feeling Gibson lost in 1960; miles away from the baseball bats or exaggerated Vs of the guitar’s original competition. Note bending is comparable to a Gibson, radius-wise, and similar in feel to most original ’50s frets (you can feel the fingerboard), but not LP Custom Fretless Wonder-like at all. Plus the short scale length makes .011s respond like .010s, .010s respond like .009s, etc.

This was an important feature in the ’30s, when strings came in one gauge – big! Beauchamp used a short scale because he could, tradition be damned! With electrics, it was feasible and the theory was exploited by professionals like Tal Farlow, Billy Byrd, and Hank Garland in the ’50s, as well as Jimi Hendrix in the early ’60s.

As for the hollowed-out areas under the plates, it’s obvious they were dealing with excess weight and not creating tone chambers. The prototype/first run models had unobstructed neck-through solidness, but Bakelite is amazingly dense and when even more weight needed to be removed, they took it from between the pickup and the end of the fingerboard, plus a little bit under the bridge (the only places left), with no obvious negative effect. Fact is, the neck joint is a snug 4″ long and the bridge and strings mount into a square block of the rock-like miracle substance (at least for the ’30s), making this guitar solid and uneffected by the frivolous inclusion of extra mass to either side of the neck.

Next month, we’ll discuss the Rickenbacher/Electro Bakelite Electric Spanish Guitars. And don’t forget to check out this month’s “Vintage Amplifiers” column on the Pre-WWII Electro and Rickenbacher amps.

Neither this article or last month’s on the Audiovox bass were meant to belittle the memory of Leo Fender or try to negate the impact his Precision Bass and Esquire/Broadcaster/Telecaster guitars have had on musicians and listeners alike (I still rely on the ’66 Vibrolux Reverb I’ve had longer than my Gretsch). Hopefully, these exposes have come across as based in fact and not merely opinionated rantings – rewriting a half century’s worth of history books isn’t always easy.

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Backs of top-mounted control panels and hollow cavities in bodies. Later Ricks had both volume and tone controls; original Esquire also fitted with volume and tone controls, with no three-way switch. Photo by John Teagle

This article originally appeared in VG‘s April ’99 issue.

Perhaps this essay should have been titled “Audiovox vs. The Piltdown Man,” due to the doubts had by myself and a number of others regarding the authenticity of this month’s cover girl. The Piltdown Man, for those who played guitar all day instead of doing your anthropology homework, represents the ultimate hoax on a scientific community – a deliberate deceit.

Having done extensive research into the early days of electric and electrified musical instruments, I was not wholly convinced when word filtered out of Seattle a few years ago regarding the late Paul Tutmarc’s pre-WWII Audiovox line; particularly the wooden solidbody fretted electric bass guitar. In work for an upcoming book, I’d gone through just about every page of nearly every national music publication from the era, plus countless patents, and had yet to find mention of Paul Tutmarc or Audiovox.

Besides, everybody knows Fender created the electric bass guitar, right? Adolph Rickenbacher released a solidbody electric upright in 1935, followed shortly by Regal, Vega, etc. and the idea of a fretted acoustic bass was pursued by Gibson and Lyon & Healy as early as 1911, with the oversized four-string Dobros and Regal’s Basso-Guitar showing up in the ’30s (and then there’s Washburn’s giant six-string bass guitar from the 1890s, see page 87 of the Washburn book). But prior to 1951, no one had combined a solidbody electric instrument (as seen on countless lap steels and a handful of Spanish guitars) with a fretted bass, particularly one held and plucked like a guitar.

Or so consensus has had it.

Taking into account the close to 50-year acceptance of Hall-of-Famer Leo Fender as the bassists’ friend, it seems almost blasphemous to suggest that 1.) his idea for the Precision was not the first of its kind, and 2.) its design might possibly warrant charges of plagiarism!

Could Tutmarc’s son, Paul Jr., be credibly representing his father’s story, as told in The Hawaiian Steel Guitar (compiled by Lorene Ruymar), and a small article in Bass Player Magazine? If nothing else, neither of these seemed to influence public opinion on the subject, creating yet more doubt. Then there was Peter Blecha, a relative newcomer to the international vintage guitar community, but Curator of Collections for the newly formed Experience Music Project (based in Seattle and backed by the $20 billion bank of Zeus). As part one in a series of booklets on the world of music, the EMP museum published his chronicle detailing the electric guitar’s genealogy, in which he places Tutmarc at the very least among the progenitors of the instrument’s design.

A couple of shady characters in cahoots, Blecha and Paul Jr.? Far from it. But in this day and age, any great revelation regarding the history of American guitars is met with suspicion. One only has to look at the 25-plus year influx of faux-’50s Gibsons, bogus bolt-on neck bastards, new pre-war D-45s, etc., to realize there are more than a few shady folks in the field, or more aptly put, business of “vintage” instruments. As the public’s knowledge of details has increased over the years, the amount of related hokum put into passing a major forgery has likewise increased. And it’s not just guitars; fine violins have been knocked off for centuries and pre-WWII five-string resonator banjos are, more often than not, converted four-strings. One old-timer from the Depression-era, who kept photos of himself as a young man with his fancy five-string, went so far as to have replicas of the surviving instrument made, which he then sold off with copies of the provenance! Former bandmate and VG contributor Baker Rorick and I jokingly tossed around the idea of setting up a photograph showing a uniformed Korean War-era lad holding a somewhat crude Strat-inspired doubleneck; a guitar handmade in the late ’50s and currently in Baker’s possession. By distributing a story to one of the guitar-zines about looking for “…uncle Zeke’s guitar,” (from Fullerton, California, of course) with the bogus photo “…taken right before his death in 1953,” we could have mirculously turned up the “real” basis of the Stratocaster! Change the pots to 1952 or late ’80s, and who could argue!

A stop in Seattle seemed prudent. Meeting with Tutmarc and Blecha, it became obvious the Audiovox story is indeed very real. Paul Sr. was a big fish in the Seattle music waters, with Paul Jr. taking it a step further, recording 30-plus albums of Hawaiian and inspirational music over the years. Bud (as the younger Tutmarc goes by) was a most gracious host, opening his scrapbooks and pulling out numerous examples of his and his father’s handiwork; single, double and quintuple-necked Hawaiians, amplifiers, old pickups, etc.

Stories of his firsthand involvement growing up and newspaper clippings galore, were impressive, to say the least. A photo of Bud’s band with the Audiovox bass guitar in his 1937 high school yearbook, the family photo with mom playing a similar model, and the 1947 L.D. Heater ad for his ’46-’48 “Bud-Electro Mfg. Co.” Serenader bass made my jaw drop! His friendship with fellow steel guitarist Alvino Rey further dispelled any doubts I may have had about his credibility prior to our meeting.

Returning to Seattle in the Fall as an EMP exhibit consultant (along with authors George Gruhn and Richard Smith, Gibson aficionado Lynn Wheelwright, and hometown welcome wagon/VG regular Jim Hilmar), it became obvious Blecha was totally sincere in his fanatical appreciation of the Northwest music scene and the history of the electric guitar. He put together an enormous collection of related paper and artifacts prior to his involvement with the museum and has been constantly expanding on it.

It was inspirational to see a pair of original pre-WWII Audiovox flyers, numerous dated newspaper clippings and a number of the museum’s original Audiovox Hawaiian guitars and amps. And playing the Audiovox bass was an absolute thrill (“Who cares about the Hendrix Woodstock Strat, let’s see that Audiovox bass!”)!

An old clipping from the Seattle daily newspaper (provided by Tutmarc and dated to 1935 by Blecha) pictured music studio operator/local celebrity Paul Sr. with a prototype electric upright bass, described as the world’s first and seeming to pre-date his bass guitar.

It’s interesting that in the article there is no mention of the other instruments or the Audiovox brand name, which could suggest manufacturing was not approached as an official business until a short time later. However, the number of existing survivors shows there definitely was a company.

Apparently, the Audiovox line was only available in the Seattle area, with no national distribution in its lifetime. Unlike the legendary Les Paul log and App solidbody guitars (both historically overrated in the evolutionary process), Tutmarc’s instruments were not one-off prototypes, but sold on a somewhat regular basis for many years through his teaching studio. It seems logical a portion of his business was for custom-ordered instruments, but apparently none got the exposure associated with celebrity endorsers, unlike those of Paul Bigsby, Elmer Stromberg, John D’Angelico, etc. Had Audiovox been located in either L.A. or NYC, things might be different today.

In a newspaper interview from 1971, Paul Sr. dated his involvement with Arthur J. Stimson to the early ’30s. Their relationship designing pickups reportedly ended when Stimson filed a patent application for a jointly designed pickup, which was assigned to Dobro for use with its entry into the electric field, the All-Electric (and for which Stimson reportedly received $600). Bud Tutmarc’s recollections of his father’s association with Stimson are in agreement with the old article, but confusing this issue is the fact there are two radically different patents for Dobro, both with Stimson’s name as assignor.

The first patent application was filed April 7, 1933 (see diagram), and this unit corresponds with the first All-Electric ad, also from April ’33. At that time, George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacher’s electric offshoot of National, known as Electro String Instruments Corp., already had its original line on the market, along with Lloyd Loar and Lewis Williams’ new project known as ViviTone, which began advertising in January ’33. Like the ViviTone, the first patent-applied-for pickup electrified the instrument by amplifying string vibrations after they’d been transferred through the bridge. This allowed gut strings to be used, but did not make for a true electric instrument like the metallic-string-driven Electro. The Dobro ad, admittedly an artist’s rendering, does not show a slot for the bar polepiece and examination of the patent clearly shows why; because it did not have one. John Dopyera reportedly claimed all but one of these complicated electromechanical contraptions were recalled and the ukulele, banjo, mandolin and others promised in a press release from the time never materialized. Anyone who has tried to use a similar-style ViviTone knows it just wasn’t a practical approach.

A better pickup, and arguably one of the best designs of all time (check out Bud’s tone on record), showed up not long after the initial experiment.

Experience Music Project has this second version All-Electric in its collection, and the slanted split-polepiece magnetic pickup corresponds with the patent application filed January 19, 1934, as do all the Audiovox Hawaiian guitars and the bass. This pickup is similar to the George Beauchamp Electro/Rickenbacher string-driven horseshoe pickup in many respects, but does not extend over the strings, making it the first of what would become the standard style for Spanish guitars, being entirely under the strings. It also has twin coils (bass side/treble side) wired in series, each with its own blade-style polepiece attached to an opposite end (polarity) of the horseshoe magnet.

Assuming the coils were reverse-wound (why else would they bother with two), you have the first humbucking pickup for a guitar, as seen on split-pickup P-basses (the theory behind hum cancellation was well-established by the mid ’30s).

On the last of the All-Electric models this pickup is mounted straight across, parallel to the bridge, as seen in Gruhn and Carter’s Electric Guitars (pages 47 and 48). Whether the 14-fret neck and body are original on this example is questionable, but the on-the-hour lineup of the dozen coverplate mounting screws is the same as on the first two styles, both of which were 12-fret necks (the authors’ decision to lead off the Spanish Neck Solidbodies chapter with these guitars is mysterious, as they have standard full-depth hollowbodies constructed of thin sides, back, and top. They lack a resonator, so they aren’t at all like a standard Dobro, but they sure ain’t solid!).

A final 12-fret, hubcap-topped electric Dobro is pictured on page 290 of Tom Wheeler’s American Guitars. However, the date of circa 1930, reportedly provided by John Dopyera, is off by enough years to imply it pre-dated the All-Electric, and of course, the Rickenbacher, which wasn’t the case (late ’34/early ’35 is more reasonable). Notice the dozen coverplate mounting screws positioned on the half hour, as on later Dobros, plus the later amp with the chrome coverplate as seen with the Dobro and National electric archtops and aluminum lap steels, all introduced in the summer of ’35 (see page 301 of American Guitars. Note: early All-Electrics were paired with a twin-speaker amp having “Dobro” cutout of the speaker opening; see “Antique Guitar Amps” in the September ’97 VG). Even the metal-encased “airplane” pickups of the ’35 Dobro, National, and ’36 Supro instruments are based on the string-driven second-version pickup, although the combined forces of the newly formed National-Dobro Corp. had switched to a single-coil (non-humbucking) – a few years later National would switch back to multiple coils, with one for each string!

There were probably as many (if not more) instruments made by the tiny Audiovox company using the twin-coil pickup as by the established Dobro factory, given the fact Dobro did little if any promotion for their electrics between the original All-Electric experiment of early ’33 and the archtops and Hawaiians of mid-’35 (jobber books, NAMM listings, ads, and a press release detailing the combining of Dobro and National listed only the resonators). While only Stimson’s name is listed on the pickup patents, Tutmarc’s use of the second variant in all his instruments implies he actively participated in its design, as he claimed. Unfortunately, little info is available on Stimson, who apparently was no longer involved in the business by the time Audiovox got off the ground.

Another name associated with the experiments is Bob Wisner, a formally trained electronics wiz who converted Tutmarc’s radio for use as their first amplifier, designed the Audiovox amplifier circuit, and was Bud’s partner in the post-war Bud Electro Mfg. Co. In the early ’30s, pickups and amplifiers were sold as sets, so Wisner would surely have had a say in both.

Considering that and Paul Tutmarc’s dedication to the project, it seems appropriate to include their names on the pickup for future reference, i.e., the Stimson/Tutmarc twin-coil, under-the-string, humbucking pickup.

In closing:
1. Whether or not Tutmarc actually designed what for all intents and purposes is the granddaddy of modern pickups, he was, beyond any reasonable doubt, closely associated with and responsible for the experimentation behind it. For that alone he is deserving of celebrity status among electric guitar aficionados. His endeavor may have begun in the very early ’30s, as has been claimed, but facts suggest the actual Audiovox instruments were more likely mid-’30s.

2. He appears to be responsible for one of (if not the) first electric basses, predating the official release of Rickenbacher’s early style by a few months. The geneses of these distinctly different instruments should be considered concurrent, however, as neither party would have been aware of the other’s experiments and Rick undoubtedly also had prototypes for a time before they went to market with their production version.

3. His indisputable claim to fame has to be the Audiovox #736 wooden solidbody fretted electric bass guitar. Any accolades previously bestowed upon Mr. Fender for inventing the Precision bass must instead be placed posthumously upon Paul Tutmarc. Considering the prehistoric state of technology 15 years prior to Fender’s bass and the relatively new medium of electric instruments, the #736 is an astounding design, far ahead of its time. Much further than the “ground-breaking” P-bass must have seemed a decade and a half later. Perhaps there is no direct tie between the regionally released pre-WWII Audiovox instrument and the ’51 Fender Precision, but Bud Tutmarc’s postwar descendent, the Serenader, was available and promoted on the West Coast for a short time in the late ’40s. It’s quite feasible the ad was seen by someone at Fender and is at least partially responsible for inspiring the famous and undeniably more influential version.

4. Apparently, Tutmarc produced a solidbody cutaway electric guitar made of wood in the mid ’30s! While both known Audiovox flyers describe an add-on pickup for Spanish guitars, the description for the bass in the earliest promo piece mistakenly included a photo of a similar six-string guitar. Until a document listing the guitar is uncovered, or more than one surviving example comes to light, let’s consider the instrument a prototype and hope it turns up, too.

Did it influence Fender’s 1950 Esquire? Probably not. However, if the guitar proves to have been more than a prototype, it would replace the pre-WWII Slingerland No. 401 as the first production model wooden solidbody electric Spanish guitar (let’s not forget Electro’s early-’30s prototype). It would also bump the post-war Fender Esquire out as the first cutaway version (its only claim in the development of the modern electric guitar).

Blecha has promised to provide VG readers another Audiovox feature in the near future, detailing the company’s history and the entire lineup. In the meantime, I sincerely recommend the editorial staff bypass the VG Hall of Fame election process and induct Paul Tutmarc and the Audiovox #736 directly in. His time has come.

A tip of the hat to Peter Blecha for his thorough research on the subject. Thanks to he and Bud Tutmarc for their hospitality and for loading me up with photocopies, CDs and tapes, an old pickup, and a number of memorable meals. Thanks also to John Sprung, Lynn Wheelwright, and Mike Newton for helping sort all this out.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s March. ’99 issue.

Perhaps this essay should have been titled “Audiovox vs. The Piltdown Man,” due to the doubts had by myself and a number of others regarding the authenticity of this month’s cover girl. The Piltdown Man, for those who played guitar all day instead of doing your anthropology homework, represents the ultimate hoax on a scientific community – a deliberate deceit.

Having done extensive research into the early days of electric and electrified musical instruments, I was not wholly convinced when word filtered out of Seattle a few years ago regarding the late Paul Tutmarc’s pre-WWII Audiovox line; particularly the wooden solidbody fretted electric bass guitar. In work for an upcoming book, I’d gone through just about every page of nearly every national music publication from the era, plus countless patents, and had yet to find mention of Paul Tutmarc or Audiovox.

Besides, everybody knows Fender created the electric bass guitar, right? Adolph Rickenbacher released a solidbody electric upright in 1935, followed shortly by Regal, Vega, etc. and the idea of a fretted acoustic bass was pursued by Gibson and Lyon & Healy as early as 1911, with the oversized four-string Dobros and Regal’s Basso-Guitar showing up in the ’30s (and then there’s Washburn’s giant six-string bass guitar from the 1890s, see page 87 of the Washburn book). But prior to 1951, no one had combined a solidbody electric instrument (as seen on countless lap steels and a handful of Spanish guitars) with a fretted bass, particularly one held and plucked like a guitar.

Or so consensus has had it.

Taking into account the close to 50-year acceptance of Hall-of-Famer Leo Fender as the bassists’ friend, it seems almost blasphemous to suggest that 1.) his idea for the Precision was not the first of its kind, and 2.) its design might possibly warrant charges of plagiarism!

Could Tutmarc’s son, Paul Jr., be credibly representing his father’s story, as told in The Hawaiian Steel Guitar (compiled by Lorene Ruymar), and a small article in Bass Player Magazine? If nothing else, neither of these seemed to influence public opinion on the subject, creating yet more doubt. Then there was Peter Blecha, a relative newcomer to the international vintage guitar community, but Curator of Collections for the newly formed Experience Music Project (based in Seattle and backed by the $20 billion bank of Zeus). As part one in a series of booklets on the world of music, the EMP museum published his chronicle detailing the electric guitar’s genealogy, in which he places Tutmarc at the very least among the progenitors of the instrument’s design.

A couple of shady characters in cahoots, Blecha and Paul Jr.? Far from it. But in this day and age, any great revelation regarding the history of American guitars is met with suspicion. One only has to look at the 25-plus year influx of faux-’50s Gibsons, bogus bolt-on neck bastards, new pre-war D-45s, etc., to realize there are more than a few shady folks in the field, or more aptly put, business of “vintage” instruments. As the public’s knowledge of details has increased over the years, the amount of related hokum put into passing a major forgery has likewise increased. And it’s not just guitars; fine violins have been knocked off for centuries and pre-WWII five-string resonator banjos are, more often than not, converted four-strings. One old-timer from the Depression-era, who kept photos of himself as a young man with his fancy five-string, went so far as to have replicas of the surviving instrument made, which he then sold off with copies of the provenance! Former bandmate and VG contributor Baker Rorick and I jokingly tossed around the idea of setting up a photograph showing a uniformed Korean War-era lad holding a somewhat crude Strat-inspired doubleneck; a guitar handmade in the late ’50s and currently in Baker’s possession. By distributing a story to one of the guitar-zines about looking for “…uncle Zeke’s guitar,” (from Fullerton, California, of course) with the bogus photo “…taken right before his death in 1953,” we could have mirculously turned up the “real” basis of the Stratocaster! Change the pots to 1952 or late ’80s, and who could argue!

A stop in Seattle seemed prudent. Meeting with Tutmarc and Blecha, it became obvious the Audiovox story is indeed very real. Paul Sr. was a big fish in the Seattle music waters, with Paul Jr. taking it a step further, recording 30-plus albums of Hawaiian and inspirational music over the years. Bud (as the younger Tutmarc goes by) was a most gracious host, opening his scrapbooks and pulling out numerous examples of his and his father’s handiwork; single, double and quintuple-necked Hawaiians, amplifiers, old pickups, etc.

Stories of his firsthand involvement growing up and newspaper clippings galore, were impressive, to say the least. A photo of Bud’s band with the Audiovox bass guitar in his 1937 high school yearbook, the family photo with mom playing a similar model, and the 1947 L.D. Heater ad for his ’46-’48 “Bud-Electro Mfg. Co.” Serenader bass made my jaw drop! His friendship with fellow steel guitarist Alvino Rey further dispelled any doubts I may have had about his credibility prior to our meeting.

Returning to Seattle in the Fall as an EMP exhibit consultant (along with authors George Gruhn and Richard Smith, Gibson aficionado Lynn Wheelwright, and hometown welcome wagon/VG regular Jim Hilmar), it became obvious Blecha was totally sincere in his fanatical appreciation of the Northwest music scene and the history of the electric guitar. He put together an enormous collection of related paper and artifacts prior to his involvement with the museum and has been constantly expanding on it.

It was inspirational to see a pair of original pre-WWII Audiovox flyers, numerous dated newspaper clippings and a number of the museum’s original Audiovox Hawaiian guitars and amps. And playing the Audiovox bass was an absolute thrill (“Who cares about the Hendrix Woodstock Strat, let’s see that Audiovox bass!”)!

An old clipping from the Seattle daily newspaper (provided by Tutmarc and dated to 1935 by Blecha) pictured music studio operator/local celebrity Paul Sr. with a prototype electric upright bass, described as the world’s first and seeming to pre-date his bass guitar.

It’s interesting that in the article there is no mention of the other instruments or the Audiovox brand name, which could suggest manufacturing was not approached as an official business until a short time later. However, the number of existing survivors shows there definitely was a company.

Apparently, the Audiovox line was only available in the Seattle area, with no national distribution in its lifetime. Unlike the legendary Les Paul log and App solidbody guitars (both historically overrated in the evolutionary process), Tutmarc’s instruments were not one-off prototypes, but sold on a somewhat regular basis for many years through his teaching studio. It seems logical a portion of his business was for custom-ordered instruments, but apparently none got the exposure associated with celebrity endorsers, unlike those of Paul Bigsby, Elmer Stromberg, John D’Angelico, etc. Had Audiovox been located in either L.A. or NYC, things might be different today.

In a newspaper interview from 1971, Paul Sr. dated his involvement with Arthur J. Stimson to the early ’30s. Their relationship designing pickups reportedly ended when Stimson filed a patent application for a jointly designed pickup, which was assigned to Dobro for use with its entry into the electric field, the All-Electric (and for which Stimson reportedly received $600). Bud Tutmarc’s recollections of his father’s association with Stimson are in agreement with the old article, but confusing this issue is the fact there are two radically different patents for Dobro, both with Stimson’s name as assignor.

The first patent application was filed April 7, 1933 (see diagram), and this unit corresponds with the first All-Electric ad, also from April ’33. At that time, George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacher’s electric offshoot of National, known as Electro String Instruments Corp., already had its original line on the market, along with Lloyd Loar and Lewis Williams’ new project known as ViviTone, which began advertising in January ’33. Like the ViviTone, the first patent-applied-for pickup electrified the instrument by amplifying string vibrations after they’d been transferred through the bridge. This allowed gut strings to be used, but did not make for a true electric instrument like the metallic-string-driven Electro. The Dobro ad, admittedly an artist’s rendering, does not show a slot for the bar polepiece and examination of the patent clearly shows why; because it did not have one. John Dopyera reportedly claimed all but one of these complicated electromechanical contraptions were recalled and the ukulele, banjo, mandolin and others promised in a press release from the time never materialized. Anyone who has tried to use a similar-style ViviTone knows it just wasn’t a practical approach.

A better pickup, and arguably one of the best designs of all time (check out Bud’s tone on record), showed up not long after the initial experiment.

Experience Music Project has this second version All-Electric in its collection, and the slanted split-polepiece magnetic pickup corresponds with the patent application filed January 19, 1934, as do all the Audiovox Hawaiian guitars and the bass. This pickup is similar to the George Beauchamp Electro/Rickenbacher string-driven horseshoe pickup in many respects, but does not extend over the strings, making it the first of what would become the standard style for Spanish guitars, being entirely under the strings. It also has twin coils (bass side/treble side) wired in series, each with its own blade-style polepiece attached to an opposite end (polarity) of the horseshoe magnet.

Assuming the coils were reverse-wound (why else would they bother with two), you have the first humbucking pickup for a guitar, as seen on split-pickup P-basses (the theory behind hum cancellation was well-established by the mid ’30s).

On the last of the All-Electric models this pickup is mounted straight across, parallel to the bridge, as seen in Gruhn and Carter’s Electric Guitars (pages 47 and 48). Whether the 14-fret neck and body are original on this example is questionable, but the on-the-hour lineup of the dozen coverplate mounting screws is the same as on the first two styles, both of which were 12-fret necks (the authors’ decision to lead off the Spanish Neck Solidbodies chapter with these guitars is mysterious, as they have standard full-depth hollowbodies constructed of thin sides, back, and top. They lack a resonator, so they aren’t at all like a standard Dobro, but they sure ain’t solid!).

A final 12-fret, hubcap-topped electric Dobro is pictured on page 290 of Tom Wheeler’s American Guitars. However, the date of circa 1930, reportedly provided by John Dopyera, is off by enough years to imply it pre-dated the All-Electric, and of course, the Rickenbacher, which wasn’t the case (late ’34/early ’35 is more reasonable). Notice the dozen coverplate mounting screws positioned on the half hour, as on later Dobros, plus the later amp with the chrome coverplate as seen with the Dobro and National electric archtops and aluminum lap steels, all introduced in the summer of ’35 (see page 301 of American Guitars. Note: early All-Electrics were paired with a twin-speaker amp having “Dobro” cutout of the speaker opening; see “Antique Guitar Amps” in the September ’97 VG). Even the metal-encased “airplane” pickups of the ’35 Dobro, National, and ’36 Supro instruments are based on the string-driven second-version pickup, although the combined forces of the newly formed National-Dobro Corp. had switched to a single-coil (non-humbucking) – a few years later National would switch back to multiple coils, with one for each string!

There were probably as many (if not more) instruments made by the tiny Audiovox company using the twin-coil pickup as by the established Dobro factory, given the fact Dobro did little if any promotion for their electrics between the original All-Electric experiment of early ’33 and the archtops and Hawaiians of mid-’35 (jobber books, NAMM listings, ads, and a press release detailing the combining of Dobro and National listed only the resonators). While only Stimson’s name is listed on the pickup patents, Tutmarc’s use of the second variant in all his instruments implies he actively participated in its design, as he claimed. Unfortunately, little info is available on Stimson, who apparently was no longer involved in the business by the time Audiovox got off the ground.

Another name associated with the experiments is Bob Wisner, a formally trained electronics wiz who converted Tutmarc’s radio for use as their first amplifier, designed the Audiovox amplifier circuit, and was Bud’s partner in the post-war Bud Electro Mfg. Co. In the early ’30s, pickups and amplifiers were sold as sets, so Wisner would surely have had a say in both.

Considering that and Paul Tutmarc’s dedication to the project, it seems appropriate to include their names on the pickup for future reference, i.e., the Stimson/Tutmarc twin-coil, under-the-string, humbucking pickup.

In closing:
1. Whether or not Tutmarc actually designed what for all intents and purposes is the granddaddy of modern pickups, he was, beyond any reasonable doubt, closely associated with and responsible for the experimentation behind it. For that alone he is deserving of celebrity status among electric guitar aficionados. His endeavor may have begun in the very early ’30s, as has been claimed, but facts suggest the actual Audiovox instruments were more likely mid-’30s.

2. He appears to be responsible for one of (if not the) first electric basses, predating the official release of Rickenbacher’s early style by a few months. The geneses of these distinctly different instruments should be considered concurrent, however, as neither party would have been aware of the other’s experiments and Rick undoubtedly also had prototypes for a time before they went to market with their production version.

3. His indisputable claim to fame has to be the Audiovox #736 wooden solidbody fretted electric bass guitar. Any accolades previously bestowed upon Mr. Fender for inventing the Precision bass must instead be placed posthumously upon Paul Tutmarc. Considering the prehistoric state of technology 15 years prior to Fender’s bass and the relatively new medium of electric instruments, the #736 is an astounding design, far ahead of its time. Much further than the “ground-breaking” P-bass must have seemed a decade and a half later. Perhaps there is no direct tie between the regionally released pre-WWII Audiovox instrument and the ’51 Fender Precision, but Bud Tutmarc’s postwar descendent, the Serenader, was available and promoted on the West Coast for a short time in the late ’40s. It’s quite feasible the ad was seen by someone at Fender and is at least partially responsible for inspiring the famous and undeniably more influential version.

4. Apparently, Tutmarc produced a solidbody cutaway electric guitar made of wood in the mid ’30s! While both known Audiovox flyers describe an add-on pickup for Spanish guitars, the description for the bass in the earliest promo piece mistakenly included a photo of a similar six-string guitar. Until a document listing the guitar is uncovered, or more than one surviving example comes to light, let’s consider the instrument a prototype and hope it turns up, too.

Did it influence Fender’s 1950 Esquire? Probably not. However, if the guitar proves to have been more than a prototype, it would replace the pre-WWII Slingerland No. 401 as the first production model wooden solidbody electric Spanish guitar (let’s not forget Electro’s early-’30s prototype). It would also bump the post-war Fender Esquire out as the first cutaway version (its only claim in the development of the modern electric guitar).

Blecha has promised to provide VG readers another Audiovox feature in the near future, detailing the company’s history and the entire lineup. In the meantime, I sincerely recommend the editorial staff bypass the VG Hall of Fame election process and induct Paul Tutmarc and the Audiovox #736 directly in. His time has come.

A tip of the hat to Peter Blecha for his thorough research on the subject. Thanks to he and Bud Tutmarc for their hospitality and for loading me up with photocopies, CDs and tapes, an old pickup, and a number of memorable meals. Thanks also to John Sprung, Lynn Wheelwright, and Mike Newton for helping sort all this out.

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This article originally appeared in VG‘s March. ’99 issue.

Non-MOTS Magnatones
By the mid ’50s, mother of toilet seat (MOTS) had lost its appeal, as had Hawaiian music, so Magnatone discontinued its use on all the amplifiers and offered it only as an option for the new bottom-of-the-line “Steel” guitar. In the Feb. ’98 VG (pg. 115), the five-tube, single 10″ Melodier is described as possibly the largest MOTS amp known to man, with reference to the larger Troubadour and its covering as “unknown.” However, a five-tube, single-12″ speaker Troubadour Model M-192-5D has turned up in original alligator, as seen on the eight-tube, twin-12″ 1948 Professional Model M-198-8D. Note the numeral in 5D and 8D, not to mention M-199-3T and M-197-3V, refers to the number of tubes in the circuit. As for the letters, your guess is as good as ours…

Unfortunately, too much has been changed on this M-192’s insides to trust the 1951 pot codes or the 1953 speaker code, although the speaker looks original in brand and model, being similar to those in the ’48 Professional. While lacking any official literature from the era, an educated guess suggests the Troubadour went from early-period Magnatone alligator to mid-period Magnatone light brown leatherette, along with with all the MOTS amps ca. 1955, and no other covering was used in between. It’s possible light brown leatherette was used earlier for the then top-of-the-line Troubadour before becoming standard issue.

Besides the M-192 and M-198 mentioned above, other early Magnatones (VG, Feb. ’98, pg. 114) included the Student Model M-199-3T and the slightly larger M-197-3V, as used by Gretsch for their Rex Royal. The smaller AC/DC model probably had an M-190 series number in company literature, although the bare bones construction lacked any markings on the amp itself. Perhaps there’s a catalog or price list out there somewhere? The slant-front Magnatone inherited from Dickerson undoubtedly had an M-190 series number, as well.

The 190 series was superceded by the 100 series by 1954 (probably earlier); here’s a look at the transition.

The bottom-of-the-line AC/DC model became the Starlet Model 107 in MOTS, and the slightly more powerful three-tube M-199/M-197 became the Varsity Model 108 in MOTS. Gone was the graphically-enhanced windowscreen grillecloth, replaced with acoustically transperent cloth in brown, similar to what Fender would use on its tweed amps starting in ’55. The midsized amp with the slant front was followed by the five-tube, single-10″ Melodier Advanced Model 110 in MOTS, also with brown grille (it’s possible an interim early-’50s version in MOTS exists). The 110 was joined or followed by the five-tube, twin-8″ Model 109, with only the 109 being available by ’57. Finishing out the amps, with direct ties to the original line, the alligator Troubadour M-192 became Troubadour Model 112, as mentioned above. Light brown leatherette became standard issue for all these amps ca. 1955 and lasted until ca. ’59. The M-198 Professional probably (due to its rarity today) was discontinued well before the change to the 100 series.

Magnatone released its amazing 200 series amps (213, 260 and 280) with pitch bending vibrato in ’57, but these are a story in themselves. The 200s were fitted with a new dark brown cabinet having the baffle board tipped in under the top of the cabinet 15 degrees; the non-vibrato 100 series was updated in ’58 and ’59 to match.

The lower-powered, three-tube 107 became the dark brown 111, the higher-powered three-tube 108 became the dark brown 118, the midsized five-tube 109 was squeezed out by the small, vibrato-equipped 210 and 213 amps, while the larger single-12″ Troubadour 112 became the single-12″ 250. A high-powered amp without vibrato, the 190, was suggested for use with bass guitars. The 190 used a single 12″ plus a 5″ tweeter and boasted 40 watts. Suffice it to say, the 260 and 280 were outrageously progressive and Hi-Fi, as the Professional had been in ’48.

So, there you have the near-complete story of Magna Electronics Amplifiers from the ’40s and ’50s. However, the author recalls playing through more than one ca. ’55-’57 light brown amp with AM tremolo (not the FM vibrato), but the old brain didn’t think to chronicle the model number(s). Because of the hoopla at the time of the 200 series’ release praising the superiority of vibrato, tremolo was bluntly discontinued. It seems safe to say no dark brown Magna Electronics amp had tremolo, no light brown amp had vibrato, and no MOTS amp had either. Again, more on the “V” (for vastness) vibrato next month.

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1958 Model 111; front view of new cabinet with dark brown covering. Photo by Bob Fagan

This article originally appeared in VG‘s March ’98 issue.