In 1934, Gibson introduced their first electric model, the ES-150. It featured a single pickup in the neck position, very close to the fingerboard. The ES-150 was a modified version of their L50 acoustic, and it produced a very mellow tone when plugged in.
In the 1920s, the guitar had begun to undergo one of its most fundamental changes. It was now being used for more than just chord-strumming accompaniment. It was being used for individual-note solos and leads.
To help accommodate this transition, Gibson reintroduced the L5 Premier guitar with a cutaway. The cutaway was just what it sounded like; a part of the body had been cut away, allowing for easier access to the top frets. This made soloing in the higher registers much easier, since guitars before the cutaway had fretboards that extended down across the body. This made it nearly impossible to reach the high frets with the fretting hand, but the cutaway solved that problem when Gibson brought it back in the late 30s. Now nearly every electric guitar comes with one if not two cutaways.
The first electric guitar to feature a cutaway was the Gibson ES-350. It had two pickups, one at the bridge and one at the neck, and a small toggle located on the cutaway to switch between pickups.
Up until the 1930s, both electric and acoustic guitars had been hollow-bodied, with either round or f-shaped sound holes. In the 30s several guitar makers, most notably Les Paul, began experimenting with solid-body construction styles.
The first of these was a prototype solid body built by Les Paul. It featured a design where the neck and fingerboard were attached to a solid piece of pine that ran straight through to the butt end of the guitar. The pickups and bridge were also mounted on the same piece of pine. The rest of the guitar’s body consisted of two halves of an f-hole acoustic, so that it almost looked as if an acoustic had been split down the middle of the body, and the piece of pine had been inserted in the middle.
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