Popular Music’s Most Hated Instruments: Modified Guitars

Creativity often comes from limitations, whether it’s early blues musicians using stomping and washboards for percussion or early hip hop artists making music with just two turntables and a microphone. The reverse is often true as well and when you see a drummer surrounded by a full circle of tom drums, with a dozen symbols hanging overhead like an invading army of flying saucers, then the expectation is that he’ll probably do a bunch of super-speed drum-rolls and crish-crash at the end of every bar without ever doing anything particularly surprising or innovative. And you might equally be suspicious if you see a guitarist who’s bought an exceedingly expensive guitar with extra strings or two necks or scalloped frets or no frets at all. These are what I’ll call “modified guitars” and are the object of my scorn and derision today…

One of the earliest adjustments that was made to the electric guitar was to remove the frets (the ridges that mark where each note is played on the guitar). This meant that could swoop between notes without any jump between one note and the next. This type of modified guitar was created by the musicians themselves at first and so were used either by experimental musicians or bassists that wanted to replicate the fretless sound of the double bass and hence the early years of the fretless guitar were quite respectable. Bill Wyman made his own fretless bass prior to joining the Rolling Stones (which may have been the first fretless electric) and John Cale was one of the first to record a fretless guitar (on Stainless Gamelan, 1965), though Frank Zappa wasn’t far behind. Over the next couple of decades, fretless guitars/basses were mainly kept safely in the realms of jazz where they couldn’t annoy the general public – look at some Jaco Pastorius if you want to see the fretless bass at it’s most impressive/ridiculous. Perhaps it was his influence that led to line of technically proficient bass players that took up the instrument, including Les Claypool (Primus), and Bakithi Kumalo (who played on Paul Simon’s Graceland). However, it was fretless guitars that usually led to the most inappropriate noodling, one example being John Frusciante’s sliding around on this Red Hot Chili Peppers track (he even had a glass fretboard installed to make his guitar extra slippery). More horrifying still is the use of fretless guitars by Steve Vai and Matt Bellamy from Muse, mostly because the ones they used were also on multiple-neck guitars, which brings us to our next variety of modified guitars…

If you mention multi-necked guitars then most people probably think of Jimmy Page playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’. This was certainly the era for the instrument and it was a big hit with prog bands like Rush, Yes, and Genesis (before they all morphed into pop bands during the 80s). It also had it’s uses in prog metal (Dream Theatre), thrash (Megadeth), and popular metal (Slash and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi who used a triple-neck, one being a mandolin). There’s a certain amount of one-upmanship when it comes to the use of the multi-neck guitar. Steve Vai might’ve needed his three necks (one twelve-string, one six-string, one fretless, see link above), but there’s no excuse for this. And you’ve got to think that Cheap Trick were just taking the piss when they turned up with a five-neck guitar…

The worst abuses of modified guitars were during the 80s and 90s, when some guitarists began to make careers of playing sets of freakish guitar wizardry rather than actually trying to make decent music. Once again Steve Vai’s name comes up (he really sins on all fronts). He was so famous during this era that he was able to give his own ideas to guitar makers and have them carried out. He had a seven-string electric constructed – initially these had an extra high string, but they kept breaking so they switched it to a lower string instead. This suited the next generation of heavy metallers pretty well, especially KoRn, who not only took this new instrument up, but also added five-string electric bass guitar (as well as jamming with Vai himself). Five string basses do help create a suitably low growl for the bass players of modern metal proponents like like Disturbed and, even more so, for death metallers like Cannibal Corpse… Though it was popping on the high-notes that appealed to funk metallers like Infectious Grooves and their bass player is now in Metallica so it’s clear that five-string basses will continue to be fairly standard in metal going into the future. Of course, once they’d added one string, they decided they may as well add two. The eight-string electric guitar is used by bands like Meshuggah to make low chords that rumble around under their music, adding more to the rhythm than the melody. However, it’s not death metallers, but showboat shredders that give extended range guitars their bad name and this is where we need to cut back in time to make sure we don’t skip past Yngwie Malmsteen. He was pretty much another guitar noodler in the mould of Vai and his unique contribution was not only playing a seven-string, but also designing a style of guitar that had scalloped higher-frets (which meant they were curved inward to allow for faster solos). It’s hard to pick which of his many videos of pointless shredding is the best one to make my point, but in the end I settled on this one:

You might think New Zealand was immune from all of this silliness, since we’re generally a bit more down-to-earth. Around these parts, you’ll usually you’ll only find modified guitars in jazz bands or underground metal acts. It’s not quite the same when a local band like The Sneaks, modifies their guitar so it has two pick-ups: one that only picks up the lowest string and leads to a bass amp; and another that goes to a guitar amp. In their case, the innovation only came about because they couldn’t be bothered to replace their bass player, so set-up the guitar so it could play both roles. However, there is one local musician who has taken modified guitars into popular music – Johnny Fluery. Perhaps the name isn’t familiar to all of you, but he played with Greg Johnson Set in the 80s and is also the father of Zowie (in fact, he played alongside her during her early shows as Bionic Pixie). His instrument of choice is the Chapman Stick, a weird ten-string guitar with no body (so it’s basically one long neck). Let’s go out on him playing on Greg Johnson’s hit single, ‘Isabelle’: