The Guitars of Woodstock…. Were Not Strats

There’s a neat little video about this.

The notes have the following list: 

John Fogerty - 1969 Rickenbacker 325

Jerry Garcia - 1967 Gibson SG Standard

Jorma Kaukonen - 1964 Gibson ES‑345

Alvin Lee - 1959 Gibson ES‑335 “Big Red”

Johnny Winter - 1968 Fender XII

Buzzy Feiten - 1960s Gibson ES‑335

Leslie West - Gibson Les Paul Junior

Pete Townshend - 1968 69 Gibson SG Special

Carlos Santana - 1960s Gibson SG Special

and finally….

Jimi Hendrix - 1968 Fender Stratocaster

Gibson 7, Fender 2, Rickenbacker 1. Gibsons evenly split between SG’s and ES’s. The sound of Woodstock was the sound of the humbucker. Legendary session guitarist Tim Pierce said that the standard advice on the West Coast when he was getting started was get an ES335 and a Fender Princeton.

How? Why? After all, Hank B Marvin was a big deal in the UK, and this guy called Buddy Holly was apparently a thing in the States, and they played Strats in the 1960’s (and that was good enough for Dave Gilmour). Well, it was the days before pedals, when any effects had to be obtained by some kind of abuse of studio equipment. Anyone who wanted a `sound’ had to get it from the guitar and the amp, and maybe refine it with some EQ in the studio board.

It was two things. One is an effect often seen in the early history of a technology, the other was gain pedals.

The largest amount of whacky, creative weirdness in any technology is always just after its invention, while it is all still being made in garages and small factories, and no-one has invested serious money on production lines and staff training. Take a look at some of the early desktop and laptop computers in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Or mobile phones in the 1990’s and 2000’s, before the iPhone. Or MP3 players before the iPod. Once IBM waded in with a desktop design, everyone else followed suit, because, you know, IBM. Once Apple waded in with its massive production and superior marketing, all MP3 players looked the same, as did smart phones a bit later. Someone `gets it right’ and does so at the right time with the right business muscle behind it. Leo Fender might have got it right with the Tele and the Strat, but the business heft wasn’t there. Sit through this to spot when someone got behind Fender / Squire.

There were all sorts of guitar weirdness in the 1960’s, often tied with a genre. Surfers used offsets, bluesmen used humbuckers, jazz players used archtops with humbuckers or P90’s, country musicians used Gretch and anything else that would twang. Rock musicians wanted a big fat sound, and back then, that meant humbuckers. Later on, metal shredders would adopt Ibanez.

Once the gain pedals appeared in the mid-1970’s, a Strat+pedal could drive the amps as hard as a humbucker, and the more gain and effects in the signal chain, the less difference the guitar makes to the sound. The Strat can be easily modified, and is more comfortable to play. The more the guitar becomes a tone generator for the effects in the signal chain, the less it matters what the actual instrument is, so you may as well play something comfortable and easy to repair.

Or something along those lines.