Guitar Time

Archtop Guitar History

Jun 4, 2009 archtop guitars
Posted by freddy1955

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The First Archtop Guitars

Orville Gibson was building archtop guitars in the U.S. by the end of 19th Century. He believed that unstressed wood had superior vibration characteristics. Therefore, Gibson carved the archtop guitar tops and sides from solid blocks of wood.  This technique, while expensive continues in some archtop guitar models even today, as it makes for a better sounding (and louder) guitar.

He made archtop guitars with bridges and tailpieces similar to those in cellos. These characteristics made it necessary for the neck to form a certain angle with the soundbox, as in cellos and modern jazz guitars. These early guitars had an oval sound hole instead of the “f” holes of later instruments.

Lloyd Loar joined Gibson in 1919. His hiring led to the famous Gibson L5 archtop guitar in 1923. This guitar was the first archtop jazz guitar, with the characteristic floating bridge and tailpiece, f holes.

With its solid woods, and large physical size, the L5 was much louder than most guitars. That helped it to keep up with the horn sections in orchestras .

The Music

The history of the archtop guitar is closely associated with the history of jazz music. The late 1920’s and the 1930’s saw the rise of jazz music and Big Band music in general. Big archtop guitars were a part of those sounds, and artists like Eddie Lang became celebrities.

The Artist

Eddie Lang (October 25, 1902 – March 26, 1933) was an American Jazz guitarist, and is regarded as the Father of the Jazz Guitar.

Eddie Lang was able to integrate the guitar into 1920’s jazz recordings with great success. In 1930, he recorded the jazz and pop standard “Georgia On My Mind” with Hoagy Carmichael.

Lang played the Gibson L4 and Gibson L5 archtop guitars.

The Archtop Explosion

At the end of World War I, banjos and mandolins were more popular than guitars. Artists such as Eddie Lang, proved that the guitar was a viable jazz instrument. Lang even appeared in some early talkie movies in the eary 1930’s, playing his Gibson L4 or Gibson L5 guitar.

By mid 1930s other guitar makers had similar instruments in their catalogs, including Epiphone, Stromberg, and D’Angelico.

Gibson followed up with the Super 400 in 1935. The Super 400 is also a big guitar, although not as large as some Strombergs of those years that came to measure 19″ in their lower bout. The Gibson L4 and L5 are still in production today and the Super 400 was in production as an electric archtop guitar until 2008.

By the 1940’s, electric lap steel guitars were in production, and by the early 1950’s guitar amplifiers of sufficient power became available. Electric archtop guitars became the norm for most players.

Today, the archtop guitar continues to be associated with jazz music, whether in acoustic or electric format. While many boutique manufacturers cater to the demand for archtop electric guitars, almost all archtop guitars are built to resemble the look, feel, and sound of the vintage archtops made by Gibson and D’Angelico.

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