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From Megadeth to Math Rock: The Evolution of Guitar Techniques

Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From is a book focused on, unsurprisingly, how good ideas come about. The main claim is that ideas are not random or spontaneous, but that they grow from the development of preexisting concepts. This is known as the ‘adjacent possible’, and is the foundational principle of this article. The adjacent possible is simply the idea that current ideas cause future ideas, and the same applies to technology.

Humble Beginnings

The electric guitar was invented during the 1930s, and the Electro String Corporation received the first electric guitar patent for an instrument called the “Rickenbacker Frying Pan” in 1937. At the time, electric guitars were mainly used to play jazz and rock-and-roll, so most guitar players focused on playing chords and single-note guitar solos. These were the first techniques associated with the electric guitar. Because of amplification, electric guitar solos were louder than previous acoustic solos and could be heard by an audience even if 50 other musicians were playing. Additionally, the six strings and four-octave range of guitars allowed for a wide variety of different chord options. Guitar playing continued in this fashion through the 50s and maintained popularity during the boom of rock-and-roll, but in the 60s a new technique was pioneered by one of the greatest blues guitarists of all time: B.B. King.

Bending and Vibrato

Melodic instruments like guitars sound best when they mimic the inflections and styles of the human voice. One aspect of human singing that many instruments can recreate is vibrato, a slight, rapid variation in pitch caused by the vibration of a singer’s throat muscles. Wind instruments can do this naturally because they are being played by a human throat, and stringed musicians rotate their fingers back and forth parallel to the neck. Vibrato on the electric guitar is slightly different, as the musician raises and lowers the string rapidly perpendicular to the neck. B.B. King combined this technique with string bending, which is the act of changing the pitch of a string by raising or lowering it, to create a soulful sound in his solos that comes closer to the sound of a human singing voice. Bending and vibrato became staples in blues guitar, classic rock, and rock, and in 2022 they are still required skills for any half-decent electric guitar player.

Two-Hand Tapping

Speaking of half-decent guitar players, the explosion of rock music in the 70s spawned a new musical technique called “tapping”. Players will fret notes with their left hand and use their right hand to tap other frets instead of picking or strumming with the right hand. This was first popularized by the late great Eddie Van Halen in his 1978 release “Eruption”. In this context, tapping was used to play blisteringly fast notes on one or two strings, but recently it has become more practical for modern musicians to create even more complex chord voices and arpeggios (playing a chord as individual notes) by playing low notes with their left hand and tapping high notes with their right hand. This technique is displayed in modern progressive metal guitarist Richard Henshall’s song, “Kraken”. The advent of tapping came from a solid foundation of the skills mentioned above, as single-note runs on guitar became faster and faster while bending and vibrato required musicians to have expert control over their left and right hands. 

Hybrid Picking

One last technique that has exploded in the modern day was introduced to most by the math rock band Polyphia in their 2018 release, “New Levels, New Devils”. Polyphia’s guitarists, Tim Henson and Scottie LePage, are infamous for developing and utilizing exotic guitar styles in their work, as they combine trap drum beats with virtuosic guitar shredding that utilizes bending, vibrato, tapping, and hybrid picking. Hybrid picking is a technique that involves plucking the strings with the middle, ring, and pinky fingers while also using a pick. The pick is held between the index finger and thumb, so the other three fingers are available to grab the higher strings instead of moving the hand around during a song. This is monstrously difficult at medium and high speeds, and most other virtuosic guitarists don’t utilize this technique at all. Hybrid picking once again builds on the control required to perform previous techniques and allows the player virtually limitless freedom when playing the guitar.

 

All of these techniques came about because of the invention of the electric guitar, which was an exploration of the adjacent possible of acoustic guitars. New technology creates new specialists like B.B. King, Eddie Van Halen, and Tim Henson, who will continue to explore the possibilities of an instrument until it can make virtually any sound imaginable.