Frying pan (guitar)

1 × " Horseshoe "

The Rickenbacker Frying Pan ( official model designations A -22 and A-25, and later Rickenbacker Electro ) is a 1932 imported Lap steel guitar model of the American musical-instrument company Rickenbacker. The Frying Pan is played like all Hawaiian guitars while sitting; the instrument is placed in a horizontal position across the thigh of the player and played exclusively as a slide guitar. At its launch in the Frying Pan was the first electric guitar model produced amplifiable in series ( electric guitar ). Neck, " fretboard " and the body of the first production version of the guitar are made of a single piece of cast aluminum. Your first unofficial and later taken over by Rickenbacker model name she received, since both the material and the outline of the guitar neck and a small, circular body away in a frying pan (English: frying pan ) remember. The Rickenbacker Frying Pan was produced until the 1950s.

Prehistory

In the Kingdom of Hawaii, the playing technique of the Hawaiian guitar was developed in the 19th century. The guitarists in the Pacific island used to initially acoustic guitars featuring wooden. They replaced their gut strings by those made of steel (the origin of the English name Steel guitar), voted as the strings on an open atmosphere and laid their instruments to play while sitting flat on the thigh (English: Lap Steel ). With the left hand guitarists glided with a metal rod ( for example, a large nail, the back of a knife blade or a comb ) on the fingerboard of the guitar strings and thus altered their pitch, the fingers of the right hand plucked the strings, usually with finger picks. At the beginning of the 20th century, Hawaii was now annexed by the United States, Hawaii music and especially the Hawaiian guitar in the U.S. became very popular; Hawaiian music groups went to the States on tour, made ​​his first recordings of Hawaiian music.

A disadvantage of this technique in Hawaiian bands and recording studios was the low volume of the acoustic guitar with its wooden body. The first attempt to overcome this deficiency, was the development of guitars with a hollow neck of metal. But it was only developed in the 1920s practice, complete build of metal guitars, yielded a significant gain in volume. In 1927, the U.S. steel guitar player George Beauchamp invented together with the banjo - builder John Dopyera the resonator guitar. The built in their metal body funnel made ​​of aluminum, the steel guitar was even louder. Concurrent with the development of the resonator guitar Beauchamp had researched for ways to strengthen the Hawaiian guitar electric.

The development of the Frying Pan

Beauchamp experimented since 1925 with the musical instrument maker Paul Barth at guitar company National Guitars in Los Angeles with the possibilities of electrical amplification. Around the middle of 1931 they had completed the first operational prototype of an electromagnetic pickup. Another employee of the company National, Harry Watson, built from a single piece of maple, a lap steel guitar on which the prototype could be tested. Due to the use of two horseshoe magnets for the pickup of this was nicknamed " Horseshoe pickup".

Also in mid -1920s had Adolph Rickenbacher, a born in Switzerland Americans developed in his company Rickenbacker Manufacturing Company in Los Angeles, a method with which components for guitars could easily punch out of metal and plastic. After Rickenbacker, George Beauchamp had met, the largest buyer of the company National was for the components manufactured by Rickenbacker.

On the initiative of Beauchamp the other prototypes of the instrument has a body and a neck made ​​of aluminum were given; the components supplied for Rickenbacker. This pre-production model first carried the designation Electro Hawaiian and catalog numbers A-22 and A- 25th

Towards the end of 1931 Rickenbacker, Beauchamp and Barth founded the company Ro - Pat- In their electric lap steel guitar to mass and marketable. Series production of the Electro Hawaiian began in mid- 1932, Beauchamp and Barth were not now working for National.

The first models of the Frying Pan cost including electric guitar amplifier 175 U.S. $. In the first year of production Ro - Pat- In was only able to sell 13 copies, in the following year, 95 instruments. 1935 was the company that had since been renamed the Electro String Instruments, sold more than 1,200 units of the now known as Rickenbacker Electro Lap steel guitar. In addition to the model of metal Rickenbacker brought out a variant of the Frying Pan with Bakelite body and neck and bolted neck, which was also a success in the market. The lettering on the headstock of the instrument was shortened to Rickenbacker ( occasionally also to Rickenbacher ).

In 1934, George Beauchamp filed at the U.S. Patent Office a patent application for the Frying Pan. Although the instrument was already on the market and sold, with increasing success for two years, the Office doubted that such a device was ever used as a musical instrument. To prove this, let Adolph Rickenbacker several guitarists the instrument in the Patent Office in Washington, DC show. The patent for the Frying Pan was finally granted in August 1937.