Jimmy Page onstage with Led Zeppelin in 1975. Photo by
Ron Akiyama courtesy of Frank White Photo Agency. |
As far as anyone knows, doubleneck
guitars have been around
as long as the guitar itself.
Even still, guitars with more than one neck have always been
a bit of a curiosity, never the norm. The far majority of players
seem to have more than enough on their hands just
working one set of strings. Some players, it seems, need
more. So while we may take multi-neck guitars for granted
as mere novelties, the roots of their existence, like many
innovations, lie in necessity. The impetus for a guitar with
more than one set of strings lies in two needs: tone and
tuning. The player needs either an alternate sound or pitch
from the main instrument.
One of the earliest examples of a multi-neck
guitar is dated to circa 1690, and built in
the style of the famed Alexandre Voboam. It
is a small-sized guitar with an even smaller,
almost ukulele-sized, guitar grafted to its
treble side. This instrument would have been
made for a professional musician who performed
with an ensemble or orchestra. The
purpose of the second set of strings was to
allow the player to transpose on the fly.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,
multi-necked guitars appeared on a semi-regular
basis, but never in any kind of large-scale
production. It wasn’t until the 1890s, when
modern manufacturing methods facilitated a
sharp increase in instrument production, that
multi-neck instruments could be made and
distributed in the kind of scale that would
allow for widespread usage. As multi-neck
guitars began to be used more frequently,
there became a greater and greater demand
for the instrument—it built upon itself.
The double-neck guitars of the 1890s
reflected the tastes of the times. What
became popular were things like harp guitars,
lute guitars and mandolin guitars. The
playing method differed from instrument
to instrument. On the harp guitar, the extra
strings were intended to mostly drone along
with the guitar. On a mandolin guitar, one
neck was played at a time. While none of
these instruments set the world on fire, they
did achieve enough popularity to establish
the concept of a multi-necked guitar as a
viable instrument.
The Early Lap Steels
As we know, the popularity of Hawaiian music
in the late 1910s and ‘20s led to the emergence
of the guitar—particularly the lap steel
guitar—as an accepted instrument in popular
music. The portability and accessibility of the
guitar lent itself to usage across the entire
spectrum of society, from front-porch pickin’
to ballroom jazz. The need for more volume
from the instrument lead to the amplification
and electrification of both lap steel and
Spanish-style guitars in the late 1920s.
The earliest multi-neck electric guitars were
lap steels. The famed lap steel guitarist Alvino
Rey, who seemed to have had a hand in a
multitude of early electric guitar inventions,
claimed to be one of the first electric lap
steel players to use instruments with more
than one neck. Rey, like many other lap steel
players before and after, knew that the instrument
required multiple tunings to keep up with a band or orchestra. He found that the
ultimate solution was to have more than one
set of strings on the same instrument. By the
mid-1930s Rey had commissioned a dual-neck
steel from Gibson. By the end of the decade
there were a number of steel players utilizing
two- and three-neck instruments.
Immediately after the end of World War II, a
number of different builders—Leo Fender and
Paul Bigsby to name two—made businesses of
building multi-neck steel guitars. Indeed, multi-neck
steels were a core part of the Fender
business throughout the 1950s. But steels
were not the wave of the future, and both
Fender and Bigsby would focus the bulk of
their efforts on the single-neck electric Spanish
guitar. But that didn’t mean the end of multi-neck
guitars. In fact, it was just the beginning.
Doubleneck Spanish-style electric guitars may
have existed prior to World War II, but these
would have been one-off pieces. In the years
just after the war, most manufacturers—players
as well—were just trying to get their
footing with the new standard of electrification.
Once this new standard was accepted,
people began to expand their vision of what
an electric guitar could be, and what it could
do. It was the economic and cultural climate
of the 1950s that brought the doubleneck
electric guitar from the freak show onto the
main stage of music.