No, he wasn’t shredding guitar or playing an instrument he was the recording engineer. You see, Glenn was not only the co-inventor of the first fuzz pedal and the first guitar pedal ever manufactured, the Maestro Fuzz Tone, he was there on that Gunfighter Ballads cassette tape that my dad picked out of a gas station bargain bin. This story of this accidental fuzz tone is the story of the shot heard around the world. To this day, my travels across the globe to interview inventors and forerunners in guitar history all lead me back to Glenn Snoddy’s invention and his passing in 2018, and even further back to that ride in my Dad’s truck circa 1992. I read a New York Times piece on Glenn’s life, researched more articles, hunted down family members and friends, watched the NAMM Oral History interview with Glenn and eventually fell down an Alice in Wonderland-sized rabbit hole, all about the story of fuzz. I quickly moved onto the next project, but I couldn’t shake the Glenn Snoddy story. So we filmed the ‘Origin of Fuzz’ episode, mentioned Glenn’s passing in the beginning and aired it as planned. Here was the origin of fuzz himself who I could have talked to and asked questions I was sure no one had ever asked him, but now he was gone.Īt that moment, I felt a clear directive for what The JHS Show would become: I wanted to find the hidden stories and the people in music history, those in danger of being lost, and preserve them for the future of guitar. I didn’t know Glenn personally I’d never even met him face to face, but that was the tragedy. It was the feeling of knowing that I missed an opportunity, I had missed a chance I didn’t know I even had. Don’t get me wrong, 96 is a respectable age, but all I could feel in that moment was loss. Why did a country folk record about outlaws and cowboys catch my ear the way that it did?Ī few days before filming, I woke up to the news that Glenn Snoddy, the co-inventor of the first guitar pedal (the Maestro Fuzz Tone), had died at 96 years old. The 1959 album Gunfighter Ballads jumped from the speakers full of harmony, melody and a simplicity that drew me in. It was his favourite singer, Marty Robbins. Who was the siren that lured me in, you ask? It had to be someone that the kids were into, right? Nirvana? The Cure? No, silly, this was my dad’s truck, and my dad drinks his tea sweet and has quite literally worn blue jeans every day since I was born. It would be a few years before I became obsessed with grunge and alternative rock albums, spending hours learning from guitar tabs I had printed during 9th grade computer lab, but during that drive in my dad’s truck, melody and harmony caught my attention. That was the day something changed in me. The burgundy vinyl interior smelled like hot plastic as it cooked in the Alabama summer sun, and at the time, I had no particular interest in music. I’m a ten-year-old kid riding in my dad’s 1970 Ford F100 Ranger, with a newly installed cassette deck having replaced the truck’s positively Stone Age eight-track player. By 1962, the conditions were perfect and an unexpected accident helped launch guitar to the center stage of a decade that would change the world.įirst, though, we have to take a slight detour to rural Alabama, circa 1992. To use a biblical metaphor, I believe the first 30 years of the electric guitar can rightly be called its Genesis, and today we will turn the chapter to what can equally be called its Exodus. These new guitar sounds were as much evolution as they were invention, as guitar tinkerers and DIY masters used the world around them to expand what a guitar could be and do. The sounds of tremolo, echo, distortion and reverberation gave the guitar a new voice, expanded its vocabulary and helped it to shape the beginnings of dozens of musical genres that we take for granted today. Over the last few months, I’ve shared the fascinating stories of how our favourite guitar effects came to be after the guitar was first electrified in 1932. READ MORE: Why the Fender Bassman is the greatest amp of all.The sound of the guitar evolved slowly through invention, transforming itself into something that literally defied imagination. But there’s a little more to it than that. How did we get from the swinging clean guitar of 1940 Charlie Christian to the in-your-face aggression of Jimmy Page on Led Zeppelin’s 1969 debut album? If you just said, “A freakin’ huge amplifier and some power chords,” you’re not wrong.
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