With so many types of electric guitars available in the market, choosing one as a beginner will definitely be a very tough decision to make. Today, we will talk about common type and shapes of electric guitars. I hope this will help you in your future when you decide to venture into the best musical journey you will ever have.
Electric guitar is fun, trust me.
And, this email is going to be a little bit lengthy, you can “starred” it and always come back for a revisit.
Electric guitars can be categorized in a 3 main type:
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Solid body
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Semi-hollow
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Hollow
Basically the shapes of the guitars are built on top of 2 foundations:
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Single Cut
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Double Cut
So with that explained, let's start with the most iconic designs, please note that what we are going through today are considered as the common features of them.
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Telecaster (“Tele” for short)
The first ever mass produced solid body electric guitar with a bolt-on neck. Leo Fender, the founder of Fender released this design in 1951. The telecaster is a single cut, flat top electric guitar mostly installed with 2 single coil pickups configuration and is famous with its bright tone.
Fender Telecaster
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Stratocaster (“Strat” for short)
Fender guitars launched this design in 1954 and quickly adapted it to the music scene and served as the most popular and the most cloned guitar in human history.
Fender Stratocaster
It is a double cut solid body electric guitar with 3 pickups which provide a huge variety of tone available for creativity.
Due to its popularity, many guitar manufacturers make their own version of strat style guitar, some of them recreate theirs with strict vintage specification and others tweak the design with modern touch.
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Single Cut Solid Body
Generally called the “Les Paul Style” guitar, made famous by the Gibson Les Paul model launched in 1952. It features a single cut and 2 humbucker pickups(earliest Gibson Les Paul comes with P90 single coils pickups)” on an arch top.
The reason why we called it Single Cut rather than “Les Paul style”, is because there are some Les Paul style guitars that come in double cutaway.
Gibson Les Paul Standard
This type of guitar is used for Rock n Roll or heavier genres of music due to its louder pickups that are punching out more mid range frequencies.
Single cut electric guitars are heavier in weight and mostly come with a glued-on neck, some alternatives provide a bolt on neck for easier repair like the one below.
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Other Double Cut Solid Body
These guitars can have a configuration like a single cut solid body with either archtop or flat top.
Gibson SG is a flat top double cut Electric Guitar
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Semi-hollow Electric Guitar
As the name mentioned, these guitars have a hollow inner chamber, with holes (usually 2 “f shaped” holes) on top of an arch top. The inner chamber is divided into two by a wood block that runs across the body.
These guitars sound darker and tend to have more acoustic-like tone characteristics.
Gibson ES-335 is an iconic Semi-hollow electric guitar
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Hollow Body Electric Guitar
Commonly seen with jazz musicians, these guitars look very similar but typically have a deeper body than the Semi-Hollow guitar. The main difference between them is, a hollow body guitar doesn’t have a wood block running across the body.
These guitars sound even darker, mellower than the Semi-Hollow guitar and they will generate unnecessary feedback under high gain settings.
Gretsch White Falcon
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Other shapes of guitar
There are other shapes of guitars like the “Offset (asymmetrical waist)”, notably the Fender Jazzmaster, or the “Firebird” shape, the “Explorer” shape, or the “V”s.
A Fender Jazzmaster, the waist of the guitar is offset
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Super Strat
A Strat that is on steroids! In the 70’s when heavy metal music became more popular, guitar players started to look for something that is more suitable for their own style.
With that idea, guitar players started modifying their own strat, ie: different pickup configuration, thinner neck, flatter fingerboard radius, high output top mounted pickup, etc…
and something that looked kinda familiar but also strange at the same time appeared.
Ibanez Steve Vai’s JEM Series
The most recognizable Super Strat. A reissue of the Eddie Van Halen’s “Franckenstrat”
With new discoveries in technology and the change of trend in the music scene, electric guitars will become even more “stranger” in the future. It would be hard for us to categorize them in “shapes” and “types”.
We hope that the information above answers your question while choosing an electric guitar,
Most importantly:
“Learn to play, Play to create”