20. Guitar Design From the book “The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the way people live with technology, by Kim Vicente THE ROCK -N- ROLL REVOLUTION: AN ELECTRIC GUITAR THAT FITS LIKE A GOOD SHIRT The philosophy of fitting the design to the human body is infinitely transferable; the Human-tech approach can be applied to a vast range of needs. One of the most fabulous examples was directly responsible for changing the course of musical history. Without the unique and powerful sound of the electric guitar, rock 'n' roll - the music of the Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix - just wouldn't exist. There's something raw and intense about the notes produced by an electric guitar that meshes perfectly with the rebellious strength behind the music itself. But it was one particular electric guitar model that, arguably more than any other, influenced the revolution that became rock music - the Fender Stmtucaster." The Strat has been on the market since 1954, and the long list of famous guitarists who generated their influential trademark sounds on a Strat reads like a rock 'n' roll hall of fame: Buddy Holly, Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, Richie Blackmore, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Mark Knopfler, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Robert Cray and Bonnie Raitt. The Strat was also behind the sound of some of rock's most popular and influential songs. Eric Clapton used a 1956 Strat - which he dubbed "Brownie" - on his hit recording "Layla." When that guitar was first manufactured, its list price was about US $250,12 and Clapton bought Brownie second hand in 1967 in London for £150." Because it was used to record a song that became one of rock's most famous love songs, the guitar's value skyrocketed. In 1999, Christie's of New York auctioned off Brownie on Clapton's behalf as part of a charity fund-raising effort. The selling price? I remember it well because I listened to the auction over the phone. I was (unsuccessfully) trying to buy one of Clapton's lesser-known guitars (there really is no such thing, as I eventually learned). If you include the commission fee, Brownie sold for a record US $497,500 (the case was thrown in for free). Half million dollars for a forty-three-year-old guitar that had cigarette burns, scratches, and generally looked as if it had been run over by a Mack truck! You might think the buyer was completely out of his mind to pay that much money, but that was the going price on June 24, 1999, in New York City for a centrepiece of rock 'n' roll history. And the Fender Strat found itself literally in the spotlight. The Strat was invented by Leo Fender, who was a radio repairman before he started building guitars. His company, Fender Musical Instruments, was created after World War II. During the war, when the efforts of previous musical manufacturers had been diverted to contribute to the wartime production of goods, it had been difficult for musicians to buy new instruments, and they were still scarce; also, guitarists in big bands were looking for a way to get their music heard over the sound created by louder instruments, like drums and horns. Fender believed there would be a demand for well-designed electric guitars, because their sound could be amplified, and hence heard even in a big band setting. But rather than get embroiled tinkering with technical details as many Mechanistic-minded musical instrument designers did, and still do to this day, Fender had the vision to focus on the musician's needs from the beginning and to use those needs to steer his design effort. According to Freddie Tavares, Fender's colleague, "Leo Fender's general philosophy . . . was make it practical, as practical as possible and as simple as possible."14 Fender also had the wisdom to listen to his customers and run design concepts by them to get their feedback. As Tavares said, "One of the reasons for Leo's success was that all the musicians knew that they were welcome in our lab. They could come out there and talk to us directly. Everybody knew they could get to Leo.'"' He took the work out of the lab, and early on in the design process conducted field tests during studio sessions and live performances with professional musicians. Bill Carson was one of those musicians: "Leo had a really uncanny ability to take what you were telling him and interpret the needs of that as a guitar player. He didn't play guitar, he didn’t think or hear in terms of a player, so he relied heavily on players."16 Fender repeatedly built prototypes, gave them to musicians to use, listened to their feedback and reshaped the design; then he would build another prototype and start the user-testing process all over again. The effort really paid off.  A number of features that found their way into the final design of the Strat weren't present in the first prototype. The overall shape of the body of the Fender Strat is one example. The bodies of previous electric guitars, squared off at right angles, were sharp and would dig into the guitarist's rib cage. Bill Carson told Fender about the problems he had experienced with another of Fender's guitars, the Telecaster: "The thing I didn't like about the Telecaster was the discomfort of it... I was doing a lot of studio work at the time on the West Coast and sitting down its square edges really dug into my ribs.... one of the things he got tired of hearing was that a guitar ought to fit you like a good shirt does"17 Fender built prototype after prototype to improve the relationship between instrument and musician. Carson described the process: "I went one morning, this was early '53 as 1 remember, and Leo had sawed out four or five bodies ... to see which one of those bodies did the job."18 Thanks to manv design iterations, the final version of the Strat has a comfortable, contoured body, a perfect fit. No more sore ribs. Another design feature of the Strat was the receptacle where the cord plugged into the guitar; it was mounted on the front surface of the guitar within the musician's view, instead of at the bottom of the instrument, on the edge and out of the guitarist's view (its usual position on many other guitars). Fender players could easily see and reach the receptacle instead of blindly groping along the bottom edge of the body to find it as  Fender pointed out, "Another very important consideration was the position of the controls. On the Stratocaster we positioned them a lot nearer the guitarist's playing and that  seemed very popular."19 Also, traditional designs had three tuning pergs on the top and three on the underside of the guitar, where they were out of view. Fender had the six in-line tuning pegs facing the player on the top of the guitar head, making it easier for the guitarist to grasp the peg for the desired string. As A. R. Duchossoir, author of The Fender Stratocaster, put it, "The purpose of Leo's invention was to make life easier for players."20 Other insights that he gleaned from guitarists after the Strat was released in the market eventually found their way into later models. For example, consider the design of the pickup selector switch.21  Originally, Fender had designed this linear switch with three slots; it could be moved into three positions, allowing the guitarist to create three different kinds of guitar sound. Working musicians found they could actually create two new "out-of-phase" sounds by putting the pickup switch in intermediate positions: if you could get the switch stuck in between the first and second slots, you got a new fourth sound; similarly, if you could put it between the second and third slots, you would get a fifth sound. It took a fair amount of manual dexterity to put the pickup switch into these intermediate positions and keep it there - after all, the switch had been designed to have three slots, not five - but word spread amongst professional musicians that you could use this little trick to get some cool new sounds out of the Strat. Because Fender kept in touch with musicians, he learned of this trick and redesigned the pickup selector switch in 1977 to have five slots and thus five positions, so they could get the two out-of-phase sounds without having to engage in fancy tricks of manual dexterity. Fender's genius led him to apply the Human -teeh approach to the manufacturing and repair processes as well — which is where his experience as a radio repairman came in handy. He was sick and tired of trying to repair radios designed without consideration for the repair technician's job. "The design of everything we did," lie said, "was intended in In' easy to build and easy to repair. When I was in the repair business ... I could see the shortcomings in the design completely disregarding the need for service. If a thing is easy to service, it is easy to build."33 So the Strat was tailored to fit the needs and capabilities of the manufacturing workers and the repair technicians as well  - an astoundingly enlightened design process for 1954. The Fender Strat not only changed the course of musical history, but was also a tremendous success in the marketplace. We can get a feel for how unique the Strat is in this regard by comparing it with the other guitars that came and went. In the electric guitar market graveyard, we find guitars whose labels read right side up from the audience's point of view, but upside down from the musician's point of view. Then there's the design with over thirty controls! There are also designs that have unmarked multiple controls that look identical, but do completely different things. I could cite countless other examples of hopeless design features but you get the picture. The Fender Stratocaster was an early  example of wide-ranging Human-tech thinking, used in this instance in the service of artistic expression. Fender forged a direct connection between the guitarist's creativity and the sound com ing out of the amplifier - the musician-and-guitar become one tightly integrated system. Poor designs, based on a Mechanistic world view, create a mismatch between the guitar and the musician, driving a wedge between the two and forcing the musician to concentrate on the knobs and dials rather than on the music. I'll give the incomparable Jimi Hendrix — a devoted Strat customer - the last word on the subject: "Music is getting better and better, but the idea is not to get as complicated as you can, but to get as much of yourself into it as you can."23