CATEGORY: ELECTRIC GUITAR
BY CHRIS GILL
POWER TOOLS
ONE OF GEORGE Harrison and the Beatles’ most influential contributions to the electric guitar actually didn’t involve an electric guitar at all. When Harrison first played an actual sitar on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” [transcribed on page 102] on Rubber Soul, it inspired numerous other pop bands to incorporate the distinctive droning sounds of a sitar on their records as well. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, for example, played a sitar on “Paint It, Black,” recorded in March 1966 a few months after the release of Rubber Soul in December 1965. However, the Beatles were not the first pop/rock band to experiment with sitar sounds — the Kinks featured one on “See My Friends” released in mid 1965, and the Yardbirds attempted to use one on “Heart Full of Soul,” hiring an actual sitar player before settling on Jeff Beck’s fuzz box simulation instead.
Unlike most of their British peers, the Beatles employed the sounds of a sitar several more times after that, including “Love You To” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” (Revolver), “Within You Without You” (Sgt. Pepper’s) and the single “The Inner Light.” [Note that the sitar in “Tomorrow Never Knows” was a short backwards recording; the drone was created by a tambura.] Hence, the Beatles deservedly take credit for popularizing the sitar in a pop music context.
During the mid Sixties, many guitarists wanted to copy the Beatles’ sitar sounds but few wanted to buy a real one and spend the time and effort it took to master it. Session guitarist Vinnie Bell and Nathan Daniel of Danelectro collaborated on an ingenious electric version, the Coral Vincent Bell Electric Sitar, introduced in 1967. The Coral Electric Sitar featured a clever “buzz” bridge design that provides a convincing imitation of a sitar’s distinctive character. It also featured a semi-hollow body and 13 “sympathetic” strings that seemed like a good idea but never really resonated effectively. Instead, the strings are more effectively played in a harp style. The original model featured three lipstick tube single-coil pickups (two for the six-string neck and one for the sympathetic strings), each with individual volume and tone knobs.
The Coral Electric Sitar has appeared on hundreds of notable records by an incredibly wide variety of artists since the late Sixties. R&B artists were among the first to embrace i
