Six Strings, Infinite Stories: Contemporary Guitar & Innovation
The guitar has lived many lives and filled a variety of genre niches throughout its musical history. It left Spain in the hands of colonizers and traveled to Latin America, where it became mariachi. It crossed the Atlantic to North America and was picked up by enslaved Africans, who in turn created the blues. It was jazzified and electrified by the likes of Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian, who altered the instrument’s very design.
And now, in a studio in San Rafael, California, it’s being reinvented again.
Guitarist Jack West describes himself as an “inventor.” “I invent songs, new ways of playing guitar, and sometimes I invent products too,” says West. “Fundamentally, I’m a guitarist, but I also call myself an inventor because I think of it all as the same thing.” His love for innovation has led him to develop a uniquely original approach to acoustic guitar, one that is simultaneously rooted in American folk, rock, jazz, and funk music while also influenced by new percussive techniques and his own instrument inventions.
Music is a progression. It can’t stay the same, fundamentally because humans don’t like music to always be exactly the same. We like music that references something we know and simultaneously surprises us. There has to be an element of the new.
To West, the most exciting thing about the guitar has always been the discovery of not only what it has done, but what it can become. “Ever since I discovered guitar at age 14, I’ve been absolutely obsessed with how many different sounds you can get out of this little box… You can almost write a history of my life in ways of playing the guitar and the sounds that come from guitar. That could be a whole novel I could write.”
Among West’s many guitar-related inventions include “the bump,” which tips the guitar diagonally away from West’s body as he’s playing, allowing him to better hear its sound. This custom tool gets coupled with West’s collection of various acoustic guitars, which have each been modified to create slightly different types of sounds.
Before West even starts playing, however, he must don one of his other inventions: a set of special fingerpicks that attach to his fingers like acrylic nails. “I used to break my nails all the time, and I started getting manicures to strengthen them, and I… got tired of every two weeks having to get my nails done. So, I thought, ‘Y’know, it sure would be nice to have a manicure that I could take on and off.’”
It was West’s attempt to fix a problem many fingerstyle guitar players face—nail destruction—and now it’s become a key part of his playing style. But he’s not alone: “It was a product that was actually sold for about the last ten years by a company called Tiptonic,” says West, “so there’s quite a few people who use these now.”
But West’s biggest invention, the one that has spent decades in the making, is a brand-new version of the guitar, which West calls the Gliss guitar. “I actually had this idea like, I don’t know, 20 years ago,” says West. After that initial idea, however, he says the project went largely on the back-burner. But now, West says, “we’ve been working on it very intensely for six years, and we’re close. We’re very, very close to getting this thing working.”
The concept for the Gliss guitar is part of an effort to alter the pitches of a guitar’s strings in split-second intervals by motorizing the instrument. “It’s inspired by the musical possibilities of being able to change the pitch to any pitch that you want, super fast like that,” says West. “Because, like, on guitar, for example, there are certain notes you can’t reach. Your fingers are only so wide. But with this thing, you could potentially be able to play all these notes that you can’t normally reach because the motor can change the pitch of the strings, instead of you having to change the pitch by fretting the guitar.”
The Gliss guitar is soon to be fully operational; West hopes he’ll have the instrument fully “gigable” by his concert at Stanford Live on Apr. 3. “We gotta get it to the point where I can take it to gigs. And we’re gonna have that happening this year,” West assures, “by hook or by crook.”
In the hands of creative musicians and innovators like Jack West, the possibilities of the guitar are always moving forward. Who knows what the future of the guitar will look like, whether that be West’s motorized Gliss guitar or an entirely new design. But through all its eras, one thing stays the same: the guitar’s ability to transform thanks to those with an imagination and push the boundaries of what's possible.
