Aren’t gypsy jazz guitars great?

The other day another guitarist and I were talking about guitars and listening to some gypsy jazz CDs. We remarked how gypsy jazz guitars force you to play every note as if you mean it – there are no blurry half-played notes that you often get with electric guitars (especially if they have a bit of chorus and reverb in the mix a la John Scofield/Mike Stern/clones thereof). It set me off thinking about the advantages of playing gypsy jazz guitars (apart from obviously wishing to make that particular sound):

The sound comes from the guitar and not a spatially-remote amplifier (or headphones) so it feels as if it comes from you – something most other musicians have always felt and which makes a much more robust link between what you do with your instrument and the sound that makes. At one point in the past I used to play a thin-bodied semi-acoustic guitar with thin strings through a complex effects processor into a stereo power amp and two separate 12” speakers set four or five feet apart. With a bit of reverb and chorus it certainly produced an all-embracing sound that pervaded the sonic atmosphere but it didn’t feel very connected to what I was doing with my fingers. Now I pick up my gypsy guitar, play a note, I can feel the guitar body vibrate, the sound comes straight out of the guitar I am holding and it is loud enough to fill any domestic room without amplification.

Using the plectrum rest stroke and the usual fairly high action of gypsy guitars you do have to make a bigger commitment to playing a note than on a low action electric guitar with thin strings – this gets rid of an awful lot of the appalling fretboard ‘widdling’ that affects most of the world’s guitar players (we don’t need to mention names!) and puts playing the guitar closer to instruments like the saxophone and trumpet where lack of commitment to playing a note leads to a squeak or embarrassing silence.

You don’t have to worry about choices. Are there any choices for a gypsy guitarist to make? I suppose you do have to decide whether to play a D hole or oval hole guitar and whether to use 10 or 11 gauge strings but there isn’t much more to agonise over. You don’t have to choose round or flat-wound strings, gauges anywhere from 10 to 13 for the top string, which pickups to switch on (in phase or out of phase?), what level of the volume and tone controls on the guitar, what settings for any of 20 knobs on your amplifier, how close to the bridge or fretboard to pluck the strings, what shape, size and thickness of plectrum, whether to play a solid body, thin or thick-bodied semi-acoustic, whether to play swing, bebop or fusion. All you have to do is get your gypsy guitar out of its case and start playing!