Contrary to popular belief, there are only two types of electric guitars on the market—Fender style and the Gibson style; everything else is an adaptation of those two. While there are many other manufacturers to choose from, the seeds planted by these two companies in the 1950s have provided the basic model of what a guitar should be.

Fender Style

In early 1954, Leo Fender released the Fender Stratocaster and started a revolution. While this wasn't the first electric guitar ever produced, it was revolutionary in its mass-market appeal and classic styling, and has undergone little change since. The Strat consists of a wooden body, with a separate neck that is attached to the body by four long bolts. This style of construction is called “bolt-on” neck construction, and this innovation allowed Fender to reduce the prices of its guitars for the mass market. The bolt-on neck is still used today and is a staple of the Fender style. The Strat is designed with three single-coil pickups, a five-way pickup switch, tremolo system, volume knob, and two tone knobs for its electronics system. Its body design is contoured to fit your body and includes cutaways for both hands to play comfortably. Fender now produces various Strat models, but the standard Stratocaster remains virtually unchanged. Countless manufacturers have replicated this design.

Gibson Style

The Gibson Les Paul, launched in 1952 and designed by guitar legend Les Paul, is the other dominant style in electric guitars. The design of the Les Paul is radically different from the Fender design. Even though the Strat made its first appearance in 1954, Fender was producing other electric guitars before then, and their designs influenced Les Paul's design.

The Les Paul is designed with a set neck that is glued in, which is one of the reasons the Les Paul has a different sound—the set neck helps the guitar sustain longer than the bolt-on Fender counterpart. The body style is also different from the Strat. Instead of having a solid flat top like the Strat, the Les Paul has a double-arch top comprised of two pieces of wood glued together. Unlike the Strat, the Les Paul includes only one cutaway for the fretting hand; and the electronics are very different—it contains only two pickups, and a three-way pickup switch. Each pickup has its own separate tone and volume knobs. The placement of the pickup switch is moved up toward the player's body. Because of their heavier construction and arch top, Les Pauls are considerably heavier than Stratocasters.

To Hum or Not to Hum

In the early days of pickup design, all guitars used single-coil pickups. These pickups had only one problem, they buzzed when amplified. The buzz came from the AC current, which alternates sixty times a second. The sensitive wires in the pickups heard this noise and reproduced it as slight buzz, or hum, when amplified. If you own a Strat and think your guitar is busted, think again; all single-coil pickups do this. In 1959, Seth Lover, an engineer at Gibson, set out on a battle to stop pickups from humming. Gibson figured out that if you place two single coils right next to each other and wire them together, they cancel out the hum. These pickups were named “humbuckers” because they stopped the hum. While this was a great triumph for guitar engineering, one thing changed as a result of these new pickups: the sound. The double pickups were louder and sounded different than the Strat's pickups. In 1959, Les Paul models included humbucking pickups as a standard item.

The Sound

In the 1950s, the Strat and the Les Paul sounded somewhat different from each other due to their different construction and wood types. With the introduction of the humbucking pickup in 1959, the difference between the two guitars became dramatic. The single-coil pickups found on Fender guitars, while they did exhibit an annoying buzz, had a clean glassy sound that was favored by many players. The Les Paul, with its humbuckers, had a richer and darker sound compared to the light twang of a Strat.

It became almost impossible to make the Strat sound like a Les Paul and vice versa. Certain styles of music started to rely on these sounds—the Fender found its way into country and rhythm and blues music, while the Les Paul was at home in jazz and rock music.

Super Guitars

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, other guitar companies flooded the market with copies of the early Fender- and Gibson-style guitars. Even though Fender and Gibson started to vary their own lines, alternative Fender- and Gibson-style instruments started to hit the market. In the early 1980s, the guitar market saw the first “super guitars,” instruments that borrowed style and components from the Strat guitars; they were “hot-rodded” with lighter bodies, and built with different electronic control options and body styles. The most notable “Super Strat” companies are Ibanez and Jackson.

Both Fender and Gibson changed the guitar market. From these companies came such innovations as bolt-on necks, sharper, more contoured bodies, single coil pickups, humbucking pickups, and tremolos with locking systems to help keep the guitars in tune (an ailment that plagued Fender owners). Les Paul owners also found options in the super guitar market, most notably those made by guitar designer Paul Reed Smith (PRS), who took the basic theme of the Les Paul and sought to improve upon its design. PRS made lighter bodies (a typical Les Paul is around nine pounds) with double cutaways for more comfort, and optional tremolos, which the Les Paul rarely has.

Many other companies now produce variations with their own modifications, but the initial designs still stem from the 1950s design of Fender and Gibson. What has never changed is the sound of the instruments and the individuality that their pickups and construction differences allow. Both designs are as popular today as they were upon their introduction.