Modern Jazz - Old School Guitars

by Todd Weber

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By combining jazz, Delta blues, country and gospel, guitarist Doug Wamble makes music that has more elements than the periodic table. But while most of his contemporaries choose to go electric, Wamble gets his unique sound from a 1955 Gretsch Constellation hollow body and a 1929 National Triolian.

"When I played the traditional electric jazz guitar sound, I never felt it sounded like me," Wamble explains. "And when I started getting into the sound of early jazz, there was something about the electric that didn't lend itself to that music. But when I played acoustic, I got a sound that was less refined."

On his debut record, Country Libations, Wamble kept his electricity bill down by using his beautiful sunburst Gretsch, and not much else.

"My main guitar is the Constellation, an acoustic F-hole guitar, and the sound on the record is basically just a microphone on the guitar," he says.



Gretsch was founded in 1883 originally to make banjos, drums and tambourines. In the first few decades of the 20th century, Gretsch still produced very few guitars because there was little market for them. That all changed during the big-band era when the archtop guitar became popular. Gretsch responded with the Synchromatic line in 1940.

The Constellation, a direct descendant of the early Synchromatics, was first manufactured in 1955, the height of the "golden age" for the company. But the Constellation was overshadowed by the Gretsch electrics that were released that year, the 6120 Chet Atkins model and the groundbreaking and flashy White Falcon, which listed at an astounding $600. Technically, the metal Triolian that Wamble plays doesn't officially belong to him, but he is taking very good care of it.

"It belongs to my uncle Stewart, who found it under the bed when his father passed away. He made me the 'personal custodian' a couple of years ago."



Los Angeles luthiers George Beauchamp and John Dopyera came together in the '20s and invented what became known as the "resonator" guitar. The first resonators were a tricone design, meaning they got their amplification from three small aluminum cones in the guitar's metal body. Beauchamp and Dopyera eventually made a less expensive single cone guitar. The single cone was louder, but harsher in tone and with less sustain, while the tricone produced a mellower tone. The two formed the National String Instrument Company in 1927, and National Resonators quickly became the guitar of choice among blues artists, though their intended use was for Hawaiian and jazz music.

The Triolian is a single cone resonator-type guitar that was first manufactured in 1928 with a wood body. National switched to the metal body in 1929 and continued making Triolians through 1940. The Triolian frequently gets mistaken for a Dobro, a guitar Doperya invented after he split from National. Adding to the confusion is the fact that National eventually merged with Dopyera's Dobro Manufacturing Company. Generally, Triolians have smaller cones and smaller bodies than Dobros, and its necks are always rounded.
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Todd Weber (www.webwrites.com) is a freelance writer based in Central Iowa whose work appears weekly in Pointblank newspaper (www.pointblank-dm.com) in Des Moines. He can be reached at weberiowa@msn.com.