Rockabilly Music

Back in the days when rockabilly music was originally taking shape, country music recordings rarely featured drums. By the early 1950s some acts were beginning to use them, but they were still frowned upon by the country music elite. Because country music had such an important impact on the development of rockabilly, drums were originally left out of the rockabilly lineup at first too.

Without a drummer, who was going to drive the rhythm? That chore fell to the bass player. In a basic sense, all electric guitars create their sound in the same way. Just like any guitar, the vibration of a guitar string produces a tone.

The thickness of the string combines with the length of the string to emit a particular tone, or note, when the string vibrates as a result (usually) of being plucked or strummed. When a guitar player says, "I'm going to tune my guitar," he simply means, "I'm going to turn this tuning knob and thus change the length of the string until it sounds the perfect pitch for the note it should represent." Gibson ES-195 is one of the best rockabilly guitar in market today.

 Since rockabilly music grew in large part out of country music, many of the early rockers used the same guitars that their country guitar heroes were using. These tended to be hollow-body electric guitars and in large part those hollow-body instruments define much of what we think of when we think of rockabilly.