Some click, some spin, some, in our experience, drop off and die in the Hoover. Paul Day considers the plight of the control knob/switch/button and what it has brought us in its twiddly life.

SINCE THE ADVENT of the electric guitar in all its varied formats, a vast number of designers and manufacturers have been bent on offering the player a myriad assortment of controls providing the widest possible range of tones and sounds that can be extracted from the instrument.

Over the years two definite schools of thought have developed, one favouring the "knobs with everything" approach, while more recently the "back to basics, idiot-proof" concept has found increased favour. With this last lot, the idea has been to provide one pickup governed by a solitary volume control, leaving the rest up to the individual player's technique and imagination.

Depending on the guitarist, the last method can prove successful and, of course, is easier and thus cheaper to manufacture (an economically-fostered trend, perhaps?). For our purposes here, however, this concept will be ignored. Where's the fun in one knob, when a few dozen assorted can do the job just as well, if not better?

Virtually any device that can be turned, twisted, flicked, rocked, pushed, poked, prodded or similarly manhandled has been installed on some guitar, somewhere at sometime, and foisted on the unsuspecting player as the latest in ergonomic miracles. Mind you, that wasn't such a fashionably-motivated requirement back in the 1960s — aesthetics, however dubious, were considered far more important.

Various necessary — and, equally, unnecessary — controls have therefore made their appearance in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and styles over the years. The humble volume control has usually managed to escape much undue attention, most manufacturers opting for the normal rotary mode, albeit sometimes edgewise roller-mounted as on Fender's Jazzmaster and Jaguar, the Hofner 176 (Galaxie), the early Hagstrom P-46 and similarly inspired Italian efforts from Welson and Gemelli. More impressive visually was the slider type employed on models from Harmony, Teisco and others.

A very recent overkill variation is the "touch-response" button found on Bond and Staccato instruments. Of course, similar treatments have also been applied to the equally simple tone control, often more for the visual effect rather than for operational or aural benefit. Dual-concentric or stacked volume and tone controls have been tried at various times, appearing on the original Fender Jazz Bass, and were a familiar feature of Danelectro models. Used more recently by Aria among others, this apparently neat and space-saving idea can prove a little fiddly in operation and has thus not enjoyed widespread popularity.

However, it's in the area of further tonal modification, allied to actual pickup selection, that has brought out the best in the anything-goes stakes. Simple, capacitor-linked tone-change switches have proved very popular, whether rotary as with Gibson's Vari-tone; lever or toggle style as employed on early Fenders, Danelectros and Supros; or slider-type as used again by Fender also Framus, Hofner, Hagstrom and many others.

The "rocker" switch has found favour on various Magnetones, Wurlitzers and Supros, plus numerous Japanese efforts. Variations on a pushbutton theme have cropped up over the years, but were especially prevalent during the 1960s, being a familiar feature on many Italian models.

Pickup selection methods have proved equally varied utilising all those already mentioned — and more. Recent years have witnessed the increasing use of mini-toggle switches for coil tapping and so on, but this seems a none-too-popular trend with many guitarists who find an array of these awkward and confusing to use. For these players Big And Simple are the prime requirements. Perhaps a case of like attracting like?

Certain companies do seem to have favoured the multiple-control layout more than others. The more traditional US makers have generally preferred to keep things relatively simple, although most have been known to have had their moments over the years — such as Gibson with the Les Paul Recording model and other variants, and the various active (hyper-active?) efforts including the RD series, complete with compression and expansion. Fender too, despite being far from traditional at the outset, has usually maintained an effectively straightforward approach, mainly restricting over-the-top aberrations to prototype format only, as with the Marauder and the Maverick with its bristling array of rocker switches. The recent Elite Stratocaster employed pushbuttons — an innovation for Fender — but it proved an unpopular move, perhaps indicating that, as with Gibson, such departures from by now established traditions are just not welcome or even wanted. However, the lesser-name American manufacturers have certainly not been reluctant to experiment, and a stream of models bearing various outlandish control formats bears witness to this fact.

But for true eccentricity one must look much closer to home, and this country does seem to have produced more than its fair share of the unusual over the past 25 years. The Burns company was probably a leader in this league, with a truly idiosyncratic range of instruments during the 1960s, employing circuitry replete with four-way and two-way rotary selectors, twin three-way lever switches, massed toggles, split-sound pickups, density and presence controls, active circuitry (the first in commercial production), plus many other novel features.

Equally bizarre and as effectively entertaining and endearing were many of the offerings from Vox, including the awesome Phantom XII Stereo, the various active Specials with their bank of pushbutton controlled effects and boosts, and the later "electronic" range which boasted what must have been the ultimate manual control, a hand-operated wah-wah pedal.

The Vox Organ-Guitar was another multi-control classic, although this was later to be eclipsed by another example of the genre from Godwin in Italy, which has to rank as the world record-holder for the number of available controls — all 32 of them. This total isn't even approached by more modern contenders to the throne, such as the products from Launay-King (UK) and Hauke (Austria).

Still on the home front, the Watkins company produced a variety of models during the 1960s that all employed strange controls and circuitry, even down to the humble and ubiquitous Rapier. The range was topped by the Fifth Man, possessing numerous novel features and which started life as an organ-guitar project. It was subsequently simplified (?).

The 1970s saw the launch of the Hayman Modular which employed a number of plug-in modules offering different pickup circuitry configurations, an idea shared and developed still further by MPC/Electra in America. After the demise of Hayman the concept was continued by Shergold with the popular Modulator range, and this company offered other novel control layouts on a variety of models, culminating in the busy Activator series of the early 1980s. Jim Burns also made a welcome re-appearance at this time with some characteristically novel designs: the Bandit revived the pushbutton idea for pickup selection with the bonus of an additional passive boost button, and some other recent Burns models have employed a coil-tap facility governed by tone control operation, a feature also found on Peavey instruments.

Back in the 1960s, various Italian makers produced an array of unusual examples of control circuitry. However, the models offered by Eko, Crucianelli, Welson and Gemelli all featured a very similar system based on a bank of pushbutton, rocker or tab-type switches, controlling pickup selection amongst other things, and this was a design idea that first appeared on the Swedish-built Hagstrom P-46 in 1959. The Japanese subsequently "borrowed" the format from the Italians for use on their Guyatone and Cipher models. Various German manufacturers contributed the occasional oddity such as the Framus Organ effect, a spring-return volume control, together with numerous guitars bearing a wide assortment of rotary controls and varied switches.

Nowadays, sophisticated active circuitry can provide the player with a wide choice of effective control permutations, all accurately designated and labelled. But whatever happened to those graphically and imaginatively titled functions of earlier, more pioneering times? What about "Jazz/Rock" (Wurlitzer), "Sound Barrier" (Maton), "Wild Dog" (Burns), "Project-O-Sonic" (Gretsch), "Rick-O-Sound" (Rickenbacker), or "Barrancer" (Yamaha)? Where are they now?

Even the actual knobs have changed. There's nothing much unexpected these days, no more weirdo shapes and sizes. Where now would you hope to find an example topped with matching glitter or wood-effect plastic?

This play-safe, machine-made, high-tech age we live in is probably providing better instruments. But perhaps the state-of-the-art guitar has already been produced, and now manufacturers seem intent on making its inherently simple qualities needlessly complex. Is this what we really want? Are we really in control any more?