Geoff Duncan

Ernie Ball died yesterday. He was 74.

Ernie Ball played a major role in shaping the way musical supplies - particularly "rock" gear like strings, but also electric guitars, and electric basses - were marketed and sold. After stints in the Air Force band and as an LA session and TV player, Ball started out with a single store in Tarzana, California, which only sold guitars - the first store in the U.S. to do so. In those days (and, to an extent, it's still true) music stores built their business around band and orchestra instruments, with only a handful starting to cater a bit to folks playing blues, country, or that new-fangled rock and roll. These stores rented clarinets; sold saxophone reeds; stocked violin strings, felts, resin, sheet music, and rock-stoppers; and maybe hung a banjo and a guitar on the wall. Ball just sold guitars, and, naturally, drew guitar players like moths to a flame just as the guitar entered its post-swing-era re-invention as a cultural icon, spearheaded by solidbody electric guitars like the Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster, plus the Gibson Les Paul.

However, Ball's big break came in the early '60s, when electric guitarists playing rock, blues, and country complained they couldn't find reliable lightweight strings for their instruments. (For folks who don't play: strings play a big role in the sound of an instrument and the way it plays. The full, dark sound of Wes Montgomery uses different strings from the twangy bite of Albert Collins.) Electric rock, blues, and country artists wanted contradictory things in a string: they must be lightweight for playability and easy bending (forcing a string to a higher pitch by pushing or pulling it across the fingerboard rather than reaching for a higher fret), yet strong enough to withstand the substantial stress of these bends and add-on hardware like tremolo bridges. To get lighter strings, players were doing things like buying the lightest six-string set (which would today be called medium), discarding the thickest string, shifting the remaining five "down" one string, and using a banjo string for the highest string, resulting in an overall lighter set.

Both Fender and Gibson rejected the idea of a lighter-gauge electric guitar string set - Leo Fender reportedly didn't want to redo the truss rods on his guitars, and Gibson just didn't think it was a good idea - so Ernie Ball decided to do it himself, eventually offering his famous Ernie Ball Slinkys beginning in 1962, complete with an plain (unwound) third string. Slinkys were an instant success and are considered a standard: today, every string mannufacturer makes sets along the lines of Ernie Ball Slinkys, and the vast majority of electric guitar heard today in rock, pop, blues, and country is played using sets like the one's Ball started selling out of his store. A variety of Slinkys are avalable today - including the "Not Even Slinky" set which, amusingly, features the same gauge strings everyone was complaining about originally!

Ernie Ball bought guitar-maker MusicMan in 1984; MusicMan makes highly-regarded guitars and basses (originally built by Leo Fender) and are perhaps best-known for their Stingray electric basses (designed in part by Ball's son Sterling), the first production bass with active electronics. Ernie Ball was also a key figure behind the little-known but highly-regarded Earthwood acoustic instruments and Earthwood strings, one of the first acoustic strings to use 80/20 copper and zinc alloy.

But, to me, one of the most important contributions Ernie Ball made to the industry was refusing to take himself too seriously. His son Sterling played a major role in turning the company into a $40 million a year business, but Ernie never thought of himself as a CEO or the head of a large business: legend has it he shut down his retail store in 1967 because he wanted to work fewer hours and learn to surf, and later shut down the Earthwood production facility with no notice - by changing the locks - simply because he got fed up with the hassles of running the place. Not a saint; just a guitar player who opened a store with some new sets of guitar strings.

(And, yes, for the record: I preferentially use a couple Slinky string sets on some of my instruments, and I once owned a Stingray 5 bass, may it rest in peace.)