How Many Types of Electric Guitar Are There?
Ten iconic body designs cover nearly every electric guitar ever made. Five from Fender, four from Gibson, one from 1980s Japan. Hear the five most iconic side by side.
Quick Answer
There are 10 widely-recognised types of electric guitar by body design and pickup configuration: Stratocaster, Telecaster, Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Les Paul, SG, ES-335, Flying V, Explorer, and Superstrat. Five are from Fender (bolt-on necks, single coils, brighter tone) and four from Gibson (set necks, humbuckers, thicker tone). The tenth — the Superstrat — was a 1980s Japanese redesign of the Stratocaster for shred and metal. Almost every electric guitar ever built is a variation on one of these ten designs.
Same riff. Five different electric guitars. Hear the difference.
Pick a guitar. The same six-note pentatonic phrase plays through that instrument's typical pickup and tone profile — single-coils on the Strat and Tele, humbuckers on the Les Paul, SG and 335; subtle overdrive on the rock voices. The differences are real, even rendered in software.
Software synthesis with type-specific filter cutoffs, attack envelopes, and waveshaping. A real guitar through a real amp adds speaker breakup, room reflections, and pick-string interaction no oscillator can fake — but the tonal signatures are recognisable.
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Two companies. Two philosophies. Every electric ever made.
Fender (Fullerton, California, founded 1946 by radio repairman Leo Fender) chose the engineer's path. Bodies cut from inexpensive alder or ash. Necks bolted on with four wood screws rather than glued in place, so they could be unscrewed and replaced if damaged. Single-coil pickups — simple, bright, articulate, and cheap to manufacture. Everything designed for mass production by factory workers, not luthiers. The result: bright, percussive guitars that have defined country, surf, funk, and blues since the Telecaster appeared in 1950.
Gibson (Kalamazoo, Michigan, founded 1902 by Orville Gibson as a mandolin maker) chose the luthier's path. Bodies carved from heavy mahogany with figured maple caps. Necks glued in with the traditional dovetail joint of acoustic-instrument construction. Humbucker pickups — two coils wired in opposing polarity to cancel electrical hum, invented at Gibson by Seth Lover in 1955. Everything built more slowly, more expensively, with more attention to wood selection and finishing. The result: warmer, sustained, compressed guitars that defined rock from the late 1960s on.
Every electric guitar manufacturer that has appeared since — PRS, Schecter, ESP, Music Man, Ibanez, Jackson, Suhr, Tom Anderson — has been variations on the Fender philosophy, the Gibson philosophy, or some attempt to merge the two. The Superstrat is the most successful merger: Fender's bolt-on neck and Strat silhouette with Gibson's humbuckers.
The five iconic types in depth
Stratocaster
Fender · 1954Three single-coil pickups, contoured double-cutaway body, synchronised tremolo. The middle-and-neck "position 2" gives the famous Strat "quack." Bright, glassy, with sharp pick attack.
Telecaster
Fender · 1950The first commercially successful solid-body electric. Single cutaway, slab body, bridge pickup mounted in a steel ashtray plate that adds metallic bite. Harder, more biting than a Strat — the country and roots-rock standard.
Les Paul
Gibson · 1952Mahogany body with maple cap, set neck, two humbucking pickups (from 1957 onward), stop-bar tailpiece. Heavy, sustaining, the defining hard-rock sound. Slash, Jimmy Page, Joe Perry, Duane Allman, Billy Gibbons.
SG
Gibson · 1961Originally introduced as the new Les Paul in 1961 — all-mahogany, thin double-horn body, no maple cap, much lighter. Angus Young's entire career on it. More aggressive and bright than a Les Paul; less compressed.
ES-335
Gibson · 1958The semi-hollow standard. Maple-laminate body with a solid center block — combines the sustain of a solid-body with the resonance of a hollow-body, without the feedback problems of a true hollow. Chuck Berry, BB King, Larry Carlton, Dave Grohl.
The other five
Less ubiquitous but no less iconic — the cultural-icon designs and the modern shred standard.
Jazzmaster
Fender · 1958Wider, flatter single-coil pickups; offset body designed for seated jazz players; floating tremolo. Rejected by jazz musicians, adopted by surf, then indie/alternative rock. Elvis Costello, J Mascis, Kevin Shields, Thurston Moore.
Jaguar
Fender · 1962Offset body similar to Jazzmaster but with brighter single-coils and a shorter 24" scale. The Kurt Cobain Nirvana guitar; Johnny Marr (The Smiths, Modest Mouse). Famously hard to keep in tune due to the floating bridge — players love or hate it for that reason.
Flying V
Gibson · 1958Mahogany body in the shape of an arrow. Aimed at futurist marketing in 1958, sold poorly, discontinued within a year. Rediscovered in the 1960s by Albert King (blues) and Jimi Hendrix (briefly), then claimed permanently by heavy metal. Visual icon as much as sonic one.
Explorer
Gibson · 1958Angular, geometric solid body — even more radical than the Flying V. Same 1958 release, same commercial flop, same metal-era resurrection. James Hetfield of Metallica has played custom Explorer-shaped guitars his entire career; The Edge of U2 famously plays the original 1976 reissue.
Superstrat
Ibanez / Jackson / Charvel · 1987A 1980s redesign of the Stratocaster for technical metal and shred: modified Strat body, two humbuckers (or H-S-S), Floyd Rose locking tremolo, 24 frets, deep cutaway, thin fast neck. Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen's "Frankenstrat", modern progressive metal. Not a Fender product despite the Strat ancestry.
All 10 types at a glance
| Type | Year · Brand | Pickups | Tone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telecaster | 1950 · Fender | 2 single-coil | Bright, twangy, harder edge |
| Les Paul | 1952 · Gibson | 2 humbucker | Thick, warm, sustained |
| Stratocaster | 1954 · Fender | 3 single-coil | Bright, glassy, percussive |
| ES-335 | 1958 · Gibson (semi-hollow) | 2 humbucker | Warm, woody, resonant |
| Jazzmaster | 1958 · Fender | 2 single-coil (wide) | Bright, jangly, mellow |
| Flying V | 1958 · Gibson | 2 humbucker | Thick, biting (visual icon) |
| Explorer | 1958 · Gibson | 2 humbucker | Thick, aggressive |
| SG | 1961 · Gibson | 2 humbucker | Aggressive, bright, biting |
| Jaguar | 1962 · Fender | 2 single-coil (bright) | Bright, jangly, short-scale |
| Superstrat | 1987 · Ibanez/Jackson | 2 humbucker (often H-S-S) | High-gain, fast, modern |
Sorted by year of release. Notice how 1958 alone gave us four of these designs: the ES-335, Jazzmaster, Flying V and Explorer. The peak year of electric-guitar design experimentation.
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Six players who fused identity with instrument
Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) — Stratocaster. Bought right-handed Strats and played them upside-down because he was left-handed. The most influential electric guitar player in history, almost entirely on Fender Strats. "Voodoo Child," "Little Wing," "Purple Haze," the Woodstock "Star-Spangled Banner."
Keith Richards (b. 1943) — Telecaster. Plays a 1953 Telecaster named "Micawber" tuned to open G with the low E string removed (so it becomes a 5-string in open tuning). The riffs on "Honky Tonk Women," "Brown Sugar," "Start Me Up" are all that guitar in that tuning.
Jimmy Page (b. 1944) — Les Paul. Bought his 1959 sunburst Les Paul from Joe Walsh in 1969 and played most of Led Zeppelin's catalogue on it: "Whole Lotta Love," "Stairway to Heaven," "Black Dog." The instrument that set the rock-Les-Paul standard for the rest of the genre's history.
Angus Young (b. 1955) — SG. AC/DC's entire output, 1973 to today, on a Gibson SG. The schoolboy uniform is fake; the guitar is not. Brian Johnson and Bon Scott take the spotlight, but the riff machine is the SG in Angus's hands.
BB King (1925–2015) — ES-355 (close cousin of the 335). Named every guitar he ever played "Lucille" after a fire in 1949 nearly destroyed his at a roadhouse. Effectively invented the modern blues guitar vocabulary — the single-string lead style, the vibrato, the call-and-response between voice and guitar. The 335/355 was his voice for sixty years.
Eddie Van Halen (1955–2020) — Frankenstrat (a Superstrat he built himself). Started with a Stratocaster body, added a Gibson PAF humbucker, swapped pickups, repainted it red-white-and-black in tape stripes. Effectively invented the Superstrat as a category in the late 1970s. "Eruption" (1978) is the sound of that guitar; everyone since has been chasing it.
Continue exploring
Sources
- Richard R. Smith, Fender: The Sound Heard 'Round the World (Hal Leonard, 1995) — the standard corporate history of Fender, covering the 1950 Telecaster, 1954 Stratocaster, 1958 Jazzmaster and 1962 Jaguar designs.
- Walter Carter, Gibson Guitars: 100 Years of an American Icon (General Publishing Group, 1994) — the standard reference for the 1952 Les Paul, 1958 ES-335 / Flying V / Explorer, and 1961 SG.
- Tony Bacon, The Ultimate Guitar Book (Knopf, 1991) and 50 Years of the Gibson Les Paul (Backbeat, 2002) — design history and player attributions.
- Robb Lawrence, The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy 1915–1963 (Hal Leonard, 2008) — for the introduction of Seth Lover's humbucker pickup at Gibson in 1955–57.
- Paul Trynka, The Strat in the Attic (Voyageur Press, 2014) — for player and instrument provenance, particularly the Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan Stratocasters.
- Ibanez Guitars corporate history — for the 1987 RG series and the introduction of the modern production Superstrat.
- Tony Bacon, Sunburst: How the Gibson Les Paul Standard Became a Legendary Guitar (Backbeat, 2014) — provenance of Jimmy Page's 1959 Les Paul.
Ten silhouettes. Two companies. Seventy-five years of variation. Everything else is a version.