Electric guitar design name. In 1954, Fender introduced the Fender Stratocaster, or "Strat". It was positioned as a deluxe model and offered various product improvements and innovations over the Telecaster. These innovations included an ash or alder double-cutaway body design for badge assembly with an integrated vibrato mechanism (called a "synchronized tremolo" by Fender, thus beginning a confusion of the terms that still continues), three single-coil pickups, and body comfort contours. Leo Fender is also credited with developing the first commercially successful electric bass called the Fender Precision Bass, introduced in 1951. Gibson, like many guitar manufacturers, had long offered semi-acoustic guitars with
Electric guitar pipes and fiddles. Jazz guitarists typically play hollow-body instruments, but also use solid-body guitars. Hollow-body instruments were the first guitars used in jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. During the 1970s jazz fusion era, many jazz guitarists switched to the solid body guitars that dominated the rock world, using powerful guitar amps for volume. Until the 1950s, the acoustic, nylon-stringed classical guitar was the only type of guitar favored by classical, or art music composers. In the 1950s a few contemporary classical composers began to use the electric guitar in their compositions. Examples of such works include Luciano Berio's "Nones"