TED McCARTY— The Man Who Raised the Foundation of Gibson Brand
1909-2001
Theodore M. McCarty was born in Somerset, Kentucky, in 1909. From an early age he was a hard worker and a serious student, but he was also an athlete who enjoyed swimming and boxing. Raised in Cincinnati, he showed signs of his future abilities as a businessman even during his college years, when he became involved in the management of the university’s purchasing department.
After graduating, he joined Wurlitzer in 1936, one of America’s leading musical-instrument retailers, which at the time was expanding its chain of stores nationwide. After helping establish several new stores, McCarty rose steadily through the organization as a manager, eventually reaching a senior management position while still in his late thirties.
The frequent transfers required by the job, however, took a toll on his family. In 1948 he finally decided to leave Wurlitzer, to the point of considering a move out of the musical-instrument business altogether.
At about the same time, Maurice Berlin, chairman of Chicago Musical Instruments (CMI), one of America’s major musical-instrument distributors, was deeply concerned about the poor performance of its subsidiary, Gibson.
World War II had ended several years earlier, and the American economy was beginning to boom, yet Gibson had still not recovered from the production restrictions of the war years and continued to suffer substantial losses. Although Gibson was already a long-established and prestigious brand, its business was failing to reflect the strength of its name and heritage. For Berlin, the situation had become a serious concern. If Gibson was to be turned around, finding someone with broad experience and strong leadership had become an urgent necessity.
It was under these circumstances, and with a recommendation from Gretsch president Fred Gretsch, that attention turned to Ted McCarty. He knew the musical instrument industry thoroughly and possessed strong business instincts. Moreover, during his years as a buyer at Wurlitzer, he had already handled Gibson products and fully understood both their value and their potential. In every respect, McCarty seemed the ideal choice.
Although Ted had come close to leaving the musical instrument business altogether, Berlin’s repeated appeals eventually changed his mind. He finally agreed to move to Kalamazoo, Michigan, home of Gibson. Thus, in 1948, Ted McCarty joined Gibson as its top executive with the mission of rebuilding the company.
The Gibson–McCarty era had begun.
McCarty was thirty-nine years old when he arrived. His priority was to restore communication with the production floor. Convinced that the true strength of a manufacturing company came from the people who actually built its products, Ted promoted John Huis, previously a factory foreman, to vice president. Together they reviewed production procedures and searched for ways to rationalize and improve the manufacturing process.
Every morning after arriving at work, McCarty made a point of walking through the factory and talking with the workers. Under the slogan “Must find one improvement every day,” he energetically pursued reform. Some improvements were relatively small, such as relocating the bracing on flat-top guitars. Others, such as the development of a high-frequency gluing system, produced dramatic improvements in overall production efficiency.
McCarty even traveled personally to timber-producing regions to purchase the woods that formed the foundation of Gibson’s quality. These were practical expressions of his management philosophy: understand everything from the foundation upward, connect each part of the operation with the others, and make the entire organization work as one. As these changes took hold, the workers themselves began to recover their pride and confidence as members of a company with a great tradition. Under McCarty’s powerful leadership, the organization developed a new sense of unity, and a revitalized Gibson took its first steps forward.
The work was painstaking rather than spectacular, but the results came quickly. Market shares began to recover, losses were brought under control in little more than a year, and by the second year the company had returned to profitability. As one reform after another succeeded, the next major challenge became clear:
New product development.
To secure Gibson’s position as a leading brand and maintain its market share into the future, the company needed a powerful product line that reflected the needs of the times. That is true in any era. But developing something genuinely innovative without destroying the established image of Gibson seemed almost impossible. Until the mid-1940s, Gibson’s product line had centered primarily on acoustic instruments—flat-top guitars and full-bodied archtops. Earlier decades had also seen the great popularity of the mandolin, but times had changed.
There was no question about the quality of Gibson’s instruments, yet viewed as a whole, the product line seemed to lack the vitality needed to generate substantial new business. The electrification of the guitar had already begun, but Gibson offered only a limited number of models that essentially consisted of full acoustic guitars fitted with pickups.
Then, almost like a bolt from the blue, came Fender. Entering the market from a corner of California with the Telecaster—originally the Broadcaster—Fender introduced the concept of the solid body electric guitar. To many people in the established musical instrument industry, the idea seemed abrupt, almost alien. Yet musicians embraced it at remarkable speed, and Fender rapidly began gaining market share.
McCarty recognized the significance of this movement immediately. He became convinced that the solid body electric guitar had the potential to change the very role of the guitar itself and concluded that there could be no more powerful catalyst for restoring Gibson to its position as an industry leader. But the decision to enter the solid body market, in the face of opposition from conservative elements within the company, was an enormous gamble. One wrong move could undermine the Gibson brand image that had taken decades to build. With that decision made, development proceeded with an intensity appropriate to a product upon which Gibson’s future could almost be said to depend.
After more than a year of development, the result clearly acknowledged Fender’s solid body concept, yet every detail expressed the pride and tradition of Gibson. It was a single-cutaway guitar with the graceful carved top that was unmistakably Gibson. The guitar itself was complete, but introducing a product of such magnitude required extreme care. No matter how good a product might be, if presented incorrectly it could simply be rejected as something foreign to the established market. McCarty believed that the new guitar needed the support of a powerful public image. He therefore decided to put into practice an idea he had been considering for some time:
Artist Endorsement.
Gibson would later become well known for its relationships with endorsement artists, particularly in the jazz-guitar world, including players such as Johnny Smith and Tal Farlow. But for its newly developed solid body guitar, McCarty chose one of the biggest stars of the day:
Les Paul.
As a guitarist who, together with Mary Ford, was producing hit after hit, and as an innovator associated with the development of multitrack recording, Les Paul’s image was almost perfectly matched to Gibson’s new guitar. Moreover, Les Paul was already using his own experimental instruments based on the solid body electric concept. Ironically, several years earlier Les Paul had already brought his solid body ideas to Gibson. The management of the time had failed to understand their potential and turned him away.
McCarty approached the situation sincerely, repaired the relationship, and succeeded in securing an endorsement agreement. Gibson’s first solid body electric guitar was named the Les Paul Model and released in 1952. This version incorporated a bridge concept associated with Les Paul and, unusually for a guitar, was given a striking gold finish. After several specification changes, the finish was changed to sunburst in 1958, revealing a figured maple top. By then, the guitar was already equipped with humbucking pickups. This final version of the original single-cutaway design became what we now know as the legendary “Sunburst Les Paul.” Unfortunately, it did not fit the prevailing musical trends of the time, and production ended after only a few years. But as music changed, its value was rediscovered.
From the latter half of the 1960s onward, guitarists including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page adopted the instrument, and the Les Paul came to occupy a commanding position as a lead instrument in rock music. Its remarkable tone, balance, and elegant appearance created increasing demand for its return, and production resumed in 1968. It has remained in production ever since, an indispensable instrument in rock and blues. Perhaps most remarkable is that the Les Paul did not simply respond to changes in music. It became one of the forces that helped create those changes—and continues to support them today.
McCarty led the development team responsible for the Les Paul, but two other famous Gibson solid body guitars, the Flying V and the Explorer—were designed by McCarty himself. These instruments were conceived less as immediate sales successes than as concept models intended to break Gibson free from its conservative image. With the rise of rock music, however, their value was eventually recognized, and they too became enduring parts of Gibson’s product line.
In the early 1960s, the SG was developed to reduce weight and provide better access to the upper frets. This project appears to have been driven more strongly by the sales side of the company, with McCarty’s involvement largely at the conceptual level. The Firebird, introduced in 1963, was again created with Fender very much in mind. For this project McCarty commissioned automobile designer Raymond “Ray” Dietrich to create the design.
By contrast, the series of semi-acoustic guitars introduced in 1958 was developed under McCarty’s strong direction. These instruments were again conceived from the standpoint of electrical amplification and higher stage volume. Full acoustic guitars fitted with pickups were prone to feedback and lacked sustain in the upper frequencies. At the same time, McCarty wanted to improve playability through a thinner body and deep double cutaways.
As the prefix “semi” suggests, the semi-acoustic guitar occupied a position somewhere between a solid body and a fully acoustic instrument. Thin-bodied guitars had already existed as a category, but McCarty’s approach went considerably further. To improve both feedback resistance and tonal performance, elements of solid body construction were incorporated directly into the instrument. Specifically, this was achieved by installing a solid maple center block through the middle of the body. But this created another problem: How could a flat center block be securely joined between the top and back having complex curved surfaces? The problem appeared almost impossible.
McCarty solved it by inserting spruce plate between the curved top and back and the flat surfaces of the maple center block. Thin plates of spruce with several slots cut longitudinally were prepared then glued to pre-shaped (laminated) top and back. The slots gave the plates flexibility to confirm curved inner surfaces of the top and back. The spruce plates were then glued into position, after which the surfaces facing the center block were machined so that they can be glued to center block. In a way, the slotted spruce plate worked almost like bundled bracing. Through this ingenious procedure, what had seemed impossible became practical, and the semi-solid construction became a manufacturing reality.
Compared with some of Gibson’s other new designs, the line represented by the ES-335 enjoyed stable popularity almost from the moment it was introduced. Its tone became particularly highly regarded among blues musicians, and generation after generation of leading players has continued to use these instruments. McCarty, who had an engineering background, worked closely with Gibson’s development staff and devoted considerable energy to product design. But his influence extended beyond complete instruments. Through the development of major components, he helped upgrade Gibson’s entire product line. This was particularly evident in the field of electric guitars.
One early example was the adoption of the bar bridge on the Les Paul in 1953. It was developed by McCarty himself to improve the playability of the original 1952 Les Paul with its trapeze-style bridge and tailpiece arrangement, and for that reason this bar type design is sometimes referred to as the McCarty bridge. Made from a bar of cast aluminum, this bridge became standard equipment on models such as the Les Paul Junior and Special from 1954 onward and remained in use for many years.
In 1955 McCarty developed an entirely new bridge that allowed much more precise adjustment of intonation. Compact enough not to interfere with the player’s technique, yet providing all the adjustment necessary for accurate setup, it became known as the Tune-O-Matic Bridge. It is also known as ABR-1. It went on to be used on most of Gibson’s major models—solid body, semi-acoustic, and full- acoustic alike—and eventually became common enough to appear even on certain acoustic guitars. Today, alongside the original specification, the wider-adjustment Nashville type has also become familiar.
The Tune-O-Matic can be combined with a variety of tailpieces, but on solid body guitars it is frequently paired with a Stop Tailpiece. This too was McCarty’s design. At first glance it looks very similar to the earlier Bar Bridge, but the threaded studs that had been used to adjust bridge height were now employed to vary the relationship between the tailpiece and the strings, effectively giving it the function to adjust string tension—another example of McCarty’s characteristic ability to extract new functions from an elegantly simple design.
By the middle of the 1950s, perceptions of the electric guitar were changing. Because its volume could be controlled freely, it was no longer regarded merely as a rhythm instrument. It was increasingly capable of serving equally well for rhythm and lead playing, and its popularity grew accordingly. The growing demand for single-note melodic lead playing led to the widespread use of higher-powered amplifiers. But greater amplification brought another problem: noise.
On stage in particular, electromagnetic interference from lighting and other equipment could be picked up by the guitar’s pickups and then amplified along with the music. For professional musicians this was not merely an inconvenience. It could directly affect their performance—and therefore their livelihood.
McCarty recognized the seriousness of these complaints and made the development of a Noise-Cancelling pickup top priority. He entrusted the task to Gibson engineer Seth Lover. Lover responded by drawing inspiration from electrical transformer principles. He divided the pickup into two coils and connected them electrically so that unwanted hum could be cancelled. The result was the pickup that would become famous as the “Patent Applied For,” or P.A.F., humbucker.
Once again, the story behind its creation reveals McCarty’s fundamental philosophy of product development: recognize the needs of the market at the right moment, solving the problem, and lead the industry forward.
Ted McCarty left Gibson in 1966 and acquired the Bigsby company from Paul Bigsby, becoming its president. He remained active in the musical-instrument industry—as both a businessman and an industry leader—until the age of ninety.
Ted McCarty passed away on April 1, 2001, at the age of ninety-one. The influence of his uncompromising pursuit of better musical instruments is almost impossible to measure. The many designs and ideas he created and left behind will continue to be passed from one generation to the next for as long as guitars exist. And the music produced through those instruments will continue to resonate in people’s hearts for generations to come.