Old Forgotten Loar

Gather round children and I will tell you the sad tale of Lloyd Loar. Lloyd Loar was a genius when it came to designing stringed musical instruments. Today his instruments sell for in excess of $100,000. His F5 Mandolin, manufactured by the Gibson Company is the veritable Holy Grail of mandolins. Lloyd Loar was a modern day Stradivarius.

Lloyd was born in 1883. He loved physics, geometry and music. After high school he went to study music at the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Prolific on five musical instruments, Lloyd focused on the mandolin because that was what people wanted to hear. It may seem almost impossible to believe, but the guitar has only fairly recently become a popular musical instrument. The first popular musical instrument in America was the 5-string banjo. The banjo was brought to America from Africa by the slaves. They called it a banjar. Originally, the banjo had four strings. The 5th string was added in 1849 by Joe Sweeney. Contrary to popular belief however, Mr. Sweeney did not add the short string. That banjo already had that. He added a fifth long string. Banjos were very popular instruments and it was rare the home without one until the late 1800s.

During the late 1800s the mandolin became increasingly popular. Mandolins at the time had round “bowl” shaped backs. Today, mandolinists and fretted instrument experts refer to those old mandolins as “tater bugs”. Most families had someone who played the mandolin. It was ubiquitous. In the early 1900s one Orville Gibson designed a mandolin with a flat back. It was much easier to hold and to play. It soon became the most popular style of mandolin and every other major manufacturer copied Orville’s design. Although Orville Gibson sold out very, very early on, the Gibson Company is still one of the premier musical instrument manufacturers in the world.

Lloyd Loar went to work for the Gibson Company around 1911. A great musician, Lloyd wrote music for and performed in Gibson sponsored mandolin orchestras. The types of mandolins were expanded to include the mandola, the mandocello, and the mandobass. Lloyd started to turn his attention towards mandolin design. By 1919 he was making Gibson’s master line of instruments. Loar lengthened the neck of the mandolin thus allowing more notes available to be played. He lifted the fret-finger board off the instrument allowing for the top to vibrate more freely. Lloyd also tuned each top with a tuning fork so that the top of the instrument could vibrate in harmony with the strings thereby producing a richer, louder sound. Loar was the first to put what are called “f” holes in the tops of his mandolins and guitars, similar to violins. His primary concern was making the mandolin louder, so that it could compete with the brass instruments in the growingly popular jazz bands.

In the late teens and early twenties Jazz was really beginning to come into its own. Although mandolins were so very popular, they were not very loud. Jazz bands included pianos and brass instruments such as saxophones. With those in the band, you just couldn’t hear the poor mandolin at all. There were various attempts to bring string instruments into the jazz band. Banjos, which with the proper tone ring, are good and loud, once again became popular. In order to sell them, manufacturers cut the number of strings back to four and retuned the banjo to the same tuning as the mandolin. That way, if you played the mandolin, you could play the “tenor” banjo. Others, such as the Dobreyka Brothers (founders of Dobro) and the National company, added resonators to the guitar and mandolin in order to make it louder.

Lloyd had other ideas. Lloyd felt that the future of musical instruments was in electricity. Lloyd had the idea of putting small microphones in the instruments and using an amplifier to make the sound loud enough to hear over the other instruments in the jazz bands. The Gibson Company took a strong look at Loar’s designs and felt that electric instruments would never take off. They felt that musicians wouldn’t want to bother with having to lug around an amplifier everywhere they went. Lloyd felt that the Gibson Company was wrong and he was willing to put his career on the line. So he quit.

Loar went off and started his own company in 1925. He developed the small resonator disk called a Virzi Tone Producer. This disk was placed inside the instrument to make it louder. Lloyd eventually attached electro-magnetic pickups to guitars and mandolins and developed the first amplifier. He even developed the first electronic keyboard. But in a way, Gibson was right. America wasn’t ready for electric instruments yet. None of Loar’s designs would begin to catch on until after his death in 1943. The end of World War II brought with it the advent of Rock and Roll for which the electric guitar was perfectly suited. It was not until after Elvis burst on the scene that the guitar gained the popularity it sees today. But Lloyd Loar would never see this success. His company went bankrupt long before his inventions would ever catch on.

And so this is the sad story of Lloyd Loar. He truly was a man ahead of his times. It is ironic that the company that Loar left, the Gibson Company, is almost synonymous with the electric guitar. It would only be a little over twenty years later when Les Paul would take an Epiphone acoustic guitar and a block of solid mahogany and create the electric guitar for which he is so well known. The Gibson Les Paul may be one of the most recognizable electric guitars around today. Although he may well be the most important instrument designer and builder since Stradivarius, he will remain mostly unknown except to a few die-hard mandolin fans, and you, good readers. So raise a glass to old Lloyd Loar, he saw the future.