107 Fun Facts About Guitar

Which effect pedal gives the opening riff of Jimi Hendrix's 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)' its sound?

A wah-wah: rocking the pedal sweeps the guitar's tone so it seems to cry 'wah', an effect brass players had been getting since the 1920s by moving a mute in and out of the bell.

What is standard guitar tuning, from the lowest string to the highest?

E A D G B E: the strings rise in fourths with one major third, between G and B, which leaves the two outer strings both on E, two octaves apart.

Which fret divides a guitar's scale length exactly in half, sounding an octave above the open string?

The 12th fret sits at the midpoint of the string, and halving a string's vibrating length doubles its frequency, which the ear hears as the same note an octave higher.

In "drop D" tuning, which string is lowered a whole step from E to D?

The sixth (lowest) string drops to D, so the lowest strings ring as a D power chord and one finger laid across them plays any other, which is why metal bands love it.

Keith Richards plays "Honky Tonk Women" and "Brown Sugar" in which five-string tuning?

Open G: Keith Richards takes off the lowest string, which he says just gets in the way, tunes the other five G-D-G-B-D and leaves the low notes to the band's bass player.

Which 19th-century Spanish maker set the body size and fan-bracing of the modern classical guitar?

Antonio de Torres wanted more sound, so he made the body larger and the soundboard thinner, with struts fanned out beneath to keep the light top strong.

The X-bracing of flat-top steel-string guitars is usually credited to which American luthier?

C.F. Martin, a German-born maker, crossed two struts under the top of his gut-strung guitars; decades later the same X proved strong enough to take the pull of steel strings.

What does the 'D' stand for in the D-28 and D-18, two classic American acoustic guitars?

Dreadnought: the maker borrowed the name of the British battleship HMS Dreadnought for its big, deep body of 1916, now one of the most copied acoustic shapes.

The violin-like carved-top archtop guitar is usually credited to which American?

Orville Gibson, a Kalamazoo, Michigan, luthier, carved guitar and mandolin tops like a violin's from the 1890s and patented the construction in 1898; the company bearing his name formed in 1902.

Which Spanish virtuoso is credited with re-establishing the guitar as a concert instrument in the 20th century?

Andrés Segovia taught himself because no good teacher was at hand, then widened the guitar's thin repertoire with his own Bach transcriptions and new works he coaxed from composers.

Which material replaced gut for classical guitar strings after World War II?

Nylon: wartime restrictions cut off the supply of gut, so New York maker Albert Augustine tried nylon line instead, and concert players soon took up his strings.

What nickname did the first commercially successful electric guitar, a 1930s lap steel, carry?

The Frying Pan, George Beauchamp's cast-aluminium lap steel with a horseshoe-magnet pickup, took its nickname from its long neck and small round body; the first ones were sold in 1932.

Which Texas bluesman played a battered sunburst Stratocaster he called 'Number One'?

Stevie Ray Vaughan got Number One from an Austin music shop and always called it a 1959 model, the date on its pickups, though the body is stamped 1963 and the neck 1962.

Besides guitars, Les Paul pioneered which studio technique?

He pioneered multitrack overdubbing, layering parts by recording sound-on-sound to disc and then tape; the 1951 hit 'How High the Moon' with Mary Ford stacked many overdubbed guitar and vocal parts.

The Fender Telecaster and Esquire were the first mass-produced, commercially successful guitars of which type?

Solid-body electric: Leo Fender bolted a maple neck to a flat wooden body, and the guitar caught on so quickly that older makers hurried out solid designs of their own.

Under which name did Fender launch the two-pickup Telecaster for national distribution in autumn 1950?

The Broadcaster: Fender shipped the two-pickup guitar under that name from autumn 1950, dropped it within months when Gretsch objected, and settled on Telecaster later in 1951.

Fender renamed its new guitar the Telecaster in 1951 after a trademark clash with Gretsch over what product?

Gretsch already sold a drum kit under a near-identical name and objected; for some months in 1951 Fender clipped the model name from the headstock decal, and those guitars are nicknamed Nocasters.

How many pickups does a standard Fender Stratocaster have?

Three pickups, wired at first to a three-way switch: players found that wedging it between positions blended two pickups, and Fender later built those in-between sounds into a five-way switch.

Which skill did Fender founder Leo Fender famously never learn?

Play the guitar: Leo Fender trained in accounting and ran a radio repair shop, where fixing musicians' amplifiers led him to design his own gear for an instrument he never learned.

To which company did Leo Fender sell Fender in 1965?

CBS bought Leo Fender's companies in 1965, when his health was failing; he later recovered and went back to designing instruments.

After leaving Fender, Leo Fender co-founded Music Man and then which other guitar company?

G&L stands for George and Leo: Leo Fender set it up with his old colleague George Fullerton and went on designing guitars there through the 1980s.

Which Fender model of 1951 became the first commercially successful electric bass guitar?

The Precision Bass was named for the accurate pitch its frets gave, and its low notes overwhelmed guitar amplifiers so badly that Fender built the Bassman for it in 1952.

The Gibson Les Paul went on sale in which year?

The model went on sale in 1952, after company president Ted McCarty signed the guitarist as endorser and consultant to answer Fender's new electrics; the first ones carried a gold-finished top.

Before humbuckers arrived in 1957, the original gold-top Les Paul carried which pickups?

P-90s: these single-coil pickups hummed, so Gibson's Seth Lover designed the humbucker in 1955 to cancel the noise, and it replaced them on the Les Paul two years later.

When the Les Paul was redesigned in 1961, it became which now-separate Gibson model?

The thin double-cutaway 1961 redesign kept the Les Paul name until 1963, when the endorsement lapsed and the company renamed it the SG, for Solid Guitar; the original carved-top shape returned in 1968.

Which radically shaped 1958 Gibson was originally built from a pale wood the company branded "korina"?

The Flying V flopped in 1958, with fewer than 100 made, and was soon dropped; bluesman Albert King and the Kinks' Dave Davies later made its arrow shape famous, and it returned in 1967.

Which angular 1958 Gibson flopped at launch, then was revived in 1976?

The Explorer shipped only 22 guitars in 1958 and 1959 before it was dropped; the 1976 reissue came after a rival maker had success selling guitars in the same angular shape.

What name did B.B. King give to every one of his guitars?

Lucille was usually a black Gibson; the signature model of 1980 has no f-holes because King asked for a sealed top to cut feedback.

Which incident at an Arkansas dance hall inspired the name B.B. King gave his guitars?

A fire: two brawling men knocked over a barrel of burning kerosene in Twist, Arkansas; King ran back into the blaze to save his guitar, and named it as a reminder never to do anything so foolish again.

What is the name of Willie Nelson's battered classical guitar?

Trigger, bought in 1969, is named after Roy Rogers's horse; decades of hard playing have worn a gaping hole clean through its top beside the bridge.

Why did Leon Russell want Willie Nelson's autograph scratched rather than inked into his guitar?

Higher value: Russell said scratching would make the guitar worth more, so Nelson had Russell cut his name into Nelson's own guitar too, the first of over a hundred autographs it now carries.

Queen's Brian May built his guitar, the Red Special, largely from what?

Brian May and his father Harold built the Red Special in 1963-64, carving its neck from an old fireplace mantel a neighbour was discarding and the body from salvaged wood, because a factory-made guitar was out of reach.

What does Brian May famously use as a guitar pick?

A sixpence coin: Brian May finds the old British coin's stiffness gives him more control than a bendy plastic pick, and years of it have worn down the covers of his guitar's pickups.

Which Fender model, introduced in 1958, became a surf-rock staple with its floating tremolo?

The Jazzmaster, launched in 1958 with an offset body and a floating tremolo, was aimed at jazz players but found its home with surf bands such as the Ventures and, decades later, Sonic Youth.

Which guitarist played his 'Black Strat' on 'Comfortably Numb' and 'Money'?

David Gilmour bought the Black Strat in New York in 1970 to replace guitars stolen with Pink Floyd's vanload of gear in New Orleans, and played it on every Floyd studio album until 1983.

Roughly how much did the Black Strat fetch at its record-setting 2019 auction?

$3.975 million, paid by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay; the seller gave the proceeds of his whole guitar sale to the environmental law charity ClientEarth.

Which guitar broke the Black Strat's auction record in 2020?

Kurt Cobain's 1959 Martin D-18E set the record at Julien's Auctions in 2020; on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged he had insisted on running it through an amplifier, hidden on stage behind a fake monitor box.

Which Beatle played the electric twelve-string that shaped the sound of A Hard Day's Night?

George Harrison was handed a prototype electric twelve-string in New York in 1964, only the second its maker had built; Roger McGuinn saw it in the film, bought one and built the Byrds' sound on it.

Which guitarist's band scored hits with 'Black Magic Woman' in 1970 and 'Smooth' in 1999?

Carlos Santana's band Santana took 'Black Magic Woman', a Fleetwood Mac cover released in 1970, into the US top five, and topped the US chart for much of late 1999 with 'Smooth', sung by Rob Thomas.

What is the strip at the top of the fingerboard, over which strings pass to the tuners, called?

The nut is a slotted strip of bone, plastic or brass that sets the strings' spacing and height; Floyd Rose's locking version clamps them down so wild whammy-bar dives stay in tune.

The bar pickup of the 1936 Gibson ES-150, an early 'Electric Spanish' guitar, is named after which jazz player?

Charlie Christian, Benny Goodman's guitarist from 1939, made the ES-150 famous, so its bar pickup carries his name; the 150 came from the roughly $150 price of guitar, amplifier and cable together.

What device clamps across the strings to raise the pitch of all of them at once?

A capo, short for the Italian capotasto, 'head of the fingerboard', lets a singer shift a song's key while the guitarist keeps the same familiar chord shapes.

Which guitarist played 'Stairway to Heaven' on stage with a cherry-red double-neck?

Jimmy Page ordered a cherry double-neck so he could play 'Stairway to Heaven' live without swapping guitars mid-song, moving between its twelve-string and six-string necks.

On which 1968 Beatles track did Eric Clapton play the lead solo?

While My Guitar Gently Weeps: its writer brought Eric Clapton in because the other Beatles weren't taking the song seriously, and with a guest in the studio they were on their best behaviour.

Which genre grew from the bright electric twelve-string sound of 1960s bands such as the Byrds?

Jangle pop traces back to the Byrds' 1965 'Mr. Tambourine Man': Roger McGuinn had bought his electric twelve-string after seeing one played in the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night.

A lap or pedal steel is played by sliding what against the strings instead of using frets?

A polished metal bar, known as the steel, gives the instrument its name; Hawaiian musician Joseph Kekuku is credited with refining the technique in the 1880s or 1890s.

The word 'guitar' shares its Ancient Greek root with the name of which other stringed instrument?

The zither: kithara became cithara in Latin and Zither in German, so the name of a Greek lyre ended up on both the guitar and an Alpine table instrument.

Spain's guitar-shaped vihuela of the 1500s was tuned like which better-known instrument?

The lute: the vihuela took the place in Spain that the lute held across the rest of Europe and shared its tuning, but its flat, waisted body is the shape the guitar kept.

What is the metal rod inside a guitar neck that counteracts string tension called?

The truss rod, a steel bar set in a channel under the fingerboard and usually adjustable at one end, lets a technician straighten a neck that string tension has pulled into a bow.

How does a humbucker pickup cancel electrical hum?

Its second winding is in reverse polarity: wound and wired the opposite way, so the hum each coil picks up is cancelled while the string signal, sensed through magnets of opposite polarity, adds up; Seth Lover's design dates from 1955.

Which 1968 guitar instrumental, written by a TV comedy writer, became a Grammy-winning pop hit?

Classical Gas: Mason Williams, head writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, called it 'Classical Gasoline', fuel for the classical guitar, until a music copyist shortened the title by mistake.

The guitarra, a cittern-like instrument with paired steel strings, accompanies which song tradition?

Fado: singers in Lisbon and Coimbra are backed by the steel-strung guitarra and by an ordinary guitar, which the Portuguese confusingly call a viola.

Jimi Hendrix, a lefty, famously played what kind of instrument?

Hendrix played a righty model strung in reverse: he flipped right-handed Stratocasters over and restrung them for left-handed play, which put the controls above the strings and reversed the slant of the bridge pickup.

Ned Steinberger's original headless basses and guitars had necks moulded from what material?

Graphite and carbon fibre replaced wood throughout Ned Steinberger's first basses of 1979; to cure a neck-heavy balance he left off the headstock, which moved the tuners down to the bridge.

Which Spanish guitarist published the 1674 guitar treatise Instrucción de Música?

Gaspar Sanz, an Aragonese guitarist who had studied in Italy, published Instrucción de Música sobre la Guitarra Española in Zaragoza in 1674; Rodrigo's Fantasía para un gentilhombre is built on its dances.

Which major acoustic guitar maker introduced the bolt-on 'NT' neck, adjusted with thin shims, in 1999?

Taylor's NT neck bolts into a pocket in the body over thin shims, so its angle can be reset by swapping shims rather than by ungluing the joint, as a traditional set neck requires.

In which year did the last surviving published music for the vihuela appear?

Esteban Daza's El Parnaso, printed in Valladolid in 1576, was the last of the seven vihuela books, a series begun by Luis de Milán's El Maestro in 1536.

Despite the name, the catgut once used for guitar strings usually came from which animal's intestines?

Sheep and goats supplied most catgut, and there is no record of cat intestines ever being used; the 'cat' may be a garbling of kit, a dialect word for a fiddle.

Which Cremona violin maker also built guitars, one of which is kept in a South Dakota museum?

Antonio Stradivari made harps and mandolins as well as violins, and the National Music Museum in Vermillion holds one of the very few guitars of his that survive.

Which Canadian astronaut filmed a David Bowie cover with the guitar kept aboard the International Space Station?

Chris Hadfield recorded 'Space Oddity' in orbit on a Larrivée Parlor guitar that was already on board, and released the video in 2013 just after handing over command.

Which restaurant chain's memorabilia collection began with a guitar hung over Eric Clapton's regular seat?

Hard Rock Cafe hung the unsigned red Fender in 1979 because Clapton, a regular at its first London restaurant, wanted to claim the spot; a rival guitarist promptly sent in one of his own.

Which Nordic country has hosted the Air Guitar World Championships in the city of Oulu since 1996?

Finland's contest began as a side event of the Oulu Music Video Festival, and its declared purpose is to promote world peace.

The bass-like riff of which White Stripes hit was really played on a guitar through an octave pedal?

Seven Nation Army has no bass on it at all: Jack White plugged a semi-acoustic guitar into a DigiTech Whammy pedal that dropped its pitch by an octave.

Paul McCartney based the guitar part of the Beatles song 'Blackbird' on a lute piece by which Baroque composer?

Johann Sebastian Bach's Bourrée in E minor was a show-off piece McCartney tried to learn as a teenager; he later reworked a segment of it as the song's opening.

Deep Purple's guitar anthem 'Smoke on the Water' recounts a casino fire in which Swiss lakeside town?

Montreux lost its casino when someone fired a flare gun into the ceiling during a Frank Zappa concert, and Deep Purple watched the smoke spread over the lake from their hotel.

Which Delta blues guitarist, legend says, sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads?

Robert Johnson left only 29 songs before dying at 27, and the crossroads detail seems to have been borrowed from the story of an earlier bluesman with the same surname.

Bob Dylan first performed with an electric guitar and band, drawing some boos, at which town's 1965 folk festival?

Newport heard only a brief amplified set that night, and the Stratocaster Dylan played there sold at Christie's in 2013 for $965,000.

Which jazz guitarist relearned his instrument with two working fretting fingers after a 1928 caravan fire?

Django Reinhardt soloed with his index and middle fingers, using the two burned ones only for chords; his example later inspired the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, who had lost a finger.

The dreadnought, the big-bodied acoustic guitar shape first sold in 1916, takes its name from which kind of vessel?

A battleship: HMS Dreadnought of 1906 lent the big guitar its name, and from the late 1930s its volume made the dreadnought the standard guitar of bluegrass.

Which rock guitarist built the striped 'Frankenstein' guitar around a factory-second body bought for $50?

Eddie Van Halen wanted a Gibson's sound with the feel and tremolo bar of a Stratocaster, so he fitted a Gibson pickup into the bargain body; a copy is held by the Smithsonian.

Slash stumbled on the guitar riff of which Guns N' Roses hit while clowning through a warm-up exercise?

Sweet Child o' Mine began as a 'circus' melody Slash played while pulling faces at the drummer, and within an hour the band had turned his exercise into a song.

In which 1984 mockumentary does guitarist Nigel Tufnel show off an amplifier whose dials go one notch past ten?

This Is Spinal Tap turned that boast into an everyday idiom, and Christopher Guest had already played guitar as 'Nigel Tufnel' on a comedy album before the film was made.

Which rock and roll guitarist's 'Johnny B. Goode' was sent into deep space on the Voyager Golden Record?

Chuck Berry's recording rides both Voyager probes; when a folklorist objected that rock was adolescent, Carl Sagan replied that the planet has plenty of adolescents.

Which heavy metal guitarist made plastic thimbles after losing two fingertips in a sheet-metal factory accident?

Tony Iommi melted a washing-up liquid bottle into fingertip caps, then tuned his guitar down to ease the pain, and that slacker, darker sound became a hallmark of Black Sabbath.

Which rock and roll pioneer played a rectangular Gretsch guitar he designed himself and called the Twang Machine?

Bo Diddley drew up the box-bodied instrument himself, and he once implied that the odd shape sprang from an embarrassing moment.

Which British rock guitarist made smashing guitars part of his act after a low pub ceiling broke one in 1964?

Pete Townshend snapped his guitar on the ceiling of the Railway Hotel in Wealdstone, and the crowd's delight persuaded him to finish instruments off on purpose, later choosing cheaper ones.

Jimi Hendrix knelt over his guitar and set it alight with lighter fluid at which 1967 festival?

Monterey Pop was his first major American appearance, and he hid the lighter fluid behind his amplifiers before the set so that a rival band on the bill could not upstage him.

Moving one fret higher on a guitar neck raises a note by which interval, the smallest in common Western use?

A semitone per fret is why the frets crowd together towards the body: each one shortens the sounding string by the same ratio rather than the same distance.

Which notation, common for lutes in the Renaissance, shows guitarists which fret to press rather than which pitch?

Tablature is a diagram of the instrument itself: each line stands for a string and each number for a fret, so a beginner can follow it before learning to read music.

Which formal name do musicians use for a guitar pick, a tool once cut from tortoiseshell?

Plectrum is the proper term; flat ones only caught on in the 1920s thanks to the player Nick Lucas, before which most guitarists borrowed banjo-style thumb and finger picks.

Which word do guitarists use for the height of the strings above the frets, lowered to make playing easier?

Action set too low makes the strings buzz against the frets, so adjusting it is a trade-off; on a steel-string acoustic it is lowered by carefully sanding down the saddle.

Which notes ring out when a guitarist lightly touches a string at certain points instead of pressing it down?

Harmonics sound because the fingertip rests on a node, a point where the string can stay still, which mutes the main note and isolates a higher overtone.

Guitar tuners are calibrated to which standard frequency for the A above middle C, set out in ISO 16?

440 Hz became the American music industry's informal standard in 1926; France had earlier fixed a slightly flatter pitch of 435 Hz, which many countries adopted.

Which guitar style, popularised by Mississippi Delta bluesmen, is named after the improvised slide worn on one finger?

Bottleneck playing took its name from the necks of bottles that players slid along the strings, and Sylvester Weaver made the first known recordings of the style in 1923.

Which howling loop arises when an electric guitar's pickups catch the sound of their own loudspeaker?

Feedback is also known as the Larsen effect after the Danish scientist who first described it, and since the 1960s rock players have provoked it on purpose for long sustained notes.

The 'tremolo arm' on an electric guitar is misnamed, since wobbling the pitch up and down is really which effect?

Vibrato is a wobble in pitch, whereas true tremolo is a wobble in volume; the swapped names are generally blamed on Leo Fender, who called his bridge a tremolo device.

Standard guitar tuning spaces most neighbouring strings by which interval, with a single major third the exception?

A perfect fourth separates every neighbouring pair but the G and B strings, and that one irregular gap forces players to memorise several shapes for each chord.

A typical electric guitar pickup turns string movement into voltage by which principle, set out in Faraday's law?

Electromagnetic induction needs a magnetic string: the pickup's magnet magnetises the string above it, and that string's moving field then drives a voltage in the coil.

The air inside an acoustic guitar's body rings at its own pitch, an effect named after which German physicist?

Hermann von Helmholtz gave his name to the effect, the same one heard when someone blows across the top of a bottle; the size and shape of a guitar's cavity set the notes it reinforces.

Which French mathematician's 1636 laws explain why a tighter or shorter guitar string sounds a higher note?

Marin Mersenne showed that a string sounds an octave higher when it is halved in length or put under four times the tension, the trade-off behind every fret and tuning peg.

Many acoustic guitar pickups use crystals that produce a voltage when squeezed, an effect known by which name?

Piezoelectricity was discovered in 1880 by the brothers Jacques and Pierre Curie, and the same effect sets off the pads of most modern electronic drums.

The wire wound around a guitar's bass strings lets them sound lower by adding which property without much thickness?

Mass is the point of the winding: a metal-wound string sounds lower than a plain one of similar thickness, which let makers fit thinner, easier-playing bass strings.

Which wood, valued for transmitting sound well, is commonly used for the soundboard of an acoustic guitar?

Spruce tops matter because a bare string hardly moves any air; the soundboard does that job, so its wood has a strong effect on how loud the guitar is.

Which kind of acoustic guitar, often called a Dobro, feeds its string vibrations into spun metal cones?

Resonator guitars were designed to be louder than ordinary acoustics, which were being drowned out by the horns and percussion of dance orchestras.

Which guitar effect pedal imitates the expressive tone that 1920s trumpeters made by moving a mute?

Wah-wah pedals came about by accident in 1966 during the redesign of a Vox amplifier, and the version sold to Americans was branded the Cry Baby.

Which guitar effect, a Peter Frampton trademark, pipes sound through a plastic tube into the player's mouth?

Talk box players shape the guitar's tone with their mouth so that a microphone picks it up almost as speech; Frampton was given his as a Christmas present in 1974.

Which nickname did Les Paul give the experimental electric guitar he built around a 4x4 timber post?

The Log was built after hours in the Epiphone factory, and for the sake of appearance Les Paul attached the sawn halves of a hollow guitar body to its sides.

Gibson built guitars in which Michigan city before closing its historic factory there and moving to Nashville?

Kalamazoo kept its guitar trade after the Parsons Street factory shut in the early 1980s: former Gibson employees founded Heritage Guitar in the city in 1985.

Which Gibson model of 1958 put a solid maple block inside a hollow guitar body to tame howling at high volume?

ES-335 guitars were a deliberate middle ground: nearly as resistant to howl as a solid instrument, yet with a warmer tone closer to that of a hollow one.

Which Spanish composer, blind since early childhood, wrote the Concierto de Aranjuez for classical guitar?

Joaquín Rodrigo was a virtuoso pianist who never mastered the guitar himself, and his wife said the slow movement was a response to the miscarriage of their first pregnancy.

The Nokia ringtone is a phrase from 'Gran Vals', a 1902 solo guitar piece by which Spanish composer?

Francisco Tárrega's waltz reached Nokia through a 1992 advert that used a Czech guitarist's recording of it, and an excerpt then became the phone maker's default ringtone.

Which Link Wray guitar instrumental of 1958 was kept off some radio stations even though it has no words?

Rumble worried broadcasters because its title was teen slang for a street brawl; Wray had also poked a pencil through his amplifier's speaker cone to roughen the sound.

Which jazz guitarist plucked his trademark octave melodies with the fleshy part of his thumb rather than a pick?

Wes Montgomery developed the thumb technique for the benefit of his neighbours and to avoid waking his children; he worked as a welder by day and played clubs until morning.

Which Spanish flamenco guitarist joined Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin on the album Friday Night in San Francisco?

Paco de Lucía recorded it live at the Warfield Theatre in December 1980, and one jazz critic has called it perhaps the most influential of all live acoustic guitar albums.

Which London music-shop owner, nicknamed the Father of Loud, began building guitar amplifiers in 1962?

Jim Marshall was a drummer who sold drums before guitars; his customers wanted something bigger than they could buy, and it took several attempts based on a Fender Bassman to satisfy him.

Which slide guitarist, killed in a 1971 motorcycle crash, played on the Derek and the Dominos album Layla?

Duane Allman only began learning slide on his birthday in 1968, yet within two years he was recording with Eric Clapton; he died aged 24.

Which Rolling Stones hit made Gibson's Maestro fuzz pedal sell out its entire stock by the end of 1965?

Satisfaction was meant to have horns: Keith Richards treated the fuzz tone as a mere sketch of what a horn section would play on a later take.