The Howard Roberts Guitar Sound
by Wolf Marshall

Howard Roberts was once described as a jazz guitarist who could play anything. Add: with a sound to match. A true musical chameleon he was one of the genre's greatest jazz players and also one of the most recorded guitarists in commercial music history. When performing in the studio as a "first call" guitarist he reached into a large trunk and invariably came up with the right tool for the job everytime. By the late seventies his studio trunk contained a large number of instruments: a 6-string bass, a flat-top acoustic, an arch-top acoustic, a 12-string acoustic, a couple of hollow-body electrics, a mandolin, a ukelele, a banjo, a Les Paul, an ES-335, and other solid bodies. For rock sessions Roberts generally used an old Fender Broadcaster with light strings.

As a jazz instrumentalist Howard Roberts played a number of guitars during his career. In 1950, when he first arrived in L.A., Roberts had a Gibson L-5 acoustic cutaway model with a DeArmond pickup. Howard's later publicity shots from the Verve Records stint as well as the cover of Mr.Roberts Plays Guitar picture him with an early-to-mid fifties Gibson ES-175. This was his preferred guitar through the Verve period. The ES-175 had a 16 1/4-inch body with a laminated maple top, sides and back. Howard's ES-175 was a sunburst finish model equipped with a single P-90 pickup mounted near the fingerboard. This instrument was most likely heard on Roberts' Verve jazz albums from the fifties such as Velvet Groove and Movin' Man.

   Howard Roberts: ES-175
    "Relaxin' at Camarillo"

By the time he secured his recording contract with Capitol Records, Howard Roberts was sporting a signature guitar which he used on and off throughout the coming decade. This was a one-of-a-kind instrument, a highly-modified ES-150 (the Charlie Christian model), which had previously belonged to Herb Ellis. Modifications included conversion to a customized single-cutaway shape, black paint job and the replacement of the original bar pickup. The control knobs, headstock, pickguard and tuning keys were also changed.

Howard was an innovator and guitar designer in addition to being an astonishing player. By the mid sixties he began developing a series of unique instruments, some of which remain available to the present day. The trend began in 1961 when Howard was approached by Les Prop, an exec at CMI (Chicago Musical Instruments, a company which controlled both Gibson and Epiphone), to design an Epiphone signature model. The result was the Epiphone Howard Roberts model. Co-designed by Andy Nelson, this namesake guitar was introduced on Capitol's Something's Cookin' album, recorded in July-August of 1964. The Epiphone Roberts was essentially an ES-175 upgraded to better wood, equipped with a single floating mini-humbucking pickup mounted at the end of the fingerboard and an oval soundhole instead of the traditional f-holes. It was offered in both Custom and Standard models. Howard was most often seen with a walnut-finished Custom, as depicted on the cover of 1965's Goodies. 
 

   Howard Roberts: Epiphone Howard Roberts model

"Soft Winds"

Howard later re-designed the Roberts model guitar for Gibson. The Gibson Howard Roberts model was introduced in 1974 and was different from its predecessor in several respects.  It had three controls: volume, mid-range and treble-off, a full-size humbucking pickup, and a 25 1/2-inch scale length fingerboard. Howard was pictured with this guitar on the cover of his Real Howard Roberts album recorded for Concord.
 

   Howard Roberts: Gibson Howard Roberts model

"Gone With The Wind"

Howard always strung his arch-top electrics with extra-heavy Gibson Monosteel strings: .016-.018-.028.-.038-.048-.058. His pick was a medium-heavy celluloid type gauged about 37/1000 of an inch.

Roberts employed a variety of amplifiers in his career. Through the fifties he chose a Gibson GA-50 for his jazz sound, which he described as a flat woody tone. This distinctive combo amp had a finished wooden cabinet and two different-sized speakers, a 12-inch and a 10-inch, in the same enclosure. Howard chose a Fender Pro for rock, country and pop studio dates. He later replaced both amps in the sixties with a 100-watt Benson 300 amp, which he co-designed with electronics expert Ronnie Benson. The Benson amp featured linear tone controls (flat at the mid-point), reverb and tremelo. A plug-in equalization module was included which extended the tone-shaping characteristics and response of the amp further. The idea was to deal with the sonic discrepancies of a wide variety of guitars with a single amplifier.

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