The Ovation Guitar: The Origin of the Revolutionary Ovation Guitar

I hope you enjoyed my previous post about online guitar stores. Today’s post provides a glimpse into the origins of one of the most original and revolutionary developments in acoustic guitar design and construction: the Ovation guitar, and it’s lower priced cousin the Applause guitar.

The Ovation guitar was a revolution in the history of guitar making. Its innovations include the use of synthetic materials in guitar construction, the mathematically designed “bowl back”, the use of onboard preamps and piezoelectric pickups, and the offset soundholes of the Adamas series.

Charles Kaman, an aeronautical engineer and amateur guitar player, was born in 1917. He was raised in Washington, DC, and by his teenage years he had two main interests: guitar playing, and aviation design. These interests would later combine to produce the Ovation guitar.

As a teen, Kaman entered model airplane design contests held at his local playground. He also entered a national guitar competition sponsored by the makers of Kool and Chesterfield cigarettes. Kaman made it to the finals and won the opportunity to play guitar onstage with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra. Afterwards, Dorsey offered Kaman $75 per week to play guitar with the band, but Kaman turned it down.

Instead of taking the opportunity to play guitar professionally with Dorsey’s orchestra, Kaman had decided to pursue his interest in aeronautics. He attended Catholic University in Washington and graduated in 1940 with a Bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering.

Frustrated in his ambition to become a pilot because he was deaf in one ear, Kaman instead became a propeller designer in the helicopter division of United Aircraft, working for inventor Igor Sikorsky. By 1943, he was the head of aerodynamics. But when he developed a new propeller design that would dramatically increase helicopter stablility, he was told that the company had an inventor already (Sikorsky) and didn’t need another one.

So in 1945, Charlie founded his own helicopter design company, Kaman Aircraft. The company was quite successful and grew steadily until the early 1960s. However, the company relied heavily on defense contracts, and when a key government contract was cancelled after President Kennedy’s death, Kaman decided it was time to diversify outside of the aircraft and defense related business.

Naturally, Charlie became interested in designing and building guitars. His experience with helicopters had taught him, and his engineers, a lot about resonance and vibration, and he thought they could design a better acoustic guitar than those available at the time.

At around the same time, Charlie took his warped Martin guitar to the Martin factory for repair. He toured the plant, and was shocked that Martin was building guitars by hand with hammers, animal glue, and clothespins. He offered to buy the company and modernize their manufacturing, but C.F. Martin refused, wanting to keep Martin a family business.

So just as he had with the helicopter business 20 years earlier, Kaman decided to start his own guitar manufacturing business. He assembled a team of aeronautics engineers to design the ideal acoustic guitar, using their extensive knowledge of resonance and vibration. As Charlie would later tell Business Week, “In a helicopter, you take vibration out; in a guitar, you put it in.”

The result was the Ovation “bowlback”, a rounded back made of a fiberglass composite similar to materials used in aircraft construction. The unique shape of the back as designed to focus the soundwaves inside the guitar to maximize the sound transmission.

The first Ovation guitar, the Ovation Balladeer, was introduced in 1967. In 1971, Ovation pioneered the acoustic-electric guitar, adding piezo-electric pickups, onboard preamps, and equalizers to some of their guitars. By the 1980s, Ovations had caught on with professional guitar players and were used onstage extensively. Guitarists using Ovations onstage included Josh White, Glen Campbell, Al DiMeola, Jimmy Page, and many others.

If Charlie Kaman hadn’t played the guitar, or hadn’t studied aeronautics, or if his Martin hadn’t needed a repair at the same time that Kaman Industries needed to diversify, we might not have the Ovation guitar or the Applause guitar today.