What Are The Differences Between Hollow Body And Solid Body Guitars?

When it comes to selecting the instrument that suits you, you’ll want to make sure that you are getting a guitar that will be best suited to the styles you play.

Below we go into a little detail about the differences between solid body and hollow body instruments.

Let’s start with the obvious; Solid Body is exactly what it says on the tin! A solid piece of wood that only has slots cut into it for the hardware, like pickups and bridges.  Semi-Hollow and Hollow body guitars are as you guessed it… Hollow! (sometimes chambered)

Solid guitars and hollow guitars both have completely different characteristics and are both great for different things.

Semi-hollow guitars are still great for certain sounds and tones that a solid body would be good for but for genres such as metal and hard rock you will find that due to the body being hollow you will get an overbearing amount of feedback.

If you are playing with a clean tone any semi-hollow guitar would be great and even if you start to turn the amps gain up to give you a bluesy and crisp tone they would still sound amazing.

Famous players of hollow body guitars include artists like; Dave Grohl  (uses custom Gibson based on the Trini Lopez model) Eric Clapton (has been known to use a few but most famously a Gibson ES335) and Gary Clark Jr (Mainly uses an Epiphone Casino)

Solid guitars will give you a less acoustic style tone and would be great for the heavy tones produced by guitarists such as Brent Hinds of Mastodon and Bob Balch of Fu Manchu. So if you are looking to play genres like Funk, Soul or Blues either a Semi-Hollow body guitar or a Solid guitar would do.

If you are looking to play Classic rock indie still both would be great but for really heavy tones we would always advise using a solid body.

If you require more information on choosing your perfect guitar, please contact one of our stores for expert advice!