Soviet Guitars. Rock with Buttons
Where Soviet electric guitars got their unusual shapes, what their designers borrowed and how much they weighed.
Looking at Soviet electric guitars, I noticed odd body shapes, glittery plastic and buttons like those on a radio. The buttons were easy enough to understand. Playing the thing was the interesting part.
During the 1960s, more and more guitar bands were forming in the USSR. Foreign instruments were hard to get, so local musical instrument factories began making their own — including factories that built pianos. Clubs, schools and community centres all needed guitars.
One of the first mass-produced models was the Tonika. Its unusual body had a distinctive design, while its vibrato mechanism — the arm used to change the pitch — was copied from East German Musima guitars. Foreign examples would come in handy again.
The Japanese roots of the Ural, introduced in the mid-1970s, are more obvious. Its body outline and vibrato mechanism were copied from the Yamaha SG-5. Its circuitry, meanwhile, was borrowed from the Aelita, made in Rostov-on-Don. The result combined Japanese construction with Soviet electronics.
But similar looks did not mean the same construction. The bulky pickups could resemble Gibson humbuckers, although inside they were usually single-coils of their own design — neither humbuckers nor P-90s. The Tonika had two; the Ural, Aelita and Formanta usually had three. Buttons selected different pickups and changed the tone. There were plenty of options, but complicated circuitry could weaken the signal.
The designers experimented with electronics too. The Belarusian Formanta, whose body followed the outline of the Japanese Kawai S-170, had built-in fuzz — a harsh, buzzing distortion. An effect that usually needs a separate pedal was fitted inside the guitar itself. The Stella, made in Rostov-on-Don, had four pickups and could split its signal between two audio channels.
But none of these experiments helped much when the guitar was awkward to play. Poorly finished frets, unreliable hardware and high strings often meant work was needed before an instrument was ready to play. That quality earned Soviet guitars the nickname “drova” — Russian for “firewood”. Buy a guitar, get a woodwork assignment thrown in.
Weight varied by model and specimen: one surviving Aelita weighs 3.7 kg, while one Formanta Solo-II was measured at almost 5.9 kg. The first is a normal weight for an electric guitar. The second seems to have got carried away.
Another route was to build an electric guitar yourself. Published instructions supplied drawings and circuit diagrams showing how to make the body, position the pickups and connect the controls. Some projects even included a built-in amplifier and speaker. Making music could mean learning woodworking and soldering first.
Future rock stars started on these instruments too. Dmitry Umetsky recalled that he and Vyacheslav Butusov played Urals before Nautilus Pompilius became famous. Vladimir Shakhrin’s school band earned its Ural bass by spending a month weeding fields on a collective farm. Before rock ’n’ roll, there were weeds to deal with.
What makes this especially frustrating is that much of it did not even need to be invented: body shapes and mechanisms had already been borrowed from foreign makers. But copying a design and building it properly turned out to be different tasks. Musicians modified this “firewood” and kept playing: a good guitar was hard to find, but they wanted to make music right then.