The acoustic guitar has been around for hundreds of years; the first steel-string acoustic guitars appeared over 150 years ago and have remained largely unchanged in that time. Many manufacturers have explored different shapes and sizes to change the character of the instrument, but the first real revolution was the inclusion of a pickup to an acoustic guitar.
Initially this amplification was simply to allow guitars to be heard over the brass sections of jazz bands, but in the mid-1960s the sound of the electrified guitar became a sound in its own right with use of overdrive and eventually other effects. However, the electrified acoustic guitar (as opposed to solid-body instruments) was still largely for amplification purposes. It wasn't until the mid-80s and 90s that musicians regularly used effects on acoustic guitars. Until the invention of the loop pedal. KT Tunstall and the ubiquitous Ed Sheeran demonstrated that the acoustic guitar could be the whole band with the correct processing and looping.
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