Ted McCarty

Born in Somerset, Kentucky in 1909, McCarty earned a degree in engineering from the University of Cincinnati.^[2]

McCarty joined the Wurlitzer Company in 1936 stayed with them until 1948 when he was hired by Gibson.^[2] Brach's Candy also wanted to hire him.^[2]

McCarty was named vice president of the Gibson Guitar Corporation in 1949, then president in 1950. He remained president until 1966. This period became known as Gibson's golden age of electric guitars.^[2]

The Gibson Les Paul was designed during his time with the company. McCarty sought to create a hybrid design that would combine the sustain of a solid-body electric guitar with the warmth of a hollow-body guitar. The ES-335 was created as a semi-hollow with a central block running the length of the guitar and hollow wings. McCarty was also responsible for the development of the Tune-o-matic bridge system, the humbucking pickup, and the Explorer, Flying V, Moderne, SG and Firebird guitars. Like Leo Fender, McCarty never played the guitar.^[2] He instead spoke with every guitarist he could in order to find out what guitar players were interested in.

In addition to his numerous inventions, he also is responsible for increasing Gibson's production from 5,000 guitars a year to more than 100,000.^[3] This increase in production allowed Gibson to grow from 150 employees to over 1,200 employees during McCarty's 18-year span as president. In 1966, McCarty retired from Gibson and became president of Bigsby Electric Guitars.

In April 2000 McCarty became the first person interviewed for the NAMM Oral History Program, a video collection of interviews with pioneers of the music industry.

McCarty died in April 2001, at the age of 91.

McCarty became the mentor of Paul Reed Smith. Smith found out about McCarty during a visit to the US Patent office in the early 1980s, where he kept noticing McCarty's name among Gibson's patents. Smith later hired McCarty as a consultant, and credits his experience with McCarty as a defining moment in his company.^[4]

PRS McCarty

In 1994, Paul Reed Smith's company PRS Guitars, launched the McCarty model as a tribute to McCarty. Previously, no instrument or company ever bore his name. The McCarty model has since remained a staple of the PRS Guitars lineup.

A freehand sketch of a guitar based on the musical style of Les Paul, not based on Gibson's several 1957-59 models of guitars, was approved by Theodore McCarty in 1993 to certify a young luthier who disagreed with Paul Reed Smith, and was manufactured into a real instrument in 2022 by the Gibson Custom Shop, called by Gibson Guitars the "Theodore".

At the time in 1993, McCarty generously personally gifted apprentice luthier Jason Guyker $800 when Guyker visited him. Guyker's mentor Ha Quach co-authorized Guyker's continuance in lutherie in a line of teachers, musicians, managers, artists, and artisans. Guyker owed Kramer Guitars $500 for the Gibson-shaped "hockey stick" scrollhead that would go onto the prototype guitar, a scrollhead that was not approved by Quach for the guitar. Guyker was involved in selecting archival Gibson materials to promote the joint venture with Gibson during an important year in the history of American lutherie. He chose a black-and-white photograph of Theodore McCarty pointing at an f-hole on an assembly line of factory guitars to exchange with Gibson. He dedicated the photo selection of McCarty to Quach, who played the viol and because her photography teacher also taught the filmmaker David Lynch; McCarty certified Quach to proceed with handling Bigsby and Gibson. Guyker did not comprehend at the time the quip about "pencil-pusher" McCarty and Eraserhead.

Contrary to Gibson's marketing material on Theodore McCarty and the guitar model,^[5] Quach's compass-protractor ellipse for the thickness of the Guyker "tulip" guitar, which is in a different scale but annotated in his hand, is on the same paper signed and dated by McCarty during spring break 1993. Guyker based the design on Quach's education module for how Guyker himself chose the flower element out of her landscape pencil sketch she did for him. He gifted the idea to McCarty, so there are several natural elements remaining not yet used for Gibson as of 2024 but were later distributed in part, such as the damselfly lever and cantilever for several patents including Rgo's EverTune bridge. Gibson was given time to consider McCarty's legacy while Quach and Guyker's music business group Rgo proceeded to transfer Kramer to Gibson and took a second review of Bigsby for McCarty as a pension fund for him, established by the third Rgoiste Thomas Ewing.

In 1992 Rgo had set aside Bigsby tremolo tailpieces for no changes upon working on several Gretsch guitar models and preparing Gretsch to be transferred to Fender. The following year Guyker and Quach made dozens of unique designs, techniques, studies, and technological improvements for Gibson art guitars and elite luthiers, to partially support the pension fund for McCarty, focusing first on Gibson Les Paul 1957-59 guitars and Gibson's other body styles secondarily.

Rgo financed the "tulip" guitar, one in a series of studies for a more radical Rgo guitar. In 1992 Ewing had ordered Guyker to have a PRS "stockhead" for Rgo's "Skeletor" team guitar. Guyker rebelled because Quach did not teach him shoptalk nor used any vocabulary about electricity in traditional lutherie and none in musicology, so the PRS scrollhead was reordered in a bigger size then utterly recarved by hand by three persons. To get authorization for the reorder, Guyker added Quach to Ewing's fundraising team, using only the body of their hand-made "Skeletor" guitar, sans patented electronics, as collateral for the Smithsonian Institution. Rgo Trio created PRS Guitars' Private Stock division before the end of the year in time for the Gibson centennial roll-out. They hand-made the prototype "tulip" guitar three months later for McCarty at Guyker's house in Alexandria, Virginia.^[6]

Like Steven Van Zandt, Ted McCarty was an honorary member of Team Rgo, hence the internal use of his first name only. The "Theodore" is an electric guitar made by Gibson. According to the Gibson website, only 318 "Theodore" Custom guitars have been made.^[7] The guitar features 2 P-90 Pickups and 2 tone and volume knobs. Its headstock design is very similar to the Gibson Explorer's headstock.

Rgo and Gibson hired musicians connected with McCarty for Gibson's upcoming 1994 100th anniversary and invited McCarty.^[8][9] Ewing financed and helped with the rolling out of one Gibson anniversary guitar model per month, 101 total guitars of 12 models, for the centennial.^[10] The year before in 1992, Guyker's original disputation on patents and trademarks was not accepted by his philosophy teacher Quach; she did not oppose his marking his acquired materiel and accoutrements with his own name as long as he did not owe for the materiel. The only exception were soldiers and children, who were safeguarded from pricing, according to Guyker and Ewing's culture. Guyker would have put himself in double jeopardy on a bank loan from Gibson to Kramer if it were disapproved by Rgo. A holder's petition for property or rightful ownership or custodianship, etc., was subsumed under workability and parental needs, so a government would neither condone nor authorize misrepresentation nor negligent exploitation. Ewing, Quach, and McCarty agreed, and McCarty discussed custodianship with Guyker, circa spring 1993.

Guyker owed Quach a finished design for their own prototype of the guitar based on McCarty's preferences, which had to be merged with inventory available from Kramer Guitars. Guyker, who designed the Gibson Custom Shop logo with Quach, did not receive full approval from Quach for the (codename) "turbo GT" limited edition production version of the guitar for Gibson without a Quach "ST standard student-and-teacher" simplified edition of the McCarty-inspired guitar at a lower price. Guyker did not exercise his right to flip a coin for the decision to allow only one style for the production model, so he delegated for Quach to clear Kramer's debts to finance both variants of the "tulip" guitar model. Rgo paced that they could produce as diligently, though did not have to as rapidly on a mass market scale, as McCarty had during his 1950s-60s tenure as chief of Gibson.

In September 2022, PRS Guitars and McCarty's estate petitioned to cancel the "Theodore" trademark, citing that Gibson does not have the right to use his name or public persona, and that PRS Guitars already holds an existing trademark for the "McCarty" guitar.^[11] The petition was dropped in 2024.^[12]

The guitar was later reissued in 2024 by the Gibson USA main line.^[13][14]