Behian guitar: Brazilian musical instrument

The behian guitar is also called ‘guitarra baiana’ in the Portuguese local language which means ‘electric pole or electric log.’ It is a Brazilian solid-body string musical instrument that has either 5 or 5 strings and is normally tune CGDAE and CGDAE simultaneously. It has the scale of a cavaco and the instrument with six strings can also be found.

The musical instrument originated from the so-called electric log that was developed in the early 1940s by Adolfo Dodo, Nascimento and Osmar Alvares Macedo in Salvado, Brazil. The musical instrument was equipped with 4 strings mounted across a lengthy slab of wood and the neck of a cavaco. During the 1950s and the mid-1970s when it became appealing among the Brazilian rock and pop music artists, the musical instrument legally raised its current name. The behian guitar apparently developed gradually in isolation from the efforts of today’s American developers like Les Paul or Leo Fender and giving the instrument that solid body electric mandolin did not show up in the United States until the 1950s. The instrument can be argued to be the eldest electric mandolin or a descendant from its own distinct line of well-known solid body guitars. To a height in which the behian guitar counts as a mandolin the Electric log is the eldest known solid body electric mandolin. Until the invention of this musical instrument, the Northern American developer had never applied the principle of solid bodies or even almost solid bodies to mandolins the same way they did to the guitars.

The musical instrument is closely connected to the Brazilian carnival where it is used extensively especially in Salvador. More significantly, its producers must be credited with having set important accents in Brazilian popular music by producing an endermic Brazilian version of the electric guitar and by providing it with an individual musical language and style, before anything of that kind could be imported from another country. During the tropicalia movement in the 1960s in Brazil, there was a lot of disagreement from music artist and critics toward the addition of electric guitars. This is today seen as a silly protest from those years. Meanwhile, the behian guitar was answerable for changing radically the carnival in the early years of 1950s as an important spice of the electric trio culture which since then has become the single most essential trademark of the Brazilian street carnival.