Who Was Ernie Ball?

The Ernie Ball name is everywhere. It's on your guitar picks, straps, strings, cables, guitars, guitar pedals; it's even on the shirt I wore in a senior photo. Ernie Ball was and is a powerhouse in the guitar industry.

But how did it all start? And who was Ernie Ball?

I had the privilege of diving into this question with Brian Ball from the Ernie Ball Music Man Company, grandson of Ernie Ball himself. 

When asked this same question, Brian replied, “I mean for me, Ernie Ball was kind of a hero of mine, even as a young kid. My Grandpa was a surfer. He loved to fly airplanes. Really adventurous, that's the way I always remember him.” Even (or perhaps especially) when Ernie went bankrupt three different times trying to open a store in Los Angeles and in the Valley that only sold guitars, Brian and countless others looked up to him.  Brian remembers his grandfather as “the essence of what an entrepreneur is...he found his passion, and his one true passion was the guitar.” 

Ernie Ball started his own business in 1962, seeking to sell guitars and only guitars at a time when Big Band music was still at its height and the guitar was stuck in the back of the band playing mainly to accentuate the other musicians. At this time in history, a store selling trombones and brass instruments would have fared much better, but (like all the greats) Ernie’s ideas were ahead of his time. 

Ernie only started seeing returns on this risky investment in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when Chuck Berry, the Ventures, and Merle Haggard began bending their strings. In an effort to help young musicians imitate the style of their favorite singers without the difficulty of using traditional guitar strings, Ernie Ball created the now-famous Ernie Ball Slinkys, the modern electric guitar string as we know it today. 

As Brian recalls, “Ernie Ball Slinkys were really founded out of the birth of rock’n’roll.”  Ernie’s family and his company's roots were entrenched in Southern California. As a result, when the rock’n’roll scene started to erupt there (due in large part to the British Invasion) his family and company were on the front lines.  

Because musicians wanted to learn how to play this new form of music, Ernie opened a teaching studio. In doing so, he noticed that a lot of his younger students didn't have the strength or finger dexterity to bend the guitar strings. Bear in mind that, at the time, an E string was anywhere from a 13 to 15 gauge, which worked just fine for rhythm instruments but made it almost impossible for aspiring musicians to rock out. 

Ernie saw an opportunity not only to help his students but to expand the tools available for guitarists everywhere. People wanted to express themselves differently with the electric guitar, which meant bending. He decided that if the guitar was being played differently, then his company needed to make skinnier strings to accommodate that.

Slinkys originally had banjo frailing strings as the playing strings. In a picture typical of the time, Ernie’s kids would come home after school and hand-coil these sets, taking banjo strings and putting them in these rock’n’roll guitar string packs. Ernie then sold the packs out of his store. Ernie was the first to come out with strings with gauges from 9 to 42 to 10 to 46. Brian recalls that, “All the really common gauges that a lot of manufacturers use today were his recipes.”

In 1975, another product put Ernie Ball on the map: The Ernie Ball volume pedal. It’s a testament to how well-crafted this product is that the design is still relevant more than 45 years later. As a lap steel guitar player, Ernie wanted volume control at his fingertips, so he worked with close friend and employee Ron Saul to design a pedal that could do just that. He wanted an indestructible housing and used anodized aluminum, which nobody made pedals out of that at that time. They designed an original pulley system and the string system for the pedal. 

As Brian commented, “It was really simple, but everything we do starts with being functional and providing some kind of value. So, that design is something where we're still incredibly proud of and it's something we value tremendously.”

Merging the Ernie Ball music company with Music Man was a natural fit, especially because of the connection and lineage that Fender had with Ernie Ball -- or, perhaps more accurately, the history that Ernie Ball had with Fender. After Leo Fender had sold his brand to CBS in January 1965 for an unheard of thirty million dollars, he created the Music Man guitar company with Tom Walker, who was already connected to the Ball family, as he happened to be the godfather of Sterling Ball (son of Ernie Ball and future father of Brian Ball). 

Confused yet? Don’t worry; it gets better.

Leo Fender wanted a young rock kid to come beta test their newest product, the Stingray bass guitar, and who better to do it than Sterling Ball? Brian recalls that, “It was Sterling, my Dad, who really, really had a passion for making guitars and making basses.” This uniquely qualified Sterling to test new products for Leo Fender. It was this same passion that pushed the Ernie Ball company to acquire the Music Man brand in 1984. 

Brian sums it up nicely: “[After acquiring the Music Man company], I think there was a kind of an oh-shit moment...It was like, okay, we bought it, now how the heck are we going to build these things?” 

Brief panicking aside, purchasing Music Man launched the Ernie Ball guitar company into its most successful years yet. A clear highlight from this period was signing Eddie Van Halen. Ernie and Sterling reasonably wondered how on earth they were going to scale to meet demand for Van Halen with the For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge record out. As Brian recalls, “That record just was insane, it blew up, and it was such an electric time for the brand.” With the continued popularity of Ernie Ball Slinky, their company had become a major player not only as a string manufacturer, but in the guitar industry as well. 

When Ernie Ball Music Man signed musicians like Steve Lukather, Steve Morse, and Albert Lee, it solidified their reputation as high quality guitar makers. It was understood that these musicians wanted an extremely well-crafted guitar and they trusted Ernie Ball to do the job. That, coupled with the fact that Ernie Ball products were made in the US and played as well as any international brand, catapulted their company to the top. 

More recently, the company collaborated with Annie Clark, better known as St. Vincent. At the time, she'd just been nominated for a Grammy, and her work with Polyphonic Spree coupled with the launch of her solo career had helped her expand the boundaries of modern music. So, naturally, she wanted a guitar to help her do the job right.

As Brian remembers, “Annie's guitar was so fun for us to make because she came in with like, I kind of have this idea, and it looks kind of like an Albert, but oh yeah, I like the Armada guitar, and I like this guitar. And we liked that she's not scared of doing something different.” She didn’t want the same shape as a guitar designed in the 1950s, she wanted something new. The modern finish and downright abstract angles of the resulting guitar created a truly unique aesthetic, and a product that St. Vincent fans gleefully purchased. 

The philosophy of Ernie Ball Music Man is “that neither man nor machine can build the perfect guitar, but the combination of both can make the best guitar in the world.” A tour of the company’s guitar manufacturing factory truly brings this philosophy to life. 

Brian Ball graciously offered not only to let me tour the factory, but to build me a guitar. I consider it an honor to stand in the ranks alongside Eddie Van Halen and St. Vincent as an Ernie Ball Music Man collaborator. 

As he walked me through the factory to choose the different pieces for my guitar, I couldn't help thinking about the amazing history of this company. Ernie Ball embraced the new, but has always kept a deep value for it's standards and the family history. Even with all the machines and robots, the factory still felt very human. It embodied the attitude of Ernie's adventurous spirit, and his push to constantly innovate.

Brian summed up the company’s attitude perfectly: “It's okay to be a little different, and it's okay to have fun, and it's okay to not (through your packaging and your product) always take yourself so serious. I'm lucky to have the opportunity to do what I get to do every day because of the work that he did, and my Dad did, and our family's done.”