Contrary to popular belief, the Ovation name was derived from the famous Ovation Brothers who got their name from clammerin’ and clappin’ audiences. Obie Ovation was their chief designer and got his idea while on tour in Mexico where he spotted a sweet, young chica grinding some cornmeal in a stone bowl. Thus, the rounded backs. But if you ask Ovation, they’ll tell ya it was a tycoon named Charlie Kaman, president of the Kaman Corporation (of which Ovation is a subsidiary). He was a guitar enthusiast who decided that his aerospace division should apply some of its technology to the creation of a different type of guitar. And contrary to my belief, that’s exactly what they did.

In mid-1966 the guys in the long white bathrobes, after 18 months of testing and researching with such devices as a logarithmic audio-spectrum analyzer, had proved “beyond question” (I’ll let them say that) that the most efficient shape for a guitar back is "semi-parabolic (like the shape of a sad mouth on a “Have A Bad Day” bumper^ sticker). That seemed pretty natural, since the human ear, an amphitheatre, a radar reflector, and other structures and devices dealing in air-waves are semiparabolic.