As a guitarist, for some of my years professionally I can only say that this is mostly because you can emulate a lot of things today which normally required different guitars to bring out special sounds and because well most music today don't have guitar solos and thus it's hard to imagine guitar heroes coming out of music which doesn't put guitar in the front.
It's not just guitars though it's most other instruments. The real heroes today are the composers and producers.
Guitars (and other instruments) will remain even with the prevalence of electronic means of creation, in the same way the paintbrush and pencil are in no danger from Photoshop. The typewriter was replaced by software because instruments and implements offer what a typewriter cannot.
Nuance.
The "art" of paintings, drawings, and music lives in the nuances and life of the art; the imperfections or subtle changes. Writing is an assembly of language characters to convey the art. The nuance is how those character elements are arranged and interpreted, and thus the means of doing so are unimportant. However, an errant bristle or subtle slide down a string give life and nuance to an art without explicitly standing out on its own.
No one is saying they are going away completely just that they are mostly replaced (just like many other instruments). The number of people who live from playing the guitar has dropped to almost nothing the last 30 years. Even really really great musicians are hardly being booked any more.
I say this as a guitarist of more than three decades, and as a lover of great guitar playing. Rock and roll guitar solos are, by and large, the wankiest and most pointless waste of notes I can imagine. If we never get another, say Eruption, in exchange for no more awful weedly-deedly musical maelstroms I believe it is a more than fair trade. Even the good rock and roll guitar solos often aren't all that good compared to the song that surrounds them. (There are exceptions, and there are moments where the only thing that could have possibly worked was a wailing guitar...I'm thinking of something like the ending of The Chain by Fleetwood Mac...but that's not really a solo so much as a real and vital part of the song).
But that's a real PART. It's kind of like the Jay Graydon solo in Steely Dan's 'Peg'. Yes, you can have a bunch of exciting notes doing things, but it can't be just any bunch of notes: fast or slow, content matters.
Absolutely, content matters, and so does context. Take the solo in Living Colour's "Cult of Personality", a gibberish mess of seemingly random notes; he abuses that instrument like it owes him a lot of money! It works perfectly in the song however, so I suppose it's all a matter of taste.
Here's the problem with talking about guitar solos, especially saying, "I hate guitar solos, in the general case": Everyone immediately thinks of their favorite guitar solo, and gets defensive.
How am I supposed to argue against a Vernon Reid solo? Vernon Reid is a brilliant musician. I've loved his playing since I was a kid. He was one of my earliest musical heroes, and unlike a lot of musicians I liked when I was a kid, his playing (and the music of Living Colour) holds up extremely well to adulthood listening, even as someone that's got years of musical training since the first time I heard it and loved it. I might even enjoy some of their songs more today because I understand the depth of it.
If we could have the geniuses without the wankers, I'd have a lot less disdain for guitar solos (though even the Vernon Reids of the world usually have a few pointless rambling solos on record out there). But, we don't. Every wanker who ever picked up a guitar has shared their gifts with anyone who'd listen...sometimes, the world has been unlucky enough for it to have been recorded and somehow become a hit, and now we all have to hear that goddamned Freebird solo every now and then, no matter how hard we might try to avoid it.
Wankers outnumber geniuses by orders of magnitude. The sheer weight of guitar solo mediocrity in this world is staggering.
But thats true about almost anything that the people who know how to do something are miniscule compared to those who doesn't. Whether it's design, UX, business, entrepreneurship, football, tennis etc. Hardly an argument for anything.
So you are really back to what you like not an actual argument against guitar solos.
Sure, I've never said this is objective. I hate bad guitar solos and most guitar solos are bad. So, I said I welcome the death of the guitar solo as a medium of transmission of shitty ideas into my brain by mediocre musicians.
But, I disagree with your comparison to "design, UX, business, entrepreneurship, football, tennis, etc."
Those are the thing. You can't have design without design. You can have design without the blink tag. You can't have UX without UX, but you can have UX without mystery meat navigation. You can't have business without business, but you can have business without telesales. You can't have entrepreneurship without entrepreneurship, but you can have entrepreneurship without "Why should a programmer get so much equity? It's my idea." You can't have football without football, but you can have football without that John 3:14 guy (who is in prison for multiple kidnapping charges, BTW). You can't have tennis without tennis, but you can have tennis without the tennis community's infuriating refusal to acknowledge Serena as the GOAT. You can't have etc without etc, but you can have etc without people who misspell it "ect". There are things that make UX bad; mystery meat navigation is one of them. There are things that make songs
bad; guitar solos are often one of them.
What I'm saying is that guitar solos are the unnecessary, usually unwanted, but too often present, part of an otherwise potentially good thing. They make songs worse in a lot of cases.
You keep talking as if its objective, its not. Guitar solos are to some what they care about. So sure you have the right to your opinion but its highly subjective not some rational argument.
UX is not objective its contextual. Something being intuitive only means the context is understood.
Totally agree, I find nearly no guitar solos that add anything to the song. A few exceptions I can think of are Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and Maudlin of the Well.
There are many types of solos there are many types of music that uses it as an integral part and where it makes sense. Those might be types of music you don't like but that does not make solos pointless.
So each to their own of course but a very weird comment.
That's what a good solo does. It shouldn't be a true solo, but part of the music. Maybe the name "solo" is wrong. A good solo doesn't stand on its own, but it's a break in the music that brings you to the next piece.
Too many guitar players think the solo is their time to show off how quick their fingers are without being hampered by the rest of the song. It may be impressive guitar skills, but it's crappy music. That doesn't mean that all solos should die, just that they shouldn't be entirely solo.
Funny, I just got done playing for an hour. It's a great way to refresh.
If you want to see a resurgence of guitar playing you can't start with stadium guitar gods, you have to have the guitar house-party hero, and the local club hero, and the regional tour hero. And they're out there. Go out and see them play -- a lot of them are incredible.
I grew up in and around Austin so I'm biased and a little spoiled but there's nothing like a live local show.
There are more than a few parallels between putting together a band and becoming a success and putting together a company and becoming a success.
I clicked because I was curious what number of strings guitars were all secretly switching to. Why include such a superfluous detail in that headline? The cynic in me thinks this just clickbait getting harder to identify.
I think this article misses a key point. It's not all just about a lack of relevant role models.
Today, there are so many things competing for a kids' time - social media and messaging, mobile apps, video games, Netflix - that kids are choosing other activities instead of solitary, frustrating hours practicing guitar technique.
To become a proficient amateur-level guitarist, it takes around 2,000 hours of practice. That's equivalent to an hour a day, EVERY SINGLE DAY, for 5-1/2 years.
90% of kids learning guitar quit in the first 2 months (according to Fender) - most before they can play their first song well. The first few weeks are particularly brutal - it sounds horrible, it's painful on your fingers, and takes hours just get your first chord down.
In one sentence: it's just too hard to learn for the vast majority of people - and it's always been this way. But the difference is that these days, most kids would rather play Pokemon Go or Snapchat - and for kids who are musically inclined, it's so much easier and faster to become a DJ or producer than an instrumentalist, thanks to GarageBand and VirtualDJ and other easy-to-use software apps.
So a lot of musical kids are choosing that route. Why spend thousands of hours alone in your bedroom when you can be DJ'ing your first party in a few weeks?
So, how do we solve the problem of getting more kids to learn instruments, particularly the guitar? Some people have put lights on the fretboard (Fretlight, Gtar, Poputar) but in 25 years, that hasn't proven to make it much easier to learn. Others have gamified the experience (Rocksmith, Yousician) - but the learning curve is still extremely steep.
My company, Magic Instruments, has a different approach. We make it fundamentally easier to learn. Instead of starting by learning traditional guitar chord fingerings, we enable people to start playing chords using just one finger. This gives beginners an instantly positive musical experience - you can start strumming and playing your favorite songs from day one, and start jamming with others in a band in your first week. We then transition people over to learning traditional chords at their own pace.
We've seen 9 year old kids form a band in a few hours. Our hope is that we can inspire these kids to have a passion for practicing music, which will enable them to persevere for the thousands of hours of practice it takes to build the muscle memory to become guitarists.
"90% of kids learning guitar quit in the first 2 months" - I wonder if when the industry was doing well it mainly just meant that there were a lot more guitars out there collecting dust.
> 90% of kids learning guitar quit in the first 2 months (according to Fender)
True, just ask anyone who's ever had a teaching career in guitar (or music).
It's hard, everything about it is hard. And I'm not only saying that because I feel confident with my skills; it's quite true. Only with lots of time do callouses form where it doesn't hurt your fingers every time you play. Volume and feedback is another beast to manage. And if you're playing an acoustic, you really need some light gauge strings and good action to ever have hopes for that thing to not feel like a knife to your hands.
My method with beginners was simply to keep them entertained. So many potential Guitar Gods walk out because they go up against a Hal Leonard method book and have all the fun of guitar sucked out of them. If you can get them playing music they want to play; they're much more likely to continue playing it, even through pain, so that they can learn the fundamentals over time.
Your method works really well too, one-finger chords is a great way to get people playing the strummy music they like without the frustration of coordinating all the fingers. In the same light, it's why I've tuned my 4-year-olds guitar to an open D, so that she can "write music and sing" without having to worry about getting a sound of the guitar. If the interest is there, the perseverance will continue.
Hands up if you have actually ever thrown away a guitar? It's rather big it's bulky and there's few things that can go badly wrong. You sell it or hand it down. I've just rescued a kickass guitar from a pawn shop and it'll be serving me probably as long as i play. Basically, there are enough guitars out there. The average lifetime of an instrument is going up and that's a trend that is the opposite of what the rest of the consumer goods world is seeing. No wonder business is bad. But don't confuse business with the actual instrument.
They're an investment, plain and simple. The holy grails outlasted their original owners, and with enough care (even playing!) they'll outlast the current owners.
I mean, it's very common to play a 150+-year-old violin. I see what you're saying here. Electric guitar is so new, saturation of the market is only just happening.
Hands up if you have actually ever thrown away a guitar? It's rather big it's bulky and there's few things that can go badly wrong. You sell it or hand it down. I've just rescued a kickass guitar from a pawn shop and it'll be serving me probably as long as i play. Basically, there are enough guitars out there. The average lifetime of an instrument is going up and that's a trend that is the opposite of what the rest of the consumer goods world is seeing. No wonder business is bad. But don't confuse business with the actual instrument.
Could have written this in the 00s about computer synths, the 90s about rap, tha 80s about hardware synths, the 70s, well, the 70s were goid to guitars, but the 60s the organ was king, in the 50s, the electric guitar was new. Its always been an ebb and flow of popular music.
rock n' roll will never die as Neil Young put it. Its just taking a break and going to hell to reorganize. Rock is here to stay and is out of fashion now but the cycle will come back and just like clothing fashion 20-30 years from now a new wave will happen.
In what country is that? It became popular in NL 24 years ago. One year before that I was listening to Slayer in a Portugese club and Neil Young at a camping disco. The year after, the same places were playing house. Taste is taste and winning whatever, but that was a loss to me.
A large percentage of what was considered rock and roll in the 70s has migrated to be essentially under the country pavillion. The next Neil Young, or Greg Allman, or Bruce Springsteen will be lumped as a country singer.
Speaking of 20-30 years, you get peak revenue off collectibles and aspiration-ables about 40 years out, notice how we're at "peak star wars" right now? You can predict 80s home computers and early video games are also going to peak real soon now.
That has more to do with the propaganda apparatus of producers and promoters cherry-picking virtuosos and taking them on a fame ride to demonstrate the miracle unicorn lotteries of capitalism's permissive pop culture, when contrasted against the typical realities of the meritocracy-oriented communist worker.
Seeing Jack White play live with the White Stripes was one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. Part of the beauty of their style is that it is built on very simple fundamentals - literally an enumerated set of rules - which form a platform on top of which Jack White can experiment with incredible virtuoso stuff (the best of which is obviously observed in the live performances).
You are 100% spot on though that Jack White isn't famous for this. In their popular singles really only the basic song frameworks, and not so much of the experimental stuff, are exposed. I think it might be some mixture of intentional artistic obscurity, and fitting to the 'radio market' for economic reasons, but either way if you're not familiar with them I really suggest giving all the albums (and some of the live shows e.g. Live Under Blackpool Lights) a deep listen through - really quite incredible stuff :-)
Mayer is an amazing blues guitarist, and recognized as such. He tours with Pino Paladino as his bassist, a testament to his own chops!
And Jack White, while not a "virtuoso" has mastery of the rock guitar language. It's not immediately obvious to everyone, but his technique is flawless.
A more apt description would be "Slash was the last famous guitarist that non guitar players would probably ever remember being mentioned in the popular press".
It's along the same lines of saying "McDonalds is the fast food most people have heard of" or "BASIC is the most common programming language that everyone has heard of, so it must be the best".
Within each sub-culture, there are dedicated fans that go deeper and have a set of idols that they look up to. I can readily identify fellow guitar players (AND the genre of music they prefer) by mentioning names like Joe Bonamassa, Doyle Bramhall II, Brad Paisley etc. Blank stares just mean that the person is not involved in the guitar world at all. Someone who gets excited when I mention Paisley, I know is into the pop/country stuff.
I've heard people write off John Mayer as a 'non guitarist' even on guitar forums, but when I show them this clip [0] and tell them to come back to me when they have mastered playing that particular off beat riff and sing the melody at the same time, like he does, then I will gladly pay them $10. My money has been safe in my wallet for years.
I had the same reaction as you when I heard it the first time - I never thought one person could make all those sounds on the guitar AND sing. And if you listen you will hear that the singing melodic line is a completely different rhythmic feel from the guitar riff. How he syncs the two of them together is beyond me.
But I know it is possible, and not dubbed at all because I've seen and heard my own son do it as part of his repertoire now...
Guitar players are usually not remembered by the general public unless they have something else (like being cute). Worse for bass players and drummers, but the frontman/singer gets remembered. It was always a fight. Singer/guitarists is always easier but, like you said, usually considered non guitarist. I listened to the youtube you included and disclaimer taste/I am old, but then I listened to a lot of what he did: it is not very impressive. Sure, if you can do that live and long stretches that is talent but a good guitarist (what is the definition outside taste? that is a question, taste should not have anything to do with that)? Do you have something that shows he can do something? And the singing is just taste but without it would be better if you have.
Well, as far as musicianship, this is the best case of '3 guys really deep in the pocket with a tight groove' that I have ever seen... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vlBGk9qCio
Another guitarist/singer that is a favourite of mine is Joe Bonamassa. He is almost invisible outside of the guitar player or blues/rock enthusiast field, but is VERY successful, and busy touring the world... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-69Djk5HdQ
Again, I might be old or weird but all you posted is nice but something not, to me, interesting to play. This is all personal taste and whatever, but as a guitar player, I can not only feel what they will play but also just play it. And, as it goes with many things, if I can do it, it cannot be all that special(that is probably something people take pills for these days ;)
But that's a weird bet to make. What are you trying to prove with that? Why would anyone learn to play something with a very personal style that has taken the artist probably a decade to master... for $10? Of course it has been safe in your wallet. It doesn't prove _anything_ about the versatility or technical skills of that particular artist.
Purely to prove a point to some salty poster on a forum who bangs on about John Mayer "not being a real guitarist and not really doing anything that anybody else can't do".
A simple "Well, post a video of you doing that and I will Paypal you $10 as a token of appreciation" is just a simple challenge guaranteed to weed out anyone who is even remotely qualified to make such a call.
So far, none of the more trollish posters have ever come back with evidence of them being able to do it. Better players however (who usually NEVER talk smack about another player of Mayer's calibre, thus never have the challenge gauntlet thrown at their feet) have done so.
It's ironic that young people are losing interest in the guitar at a time when there is an amazingly enormous amount of resources freely available for learning it.
When I started to learn guitar several decades ago, I would learn guitar solos off of records by slowing them down to 16 rpm (old turntables could do that) and moving the needle back repeatedly to listen to tricky phrases over and over again. It was frustrating, time consuming, and hell on on the records.
Today, for just about any popular and many obscure guitar-oriented songs, you can find a Youtube video where someone breaks it down note by note and chord by chord. There are all kinds of resources online for learning scales and theory and online communities where an aspiring guitarist can connect with thousands of other like-minded people.
I would like to see guitar-oriented rock and roll make a comeback. The heavy metal subculture is thriving without any mainstream radio airplay to speak of, but aside from that, there's just not that much going on.
If I see a local rock band play in a bar these days, about 80% of the time it will be all middle-aged men who have been playing for decades. Some of them are even retirement age.
> When I started to learn guitar several decades ago, I would learn guitar solos off of records by slowing them down to 16 rpm (old turntables could do that) and moving the needle back repeatedly to listen to tricky phrases over and over again. It was frustrating, time consuming, and hell on on the records.
This made you a much better player than just looking up a video or tab though.
>I would like to see guitar-oriented rock and roll make a comeback. The heavy metal subculture is thriving without any mainstream radio airplay to speak of, but aside from that, there's just not that much going on.
> If I see a local rock band play in a bar these days, about 80% of the time it will be all middle-aged men who have been playing for decades. Some of them are even retirement age.
Sounds to me like you aren't looking very hard. In my city, I can find current, young rock bands playing at multiple venues weekly. Some of my favorite albums have come out since 2010.
Bar bands are dying because the economics don't make sense anymore for bar owners. Why dedicate a ton of space to 3-5 people with tons of equipment when you can just get one guy with a laptop. The latter is probably cheaper, too. In my area, most people don't go to bars for music anyway outside of places like dedicated jazz or piano bars.
"This made you a much better player than just looking up a video or tab though."
I disagree. Not about the "just looking up a tab" bit, but about the general gist of your argument that "the hard way teaches you better". Easier access to knowledge is always better when you want to learn things, and the internet is absolutely the best access to knowledge that has ever existed.
I've been playing guitar since long before the internet made it easy to find a tab or chord chart for almost any song. I learned the "hard way". I've taught guitar lessons (also before all the modern options for learning came along), took college level music classes (in high school and in college), etc. All that knowledge was hard-earned, and I appreciate the time and effort it took to learn, but if I could go back in time and give my twelve-year-old self Rock Band and the Internet I sure as hell would.
To put it into perspective, in addition to guitar I tinkered with drums even back in high school and college (though I never had my own real drumset until adulthood). When I played in bands, I'd always push for at least one song where we'd switch it up so I could play drums for a little bit. I wasn't good at drums, but it was fun and I could hold down the rhythm for a simple song. As a grown up, I started playing Rock Band. Damned if my drumming didn't go through the roof in terms of quality and confidence. And, it happened fast, too. Within a few months of playing Rock Band maybe three or four hours a week and occasionally watching a video on YouTube about problem areas, I was a completely different drummer.
What I'm trying to say is that educational tools matter and the tools provided by technology today are incredibly better than they were when those of us over, say 30, were learning to play.
Not only that, I can browse YouTube and watch hours of instruction from professionals in any field. I've watched master classes on composition for orchestra by people who do it professionally, for example. I had that kind of access to really knowledge pros for a brief window when I went to a high school for the arts and to a lesser degree during college, but after that and until the Internet, it was something I had to get from books. Learning from professionals who're speaking directly to you in a video is way more valuable than slowing down a record and listening to it a hundred times (though there's value in ear-training, the tools for that are better now than ever) or reading a book about the subject.
Anyway, the point of my rambling is: Don't let nostalgia for how it used to be to cloud your view of how much better it is today. There will likely be younger prodigies in every musical genre than ever before because of the Internet (and Rock Band and apps that let you practice your intervals, etc.) if kids still want to learn how to play instruments. I think about folks like Lorde; she was writing fully formed, mature, and extremely competent, music at a ridiculously young age. I doubt it could have happened without tech.
And, I don't know if it's awful that kids may spend time learning to play other things rather than guitar, drums, bass, and piano; maybe they're learning sequencers and samplers and such instead. It may just be different, not worse. I learned a lot about music making mods in a tracker on my Amiga back when I was a teenager. It allows one to understand the whole song in ways that banging it out by yourself on an acoustic guitar might not.
I try not to let nostalgia cloud my appreciation of art that's happening today. And, there's a lot of great art happening, in music, too, including some real rock and roll played on real instruments. Pop music has never been about the guitar, even though the guitar was ever-present in pop music for a few decades. So, it shouldn't be all that surprising that pop music isn't going to cling to the guitar; all pop really cares about is pretty fa...
What I meant is that learning songs by ear makes you a better musician because you are effectively doing ear training at the same time. Ear training is an important part of growing musically that many people over look because it is tedious, but it's what allows experts to play what they hear in their head when improvising. If you just play what's written out on a page, you won't benefit as much in this regard.
I agree that ear-training is important. I just don't believe struggling through songs while listening to slowed down records is the most effective way to do it.
We don't tell beginning programmers, "Go read the Linux kernel, it's the best way to learn." And, we shouldn't tell beginning musicians, "Go listen to an incredibly complex work recorded on 24+ tracks, with dozens of overdubs, and pitch-correction, and compression, performed by professional musicians with years of experience, and copy them."
I struggled when learning stuff as a kid, for years. I did it, but it wasn't productive practice. If I'd had competent ear-training, interval training, and sight-singing instruction at the beginning of my musical life, I would have found learning from records by ear much easier and much more productive within a year.
Kids today have access to those resources, even if they aren't lucky enough to go to a school for music. Will they do it? I dunno. I did tedious stuff even when more fun stuff was available; I had video games, friends in the neighborhood, a bike and skateboard to ride, etc., but I banged away at my guitar, making slow progress.
Making it less tedious, by making it more productive, seems like it's more likely to work out for more aspiring musicians. Learning by ear, when you don't have a framework of musical knowledge to hang it on, is among the most tedious things I can remember from learning to play guitar...and, it wasn't nearly as productive as it could have been, in terms of learning.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but for one aspect that's easy to overlook.
Easy access to information is not always better. A number of reasons: information had easily isn't valued; information that requires effort teaches determination and self sufficiency that will always be required when you get to the limit of easily available info; an abundance of info can be daunting (information overload) and demoralising. Finally, there's less sense of achievement when you e.g. read about something rather than figure it out, and a lower probability of innovation from not knowing the current "best practices".
I still think easy access is better, but mostly because I'm grown up with hard won learning skills. I'm less certain that easy access develops the right kinds of skills. Primarily because not everyone is a genius with exceptional talent; some of us need skills too.
I partly disagree. Access to endless information is great, on balance, but other things are equally important: hands-on tuition, peer feedback, competition.
I think about folks like Lorde; she was writing fully formed, mature, and extremely competent, music at a ridiculously young age. I doubt it could have happened without tech.
Kate Bush was 19 when she released Wuthering Heights (and had been writing for years before that).
Stevie Wonder signed to Motown aged 11. Not sure when he started writing his own stuff in earnest.
[Edit to add, from Wikipedia:
In 1961, when aged 11, Wonder sang his own composition, "Lonely Boy", to Ronnie White of the Miracles; White then took Wonder and his mother to an audition at Motown
"Kate Bush was 19 when she released Wuthering Heights (and had been writing for years before that)."
I've been comparing Lorde to Kate Bush for ages now, so I agree with you on that comparison (and I'm a huge Stevie Wonder fan, including his childhood songs..."Up Tight", recorded when he was 15, is among my favorites to holler along with while cooking dinner). But...there's gonna be a lot more of those kids. I'd bet there already are and I just don't follow pop music.
I can name maybe a half dozen super-talented kids that have come along in the pre-internet age; they were exceptional. But, I think they'll be less the exception as time goes on...partly due to tech.
YouTube recommended Grace Vanderwaal to me just last night. Her music isn't really my thing, but it's hard to argue she's not stunningly skilled for her age.
I agree that these kids are all amazing (including Lorde, I hope she has a long and successful career like Bush and Wonder). I just don't buy that modern tech makes that much of a difference. It's just... different! If you see what I mean. :)
My argument has always been about access. Some kids are lucky enough to be brought up in a household with music all around; the internet makes it possible to any kid can surround themselves with brilliant music and musical knowledge. That's all. There still has to be a will to make music (or art, or tech, or whatever). It's just an enabler, a lever that wasn't accessible to most kids in the past, is all I'm saying.
Not so much tech per se (although I also like your point about apps for music practice and other things) but the social changes and prosperity that are partly driven by tech.
> It's ironic that young people are losing interest in the guitar at a time when there is an amazingly enormous amount of resources freely available for learning it.
That could be part of it. Demystifying something erodes some of the appeal.
Maybe the instant gratification and easier learning curve just doesn't give them the same amount of gratification that we got from tabs an figuring stuff out our self. I've learnt songs from tabs on the internet but the resources people have currently are amazing and make the process big learning easier.
You can also hire someone from anywhere in the world to transcribe songs for you and learn your heart out. As a yuppie with a heavy interest in indie music living in a city still filling to the brim with music this is literally the best time to be a musician.
Lots of them. There are tons and tons of pretty incredible guitarists, young and old, male and female, all over youtube. None of them are blowing up huge with original work, but they can cover well-known tunes impecably.
Search for guitar licks and chord sweeps, and follow a few different branches of linked playlists offered up in the sidebar.
"Impecably" comes from the latin root for sin. It must be the problem, goody two shoes ain't rock 'n' roll. It used to be about a rebellious nature. If it's right then it's all wrong, you know?
When you peak as the most popular instrument in the world and get tons of obsessive people to collect/hoard instruments, there's only one way to go from that peak. Thinking the downturn is death is worthless hype.
Almost every collector I've met usually collects with the market. Not all of them hoard as much as you'd traditionally think. They're always buying/selling trying to get that Holy Grail First Run Sunburst Les Paul. There's plenty of room in the market for everyone willing to put some skin in the game.
Plus, I think the mention of all the boutique brands at NAMM helps with this. We all can't afford a magnificent '55 strat, but with far fewer dollars d'Pergo (or some other amazing strat perfectionist) can make something equally as stunning.
And, with enough time these instruments will hit the market again. When enough of them do; we'll make them affordable again; once everyone is play 7+ strings and doesn't want anything to do with 50's guitar technology.
This isn't just collecting as investing. Many players collect not to be collectors but because they just get obsessed with wanting to have certain instruments that they hope to (and in some cases actually do) play.
I think it's a bit naive to believe that guitar heroes can bring the interest for the guitar back. People look back at the guitar heroes time with a nostalgic fondness for a time that doesn't exist anymore. This was already visible in Wayne's world and became more than obvious in school of rock. Guitar-heavy rock has become a geek genre. Pop has moved on.
There are obviously various reasons for this:
1. Technologically the instrument ran its course. While the tech was still innovative in the 90s with the new digital effects, it hasn't changed much in 20 years.
2. Electronic music however has brought in a lot of new sounds that gave pop music a fresh start in the 2000s
3. People seem to be more interested in 2 things: dancing and lyrics. You could write songs with totally inintelligible lyrics and a good solo, and you'd have a hit. I don't think that's true anymore. Similarly a solo kind of ruins the dancing.
I think die hard rock fans need to get over it, guitar heroes are not coming back any time soon. I don't think it means the electric guitar is going to die. It still is an amazingly cool instrument. But, it means that your average kid may not want to try to play that "ten years after" intro anymore.
I think you're missing the point. The question is certainly not whether the guitar heroes of old inspire new generations to the same extent it did us.
Sure pop has moved on from the image of hairy flashy axe wielding fairies shredding away while 3 other dudes prance around. But that's fashion. It has little to do with the instrument and everything to do with fads and marketing.
Also you can sure as hell not ruin dancing with a solo (Black Sabbath, Led zep, Red Fang more recently!?), the issue is that there are too many fretboard wankers who pushed technical style for technical style's sake. That is what I hope the next generation of metal/rock guitarists will break away from.
Hold on, I am a not very young dad and the music of my youth was with two turntables and a mic. The 90s golden age of hip hop :) There was also electronic music like techno, drum and bass, ...
Guitar music is I'd say evergreen, but hasn't been the hottest thing for much longer.
<I think it's a bit naive to believe that guitar heroes can bring the interest for the guitar back.>
Isn't it the heroes in any field that inspire others to take it up? Or are you saying that there can never be another guitar hero again who will be good enough to inspire another generation? That would be naive, wouldn't it, considering how awesome the electric guitar is?
Nickleback is a good example of a band that keeps the guitar alive. Yes, they don't play ANY soli (or do they?), but they get serious airtime and I haven't heard kids call them old-fashioned..
Green Day had their moment, although it has passed.
The Black Keys are good, but maybe not that mainstream.
The best show I've ever seen was Avenged Sevenfold, which is definitely in the metal niche. But I'll never forget when they had a break in the middle of the show, and their lead guitarist came out and just solo'd for a while. Incredible talent.
The writing is juvenile, the band's attitude towards other music is insulting, every album sounds more or less the same, and there's an argument to be made that their fame partially stems largely from a Canadian law requiring Canadian music to make up a certain percentage of radio time. According to sources[0], their new album is getting outsold by Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit's new album, they're a fairly straight country act, so I'm not sure I'm even willing to take Nickelback's popularity as a given in 2017.
Like the other commenter said, Foo Fighters would have made a better example. Maybe Coldplay. Chili Peppers. Look, I understand that art is subjective, but at the end of the day, some art is less subjective than others. Nickelback deserves their spot in the pantheon of groups who get shit on whenever you mention them.
You have a rational access to music, and I respect that; though not everybody cares about an artist's street cred while listening to their music.
Indeed, country seems to take over the guitar torch, and why not. Coldplay mostly doesn't even have sounds that resemble a guitar anymore. Chili Peppers, yeah why not! I want guitars to somehow stay in the charts, or I'll feel quite obsolete with my hobby (electric guitar)..
I realize that you qualified your remark about Coldplay with "anymore", but it should be noted that their first two releases were guitar-centric and they were actually musically amazing (imo). I don't know about their more recent releases, although I believe they collaborated with The Chainsmokers for at least one of their latest songs. I'm not sure if this is representative of all their new songs, though.
CanCon, as the process is known, has many problems. It has forced radio stations to constantly play the Tragically Hip as well, who I would argue deserve to be played.
The melodies are a little too close to gain my respect. It's like they were tasked with making music for a Batman movie and started browsing the previous movie scores.
There's a whole section near the end of the article about a noticeable bump in sales of guitars to women, inspired by Taylor Swift. You just have to be more flexible about what "guitar hero" can mean.
I think even the most flexible definition of guitar hero shouldn't include Taylor Swift. I'd say that style of guitar - using it for texture under the song - is antithetical to guitar heroism. The guitar became heroic because it broke out of the background music section of the band that supports the singer and became a star in its own right. It was another avenue of expression just by itself. Strumming some chords on an acoustic guitar as part of a song where the focus is the story of the lyrics doesn't require a guitar. It could be swapped with a keyboard, or a mandolin or a piano and it wouldn't really change the song that much.
And music is really just a the electrical impulses from bunch of soundwaves banging up against the membrane in our eardrums. Jeez, that kind of reductionism really kills the magic (not to mention ignoring the talent and feel involved for an artist to make those oscillators 'speak' to you)
There are other approaches to the guitar that are just as historically significant as the Hendrix-style electric solo. Not long before that, in the folk music boom, the acoustic guitar was seen as the ultimate democratic instrument -- you could toss it in the back of your car, drive to a gig or a party, and start playing immediately (rhythm, harmony, melody, whatever you like).
The right kind of solo can accelerate the dancing. 80s pop had it all figured out in this regard: some of the best dance music ever made while also being phenomenal pop music.
> 1. Technologically the instrument ran its course. While the tech was still innovative in the 90s with the new digital effects, it hasn't changed much in 20 years.
This is... whilst not exactly incorrect, it's not the whole truth either. The article touched a little bit on this with the robotic tuner thing, but didn't fully explain why.
In my experience partaking in internet guitar forums over the decades, the vast majority of guitar players are really conservative. Extremely conservative. Especially people who mostly are into Fender/Gibson/PRS. They shun every new material (graphite/carbon fiber necks/fretboards), even if it has clear advantages (torsion/tensile/impact strength, weight, temperature/humidity insensitivity), often with unscientific emotional-based hand-waving like "it sounds too cold".
Headless guitars also stayed niche, even though they have clear advantages (lighter, shorter, more well-balanced, can't break your headstock off — a quite common way to damage your guitar).
It also took decades for 7-string guitars not to get scoffed at. The first 15+ years you had a lot of guitarists making fun of people with 7-string guitars. After they became somewhat accepted, 8-string guitars had an easier time, mind you.
People are very sceptical of True Temperament (http://www.truetemperament.com/) as well, believing that you can't perform string bending (you can, it doesn't really feel any different), and decided that to be the truth without even bothering to try.
There are still many areas on the guitar you can improve and innovate (and some stuff out there already that primarily Ned Steinberger showed us in the 80s could (and IMO should) be standard), but people want fragile, heavy and climate-sensitive "tonewood" in their guitars. They want soft brass bridges. They want maintenance-heavy soft "nickel/silver" (actually brass and nickel) frets. They want headstocks.
Maybe these old people in the article (I'm 37 so I'm one of them as well, I guess) are the problem, and when younger people that don't revere the word "vintage" so much can usher in the era of the truly modern guitar that Ned Steinberger has shown us glimpses of? One can only hope.
>Maybe these old people in the article (I'm 37 so I'm one of them as well, I guess) are the problem, and when younger people that don't revere the word "vintage" so much can usher in the era of the truly modern guitar that Ned Steinberger has shown us glimpses of? One can only hope.
It's already happening. A huge proportion of young guitarists are playing metal, which is a hugely progressive scene in terms of technology. The coolest young guitarists are playing Strandberg Bodens, Kiesel Vaders and the weird and wonderful stuff from Ibanez's Iron Label. 7, 8 and 9 strings, fanned frets, headless, active electronics, carbon and titanium reinforcement, it's all on the table. They're abandoning valve amps in favour of Helix, AxeFX and Bias. They couldn't give a toss about Hendrix and Clapton - they revere the likes of Tosin Abasi and Rob Scallion.
The baby boomers have disproportionate influence because they've got a ton of disposable income, but big changes are afoot in the guitar business.
Sure. Headless designs is going in the right direction IMO, but other than that, don't fool yourself, the Strandberg and Kiesel guitars etc. are still very traditional designs:
Wooden body, wooden neck, wooden fretboard, and in the case of Strandberg, Ibanez AANJ-style neck joint and silver/nickel frets (Carvin/Kiesel have neck-through and SS frets as options, or at least used to have). Most, if not all parts, you can get from Warmoth/All Parts, no custom designed parts there, apart from maybe the Strandberg's string fastening mechanism/headpiece, but that one is pretty crude, to be honest.
Line6 has created the Variax that uses the piezo signal of each string to model other stringed instruments and their electronic system (and even things like banjos and resonator guitars)
Strandberg use stainless frets and carbon neck reinforcement on everything but the entry-level Classic model. Stainless frets are a $40 option on any Kiesel and carbon reinforcement is standard on any of their extended-range guitars. The Strandberg headpiece and bridge is made in-house; Kiesel use custom headless hardware designed in collaboration with Hipshot. Strandberg use fanned frets throughout their range and Kiesel offer it as an option on most of their solid-body guitars.
There are merits to both the neck-through construction used on the Kiesel Vader and the bolt-on joint used by Strandberg. Through-necks are arguably more stable, but bolt-ons are far easier to maintain and repair.
The Strandberg neck profile is anything but conventional:
There's nothing terribly wrong with wood construction. It's aesthetically pleasing, relatively economical and more than strong, stiff and stable enough when used appropriately.
> can't break your headstock off — a quite common way to damage your guitar
Really? Are people using their guitars as hammers? I think it's pretty damn hard to break a headstock off. Much more common damage to a guitar is denting the frets, distorting the neck or busting the tuning pegs. I'd put "breaking off the headstock" as the 99th percentile of common ways people materially damage their guitar.
Gibson guitars are notorious for broken headstocks, due to an archaic and inherently defective design. Modern scarf-jointed headstocks do occasionally break, but they're more prone to cracking around the machine head holes.
I should've said accidental damage. Dropping the guitar. Knocking the stand over. Shipping damage. Guitar trauma, basically.
Tuning pegs don't really tend to fail. Unless you have those "vintage" Les Paul-style ones (yuck), but they're easy to replace.
Frets get worn down, necks tend to bow or arch, or at worst warp (more seldom). Fret recrowning/redressing, truss rod adjustment and fretboard leveling are part of the regular maintenance of a long-lived electric guitar.
Now, headstock breakages are usually pretty easy to fix for a luthier, and the result is stronger, since a glued joint is stronger, just not as strong as a glued scarf joint.
I don't think it's just conservatism. When buying a guitar, most buyers are primarily concerned with three things: does it sound good, is it easy to play, and does it look good.
Graphite and carbon fiber has superior properties in some respect, but substituting carbon fiber for wood doesn't necessarily make the guitar sound or look better or improve playability. Compared to acoustic instruments, electric guitars are low maintenance and durable. People in very humid or very dry environments might prefer carbon fiber to wood, but for most of us, wood is fine.
Robotuners similarly don't solve a significant problem that most players have, and they're complex and probably costly to make and introduce a battery to a guitar that didn't need one before. The convenience of automatic tuners probably aren't worth the costs.
Headless guitars similarly don't solve a particular problem, as far as I can tell. I expect to be able to rest a guitar on leg and not have it tip one way or the other while I'm playing. Most guitars balance fine with a proper headstock. I haven't tried a Steinberger, maybe they're really great guitars, but there's no particular reason for me to expect that I would enjoy playing a headless guitar more than a "normal" guitar. (Note: I have built headless cigar box guitars [1], and I kind of like the design, but that's a bit different than a full-size electric.)
True Temperament is more interesting because that actually is addressing a real problem, sort of. Electric guitars are pretty bad when it comes to tuning, but the problem isn't so much intonation, the bigger problem is that 12-tone equal temperament is a compromise -- you can sound okay in every key (12-TET) or you can sound really good in one particular key (just intonation), but you can't have both. (The latter alternative leads you to some interesting looking fingerboards [2].)
I would be more interested in the TT guitars if they were focusing on temperament rather than intonation errors. (I suspect they may actually be doing that, but their marketing material says they're correcting intonation. I'm skeptical that any normal guitars would need such extreme corrections just to play in exact 12-TET unless the action is set unreasonably high.)
TT also has the problem that normal frets can be repaired or replaced by any competent luthier using ordinary guitar tools, but I wouldn't even know you would do a fret dress on TT guitar. Maybe you'd need a special crowning file that goes around corners or something?
I think there are some ways that the electric guitar could be improved, but to some degree, I think unscientific emotional hand-wavy reasons can be a better guide to making an instrument people want than to approach the problem by using science to optimize specific criteria based on some untested assumption that optimizing that criteria will make the guitar better.
> I think die hard rock fans need to get over it, guitar heroes are not coming back any time soon.
I disagree. The guitar isn't gone yet, and even if there are newer instruments, the guitar will be with us for a long time.
And there's more to music than dancing. Even if guitars will be playing second fiddle to computers, they'll remain relevant just like violins are still relevant (and perhaps making a comeback in the hands of people like Lindsey Stirling). Besides, I need guitars in my dance music. Dance music shouldn't be sterile. The dirty, distorted sound of a guitar gives my the energy to dance in a way that an electronic beat does not.
> “John Mayer?” he asks. “You don’t see a bunch of kids emulating John Mayer and listening to him and wanting to pick up a guitar because of him.”
Sorry, but my 17 year old son was so inspired by Mayer about 5 years ago that he invested a LOT of time learning how to play guitar and sing like him, and other artists with similar styles. [0]
He is now building quite a steady music career even while finishing high school (he was booked for 3 gigs just this weekend).
He is also interested in past guitar heroes such as Eddie Van Halen, Mark Knopfler, Angus Young, Andy Summers etc. and spends a lot of time going through 'older' stuff to learn more.
While he has a lot of natural ability, there is no arguing that it takes a LOT of hard work. He practices for a minimum of 2 hours a day - sometimes even up to 4 or 5 hours, not counting gigging time. We often have to call him away from his guitar to do school work or eat.
I envy the time he lives in though - I started playing when I was 15, back in the early 80's and it was really difficult to find decent gear, and the only way to learn anything new was to try and figure it out by ear or find someone else who knew to teach you. Nowadays, the proliferation of Youtube and other online learning resources, the huge selection of reasonably priced gear, and things like software and hardware modelling amps mean players can dial in ANY sound they want under any situation. Unheard of in my time.
It just needs kids who are interested enough to turn it into their passion.
Been playing guitar for 20 years, and this is spot on! The John Mayer comment is ridiculous, he's a great guitarist. Even many of John Mayer's biggest pop radio hits have great chord voicings and writing built-in (No Such Thing, Why Georgia, Neon, Daughters). The YouTube factor you mention is also amazing.
This article was probably right, but it's so focused on the good ole days that it's sad. Times change. Art changes. Diplo and TSwift are as legit as SRV and Dylan. Rock on.
LOL, you've just named the top 4 Mayer covers in my son's regular gigging set. I must say when I first saw Mayer play "Neon" with just the acoustic guitar on "Where the Light Is", I was floored and thought that he must have to have two brains to be able to achieve that. [0]
When my son said he wanted to learn to play that song solo, I told him it would be nearly impossible. But he learned it and plays it just like John does. I have been playing for > 30 years and there is no way I could do that! :)
Singing / playing requires a split brain. If you think the chord + bass on Neon requires a split brain, check out Charlie Hunter. I just picked one of the first videos that I found on youtube, but he always plays guitar & bass at the same time:
>Diplo and TSwift are as legit as SRV and Dylan. Rock on.
First, if they are, then that's part of the focus of the article. That guitar and guitar rock is waning -- and surely Diplo and TSwift are not bringing it back.
Second, no Diplo and TSwift are not as legit as SRV and Dylan. Not because they are different genres, but because they are inferior artistically (regardless of genre).
They might be equally entertaining or whatever, in a "it's a free country and I can listen to whatever I like", but artistically they're not even close (and SRV is not in the same league for cultural impact as Dylan anyway).
It's not about the past. There are contemporary electronic, edm, r&b, hip hop etc artists that are on par with SRV and Dylan on creative merits, but TSwift and Diplo are not them -- like the Monkeys weren't as good as The Beatles, and Frankie Avalon was no Elvis.
If you want to argue that Taylor Swift is technically inferior then that's fine, but tens of millions of young women disagree with assertions of her "artistic inferiority", and I'd be curious to know why your opinion matters more than theirs.
>and I'd be curious to know why your opinion matters more than theirs
Because populism doesn't say much. One can find tens of millions supporting any kind of trash in all areas of public life (wanna talk about politics for example?).
Informed opinions matter more than uninformed ones, and we're beyond the point that the merit of Taylor Swift vs Dylan (or sugary constructed commercial pop for quick consumption and singing songwriting that defined a generation and then some and made it to the Nobel) is seriously argued.
how does it feel up on that high horse? there are no absolutes in music (as an art form) so you really can't say that Diplo is less important than Dylan until long after both are dead. even then, Diplo is influencing a ton of kids and will have impact that way for decades to come so where do you draw the line?
Dylan himself probably never thought he'd be as important a musician as his heroes - Elvis, Little Richard, etc. but now they are all in the same conversation.
It feels great. It's called culture, and being aware of it, not a blind consumer of what tastes good (McDonalds tastes good too).
>there are no absolutes in music (as an art form)
No, but human culture has, and always had, a way to prfioritize what's important and what's not besides mere consumption or influence (crap has also influenced a lot of imitators).
>Dylan himself probably never thought he'd be as important a musician as his heroes - Elvis, Little Richard, etc. but now they are all in the same conversation.
That's irrelevant though, because it's not the artist that determines their own worth but their work, its quality, and its cultural impact.
>music is fun. the expected almost never happens.
Except with TSwift, Diplo and co songs. Where it almost always happens.
>It feels great. It's called culture, and being aware of it, not a blind consumer of what tastes good (McDonalds tastes good too).
oh please, elitism isn't culture it's a perspective. you have a perspective about the things you like which is no more or less valid than anyone else's. no matter how enlightened you think you are when it comes to music I promise there is an entire subculture that finds your tastes closer to "blind consumption" than "true music fan". 100% relative.
>No, but human culture has, and always had, a way to prfioritize what's important and what's not besides mere consumption or influence (crap has also influenced a lot of imitators).
please, please describe for me this mechanism by which "human culture" has prioritized important art. I would love to hear what unassailable framework you think draws a line between "important" and "crap".
“You don’t see a bunch of kids emulating John Mayer and listening to him and wanting to pick up a guitar because of him.”
Emphasis on a bunch of kids. As someone who likes guitar it pains me to say that this seems true.
My son is 11, in a (very) music-heavy school. When I was his age I think almost every boy (and some girls) in my class learnt guitar - it was the instrument.
In my son's class I think there are 2 learning it.
The guitar will never die, but the popularity isn't what it was.
Genuine question: Has your son seen Mayer play? Either on TV or in a live situation? I remember my son being entranced when I brought home the "Where The Light Is" DVD and put it on to watch it myself. He happened to be in the room, and was hooked from the opening song to the last.
Not saying that will be the case in every instance, but I do remember the actual video that got BOTH my sons into music was an "AC/DC Live In Germany" video that I put on TV when they were both toddlers. They were duck walking all over the house and begging me to put the DVD on over and over again until I (who am a huge Angus Young fan) was thoroughly sick of it. Many years later, I took them to an AC/DC live concert in Sydney, during their "Black Ice" tour.
Exposing kids to such raw energy and musicianship on a semi regular basis is critical IMO. What they don't see, they cannot be inspired by. I also know that they won't always be inspired by what I like, and that is fine. Both my sons went through a 'thrash metal' phase, which wasn't my favourite, but it still formed a large part of their musical journey.
I also saw AC/DC during the Black Ice tour. I've been to many concerts, but never seen anyone else live who could play the guitar like Angus Young. He truly is an amazing guitarist.
There will always be people to get hooked on old artists, but the point remains that we're not in a world where there are guitar heroes like in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and the numbers of people who become inspired enough to work at the instrument for long enough to achieve proficiency has consequently declined.
I learned in the mid 90s, probably inspired by Oasis, and related Britpop artists. Of course very quickly I was listening to older musicians like Page, Hendrix, and Clapton. Even then though my friends who played music and I were well aware that the age of guitar hero was over and that it was quirkier to want to play guitar music than it had been ten years before. There were no more Slashes on the horizon.
Music scenes seem likely to never be so one dimensional as they were in previous decades, because there's something for everyone online, and I can't see a time when Top of the Pops has three big rock bands playing on the same night ever again.
>Sorry, but my 17 year old son was so inspired by Mayer about 5 years ago that he invested a LOT of time learning how to play guitar and sing like him, and other artists with similar styles.
I'm sure we can find kids into Foxtrot too, but I don't think we'll see a Foxtrot revival.
Emulating Clapton, or Hendrix, or Page, etc was a mass phenomenon, which is what the "bunch" alludes to.
The last to inspire anything of that kind in a mass way would be someone like Jack White, and even that is was more subdued and fragmented that what it used to be.
As fragmented as the music world is now, there is still capacity for a groundswell movement I believe.
In keeping with the 'guitar sales are dying' theme - back in the 80's Fender Jazzmasters, Jaguars and Mustangs were pariah guitars. They were nothing more than the oddly shaped relics from the 'surf music' craze of the 50's and 60's.
Then Kurt Cobain played one on stage in the 90's. And not played like a guitar god either, but all of a sudden, the Jaguar and Mustang offset shaped guitars exploded into popularity again, across more than just grunge bands. My son I mentioned above actually plays a J Mascis Jazzmaster as his main stage electric guitar.
On another note, I really wish I could find the thread on a popular guitar forum that I participated in about 7 or 8 years ago. Back then I predicted that the vinyl market would have a small, if temporary blip again. This was before the whole Hipster fad became mainstream too. I was literally laughed out of that thread by other members claiming, similarly as you did in your reply, that vinyl was about as relevant as be-bop or spandex clad lead singers in music.
Well, we are sitting in the middle of a vinyl resurgence right now. It will never reach the numbers of the heady days, but there definitely is a renewed interest out there. I couldn't believe it last month when I went to my local electronics and whitegoods store and there were as many turntables in the HiFi section as boom boxes and bluetooth speaker systems.
You envy him for the available content and equipment, but he should envy kids in the 80s of the ease with which you could build a well-paying career if you played well. Nowadays you better produce songs on your laptop because the money earned with streaming might not suffice for 5 people. The trajectory of what is possible is just way flatter.
I think the trend will continue down for guitar playing, and for all musical instruments.
My theory is based on the fact that learning to play well is difficult and time consuming.
Popular music is by and large not the product of humans, moving muscles, energizing mass, thus generating sound waves. "Sounds" that we hear in pop music are in main generated digitally, usually with software instruments, in a computer.
Pop music is still uses the more traditional aspects of music composition, but only as a component of an ever expanding sonic palette.
Modern production is based increasingly on the ability to manipulate "sound" in a computer, and assemble it into listenable compositions.
The human voice remains one elements that is still generated by biological processes. But even the voice is subjected to increasing amounts of digital manipulation.
Learning to produce music in the modern style is also difficult, though in a different way from learning to play an instrument. Specifically, it is not a realtime process.
Given the finite amount of time and resources available to individuals, especially young people, it is inevitable that learning more modern pop production will be at the expense of investing in the extensive training needed to perform music in realtime.
This is compounded by the fact that the economic weight of the music industry is in the world of pop music, meaning the various strains of digitally created music. This is where the money comes in. People that want to make of a living doing music will increasingly need to be proficient in modern music production.
This creates a "virtuous cycle" which directs more resources towards this aspect of music, and a "vicious cycle" towards the traditional aspects of musical performance.
There are actually two significant technological forces that enable this structural shift in music creation. The first was the advent of recording, and mass distribution of music. It broke music away from the need to have human performers, playing in realtime, to hear music. This dramatically lowered the marginal cost of experiencing music.
The twin forces of time shifting and mass replication were turbocharged with the advent of digital audio. This, combined with the ever increased use of digital manipulated in music generation, amounts to a "singularity" in humans relationship with music. A line has been crossed that is permanent, it can never be uncrossed.
To be sure (ha ha), music will continue to be performed (and listened to) by live musicians, indefinitely. But it will be in the context of decreasing cultural influences.
The financial resources needed to support the creation of skilled musicians will continue to dwindle. This effect has been ongoing for decades in the world of orchestral music; now it has come for the world of all performed music.
One might think, what about live music? Won't there always be a demand for live, performed music? I don't think so. Or rather, it will continue the dramatic decline illustrated in the article by guitar sales.
Audiences seeme to respond just as well to shows that use essentially pre-recorded music. As long as there is a show of some kind, most of the music consuming population will not mind if the music heard at a show is "canned".
This makes me a bit sad, but ultimately the endeavors of human creativity will march on, inexorably charting new paths using the astonishing arsenal of software applications that are available these days at a very low cost.
The human voice remains one elements that is still generated by biological processes.
That's being fixed.[1] That's a Vocaloid, which is a 10 year old technology. You can buy the software for about $100, from Yahama.
"Just put in a melody and lyrics and your virtual singer will sing for you." Vocaloid still requires a cooperative live singer to train the system, but there are research papers which indicate that automatic singer model extraction is not far away.
Very valid remarks and that resonate a lot with digital photography as well. These days making a good picture is more about using photoshop and the like than actually making a good picture in one shot.
Given the finite amount of time and resources available to individuals, especially young people, it is inevitable that learning more modern pop production will be at the expense of investing in the extensive training needed to perform music in realtime.
And even if you have trained musicians, the are all kinds of social factors that can make things hard, especially in a pop/rock group: infighting, drug abuse, wanting a higher pay, band members that drop out mid-tour, etc.
I think Frank Zappa embodied this realisation: you can deal with all that shit or get a Synclavier [1] and get your ideas played by a full orchestra without the social hassles and pay.
Although I do like a lot of rock music, I think this is a fantastic development. It means that some musically brilliant kid can bootstrap their career in an attic without dealing with all the hurdles they would have to deal with before.
The thing is, if EDM's trained probably two generations of producers, DJs and listeners to distinguish the quality of beats based on inhuman, machinelike perfection, you can't really roll that back and try to groove with fallible humans and call that better. So 'canned' only means 'created properly, at leisure, to produce an artifact that's ideal'.
You can manipulate elaborate networks of machines and some of the trance guys are very into that, and it takes a different type of skillset. I've got some ideas on how to incorporate live musical performance into this kind of bionic music flow, but it's important to understand most people won't respond positively to a 'human element' tacked awkwardly onto a machine beat: you need very practiced humans to fit into a context like that, and you need very practiced humans to put together a 'Daft Punk' type human context that grooves as hard as the machines.
And if you work that hard on the human groove it leaves no time to be innovative in the tonal/arrangement zone that EDM absolutely requires, so you end up being like 'wow that's good retread funk' but the real progress is being made elsewhere, in areas you can't really reach.
It's interesting. But just as you can't undistort the electric guitar, you can't un-rhythm the quantized robot rhythm. I'm actually fascinated and delighted with what's been done in trance and psytrance: it's not JUST robot rhythm, it's a very carefully crafted and incredibly demanding thing with no margin for error. You can put a-rhythmic texture stuff across it all you like, but you just can't 'play an instrument' as part of that mix, the timing is way way too tight.
> you just can't 'play an instrument' as part of that mix, the timing is way way too tight.
Live drumming has been part of "live performance" of electronic music for decades now. The drummers follow a click track. It doesn't seem to bother audiences.
I agree, the timing is way too tight, only master level musicians can approach it. Though they can.
Having grown up listening, and producing, rock music, and related forms, I find the rigid timing of EDM to be unpleasant. Except for occasional dancing, where it seems to work well.
So I don't see it as "correct" timing, just a different feel.
There was a real shift once the music started being produced in the computer, and you could repeat, bit for bit, chunks of audio.
This contrasts heavily with a lot of the best Hip-Hop production of the 90s. I'm thinking of groups like Public Enemy. Because of the nature of the production tools, the timing on their sample based music is inherently "loose."
I have a theory that part of what makes music/art interesting is the ability to perceive how an artist engaged with the limitations of their medium.
Prior to DAWs, having music that was precise, and had precise repetition was hard. Artists often did try, and achieve, some very tight productions, but it was an effort. The effort happens at a boundary, which is what allows us to perceive it.
Now, instead of being hard, getting music to be precise, and to repeat sections exactly, is trivial. There's no challenge to inherently make sound repeat anymore. So it's easy to wind up with loop based music that is super boring, because it lacks the needed variation to keep it interesting. The more interesting producers of various flavors of EDM grapple with this challenge directly, and it is upon this boundary that we, the listener, can share in their expression!
Not necessarily saying the electric guitar isn't dying, but the economic argument isn't very convincing. There are a lot of guitars in the world now and we keep making more, consequently people aren't prepared to spend as much money on them. The people who are willing and able to spend $1000 on a new Les Paul or USA Strat are an aging generation for sure, but maybe their grandchildren are just playing guitars that cost $200 instead? You can get a pretty decent guitar for peanuts these days - I bought a perfectly playable strat copy for like $40 (actually 30GBP) off Ebay a while ago, with a (small, tinny) amp thrown in.
I've been expecting the death of the electric guitar since the '80s, but it seems surprisingly resilient.
Edit: In addition, although I'm incredibly old and don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, it seems to me that in the post White Stripes era playing shitty second user equipment is widely considered cooler than playing expensive new equipment.
Serious players will still spend serious money on stuff. I think it has a lot do with oversaturation of the market.
In the beginning, when White Stripes/Black keys was still regional and people were getting these unique sounds out of old, unwanted gear the cost was cheap. But that drove Silvertone's/Sears/etc prices out of the ballpark when enough people got the read on where that market was going.
Gibson and Fender are like the companies that sell exercise equipment: lots of people buy one with the best of intentions, and three to six months later it's collecting dust in the basement.
It's not hard to see why. Playing music is hard. The ratio of effort to reward is just terrible. I totally understand why people quit.
> It's not hard to see why. Playing music is hard. The ratio of effort to reward is just terrible. I totally understand why people quit.
Several years ago I worked for Fender on their in-house web development team in the marketing department; it was hell during the holiday turnaround, but there were good times, too. I was one of the few people there who didn't play an instrument. For myself, while I have always wanted to try to play a guitar (who hasn't, right?) - even with an employee discount I couldn't justify yet another expensive hobby (I already have too many expensive hobbies as it is).
You are spot on in saying "playing music is hard" and that the "ratio of effort to reward" is terrible. From what I understand, you throw playing an electric on top of that, and you are only going to have the most dedicated of people willing to keep it up after a few weeks.
Electric guitars are hella-hard on the hands and fingers; I learned quite a lot about guitars and electrics in particular during my time there. I never knew, for instance, that there were so many particulars about the instruments, that could have a great effect on whether you liked to play it or not (like the radius and width of the fretboard (?), for instance); that some of these parts were something you needed to take into account before you purchased a guitar, which is why online purchasing is something that people only did after they went to a store to try out the real instruments (in a way, Fender's online offerings were undercutting their dealer network, but there wasn't any way around that - Fender didn't want that to happen, but that's the way the the market worked).
Then you have the hardness of the strings on the fingers; you literally better be willing to bleed to learn to play an electric. Your hands will turn into claws as you have to build up your finger "muscles" - and there's also the pain of having to really stretch your hand around and apart. Everything I learned about learning made me think "this is something that could really put a damper on my career as a software developer"; it really wasn't for the faint-hearted.
I was let go after a couple of years in a downsizing, with a small severance package; not too long after I had moved on to another employer, Fender had decided to move their headquarters from Arizona back to California, to be closer to one of their main production facilities from what I understand.
I wish them luck, but they were already grousing about getting new players, especially younger ones, when I was there. I wish them luck, because even though I know I'm not likely to ever pick a guitar up and play it (and man, did I choose to lose the opportunity of a lifetime to learn the instrument while working for them), I still love to watch people play the instrument, and listen to the wonderful sounds it can make, in all its variations (oh, and don't get me started on the interesting sound of an electric mandolin!).
I'm sorry I couldn't understand from your comment, are you saying an electric is harder on your fingers as compared to an acoustic? If that's what you meant, I must disagree, and please read the full comment. Else, it's my misunderstanding of your comment, and I shall delete my reply.
Electric guitar's strings are far more easier on your fingers compared to a steel-stringed acoustic (not comparing classical guitars with nylon strings). Just about everything is easier to play on an electric, starting with barre chords to slides to bends.
Maybe one reason for more blistering fingers on an electric is because people are more likely to do stuff like slides and bends in solos whereas many people use an acoustic just for chords. But I assure you, if you attempt to do the same stuff on an acoustic, it's going to be far more taxing on your fingers.
Correct, I have been playing both electric and acoustic guitar for 25 years and what you say reflects my experience. Playing acoustic guitar is more difficult, requires more strength in the fingers and will give you calluses on the first months of playing.
You should try lighter gauge strings on your electric, and maybe lower the action (the distance between the strings and the frets). I generally find electric guitars much easier on my fingers than acoustics.
My opinion is that it's a good time for electric guitar buyers, because factory-made guitars are pretty good and relatively inexpensive. They also last a long time, which means there's a lot of great used guitars out there.
I don't think there will be any major technological advances that make factory-made guitars significantly cheaper and better than they are now. I think a more interesting direction is for guitars to become simpler and easier to build to the point where a non-expert can build one easily without a lot of exotic tools. (In a way, this has always been the case. Cigar box guitars are an old tradition; they're ridiculously easy to make, and can sound very good.)
If you think about it, a Fender Stratocaster is a very minimalistic design that was engineered to be easy to manufacture with 1950's woodshop tools (bandsaws, routers and jigs, etc).. Every Strat clone is a reproduction of a design made for that era of technology. When CNC machines came on the scene, a Strat shape isn't substantially easier to make than any other shape, but we keep using that shape because it works well and because of tradition.
A guitar design that's optimized to be easy for a non-professional to make with a CNC router and a laser cutter and some basic woodworking tools might look somewhat different. This could open the door to extreme customization -- one-of-a-kind harp guitars, unusual pickup arrangements, guitars with three strings and four frets, nine string guitars designed for 31-tone equal temperament or just tunings, or whatever you like.
I expect most guitar buyers will continue to buy traditional Fenders and Gibsons and so on with 6 strings and from 21 to 24 frets and a scale length of 25 inches, plus or minus half an inch. However, for those that want something different, there will always be a minority of tinkerers who build their guitar just the way they like it. That's where I think the most interesting advances are going to happen.
Fender and Gibson are iconic, classic brands. They'll never deviate from what they do; because when they do (look at the double-cutaway Les Paul they just tried to hawk) they get torn to pieces.
If anyone wants to innovate in the industry, they have to come out of nowhere. Strandberg is doing well at this, with concepts you mention. Kiesel/Carvin kinda is too. Line 6 almost did, but cheap-ified the digital transition which made way for Kemper and Fractal (boutique digital brands, LOL, so funny to say) to take the stage and actually change some minds.
Because we all play guitars designed 50-60 years ago we're naturally going to resist change.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadAs a guitarist, for some of my years professionally I can only say that this is mostly because you can emulate a lot of things today which normally required different guitars to bring out special sounds and because well most music today don't have guitar solos and thus it's hard to imagine guitar heroes coming out of music which doesn't put guitar in the front.
It's not just guitars though it's most other instruments. The real heroes today are the composers and producers.
Nuance.
The "art" of paintings, drawings, and music lives in the nuances and life of the art; the imperfections or subtle changes. Writing is an assembly of language characters to convey the art. The nuance is how those character elements are arranged and interpreted, and thus the means of doing so are unimportant. However, an errant bristle or subtle slide down a string give life and nuance to an art without explicitly standing out on its own.
I say this as a guitarist of more than three decades, and as a lover of great guitar playing. Rock and roll guitar solos are, by and large, the wankiest and most pointless waste of notes I can imagine. If we never get another, say Eruption, in exchange for no more awful weedly-deedly musical maelstroms I believe it is a more than fair trade. Even the good rock and roll guitar solos often aren't all that good compared to the song that surrounds them. (There are exceptions, and there are moments where the only thing that could have possibly worked was a wailing guitar...I'm thinking of something like the ending of The Chain by Fleetwood Mac...but that's not really a solo so much as a real and vital part of the song).
p.s. Aja is an absolute classic :)
How am I supposed to argue against a Vernon Reid solo? Vernon Reid is a brilliant musician. I've loved his playing since I was a kid. He was one of my earliest musical heroes, and unlike a lot of musicians I liked when I was a kid, his playing (and the music of Living Colour) holds up extremely well to adulthood listening, even as someone that's got years of musical training since the first time I heard it and loved it. I might even enjoy some of their songs more today because I understand the depth of it.
If we could have the geniuses without the wankers, I'd have a lot less disdain for guitar solos (though even the Vernon Reids of the world usually have a few pointless rambling solos on record out there). But, we don't. Every wanker who ever picked up a guitar has shared their gifts with anyone who'd listen...sometimes, the world has been unlucky enough for it to have been recorded and somehow become a hit, and now we all have to hear that goddamned Freebird solo every now and then, no matter how hard we might try to avoid it.
Wankers outnumber geniuses by orders of magnitude. The sheer weight of guitar solo mediocrity in this world is staggering.
So you are really back to what you like not an actual argument against guitar solos.
But, I disagree with your comparison to "design, UX, business, entrepreneurship, football, tennis, etc."
Those are the thing. You can't have design without design. You can have design without the blink tag. You can't have UX without UX, but you can have UX without mystery meat navigation. You can't have business without business, but you can have business without telesales. You can't have entrepreneurship without entrepreneurship, but you can have entrepreneurship without "Why should a programmer get so much equity? It's my idea." You can't have football without football, but you can have football without that John 3:14 guy (who is in prison for multiple kidnapping charges, BTW). You can't have tennis without tennis, but you can have tennis without the tennis community's infuriating refusal to acknowledge Serena as the GOAT. You can't have etc without etc, but you can have etc without people who misspell it "ect". There are things that make UX bad; mystery meat navigation is one of them. There are things that make songs bad; guitar solos are often one of them.
What I'm saying is that guitar solos are the unnecessary, usually unwanted, but too often present, part of an otherwise potentially good thing. They make songs worse in a lot of cases.
UX is not objective its contextual. Something being intuitive only means the context is understood.
So each to their own of course but a very weird comment.
Also, Jeff Beck's records are really interesting, good, entertaining, innovative solo guitar.
Too many guitar players think the solo is their time to show off how quick their fingers are without being hampered by the rest of the song. It may be impressive guitar skills, but it's crappy music. That doesn't mean that all solos should die, just that they shouldn't be entirely solo.
If you want to see a resurgence of guitar playing you can't start with stadium guitar gods, you have to have the guitar house-party hero, and the local club hero, and the regional tour hero. And they're out there. Go out and see them play -- a lot of them are incredible.
I grew up in and around Austin so I'm biased and a little spoiled but there's nothing like a live local show.
There are more than a few parallels between putting together a band and becoming a success and putting together a company and becoming a success.
Today, there are so many things competing for a kids' time - social media and messaging, mobile apps, video games, Netflix - that kids are choosing other activities instead of solitary, frustrating hours practicing guitar technique.
To become a proficient amateur-level guitarist, it takes around 2,000 hours of practice. That's equivalent to an hour a day, EVERY SINGLE DAY, for 5-1/2 years.
90% of kids learning guitar quit in the first 2 months (according to Fender) - most before they can play their first song well. The first few weeks are particularly brutal - it sounds horrible, it's painful on your fingers, and takes hours just get your first chord down.
In one sentence: it's just too hard to learn for the vast majority of people - and it's always been this way. But the difference is that these days, most kids would rather play Pokemon Go or Snapchat - and for kids who are musically inclined, it's so much easier and faster to become a DJ or producer than an instrumentalist, thanks to GarageBand and VirtualDJ and other easy-to-use software apps.
So a lot of musical kids are choosing that route. Why spend thousands of hours alone in your bedroom when you can be DJ'ing your first party in a few weeks?
So, how do we solve the problem of getting more kids to learn instruments, particularly the guitar? Some people have put lights on the fretboard (Fretlight, Gtar, Poputar) but in 25 years, that hasn't proven to make it much easier to learn. Others have gamified the experience (Rocksmith, Yousician) - but the learning curve is still extremely steep.
My company, Magic Instruments, has a different approach. We make it fundamentally easier to learn. Instead of starting by learning traditional guitar chord fingerings, we enable people to start playing chords using just one finger. This gives beginners an instantly positive musical experience - you can start strumming and playing your favorite songs from day one, and start jamming with others in a band in your first week. We then transition people over to learning traditional chords at their own pace.
We've seen 9 year old kids form a band in a few hours. Our hope is that we can inspire these kids to have a passion for practicing music, which will enable them to persevere for the thousands of hours of practice it takes to build the muscle memory to become guitarists.
True, just ask anyone who's ever had a teaching career in guitar (or music).
It's hard, everything about it is hard. And I'm not only saying that because I feel confident with my skills; it's quite true. Only with lots of time do callouses form where it doesn't hurt your fingers every time you play. Volume and feedback is another beast to manage. And if you're playing an acoustic, you really need some light gauge strings and good action to ever have hopes for that thing to not feel like a knife to your hands.
My method with beginners was simply to keep them entertained. So many potential Guitar Gods walk out because they go up against a Hal Leonard method book and have all the fun of guitar sucked out of them. If you can get them playing music they want to play; they're much more likely to continue playing it, even through pain, so that they can learn the fundamentals over time.
Your method works really well too, one-finger chords is a great way to get people playing the strummy music they like without the frustration of coordinating all the fingers. In the same light, it's why I've tuned my 4-year-olds guitar to an open D, so that she can "write music and sing" without having to worry about getting a sound of the guitar. If the interest is there, the perseverance will continue.
I mean, it's very common to play a 150+-year-old violin. I see what you're saying here. Electric guitar is so new, saturation of the market is only just happening.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/06/518780898/f...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621515
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-guitari...
Jack White
John Mayer
Are they on the list?
"fell in love with a girl" is an awesome song but not so challenging to play:
https://youtu.be/95HRZ2SLMJk
Seeing Jack White play live with the White Stripes was one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. Part of the beauty of their style is that it is built on very simple fundamentals - literally an enumerated set of rules - which form a platform on top of which Jack White can experiment with incredible virtuoso stuff (the best of which is obviously observed in the live performances).
You are 100% spot on though that Jack White isn't famous for this. In their popular singles really only the basic song frameworks, and not so much of the experimental stuff, are exposed. I think it might be some mixture of intentional artistic obscurity, and fitting to the 'radio market' for economic reasons, but either way if you're not familiar with them I really suggest giving all the albums (and some of the live shows e.g. Live Under Blackpool Lights) a deep listen through - really quite incredible stuff :-)
And Jack White, while not a "virtuoso" has mastery of the rock guitar language. It's not immediately obvious to everyone, but his technique is flawless.
https://youtu.be/skoZ7j5PBE8
It's along the same lines of saying "McDonalds is the fast food most people have heard of" or "BASIC is the most common programming language that everyone has heard of, so it must be the best".
Within each sub-culture, there are dedicated fans that go deeper and have a set of idols that they look up to. I can readily identify fellow guitar players (AND the genre of music they prefer) by mentioning names like Joe Bonamassa, Doyle Bramhall II, Brad Paisley etc. Blank stares just mean that the person is not involved in the guitar world at all. Someone who gets excited when I mention Paisley, I know is into the pop/country stuff.
I've heard people write off John Mayer as a 'non guitarist' even on guitar forums, but when I show them this clip [0] and tell them to come back to me when they have mastered playing that particular off beat riff and sing the melody at the same time, like he does, then I will gladly pay them $10. My money has been safe in my wallet for years.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DfQC5qHhbo
But I know it is possible, and not dubbed at all because I've seen and heard my own son do it as part of his repertoire now...
As far as a nice, tasteful guitar solo at 03:25... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG6GKh3NWkQ
So some things I find amazing:
https://youtu.be/v1c1SaG_gKA (with his huge fingers, playing one note with feeling you cannot copy)
https://youtu.be/9IrWyZ0KZuk
https://youtu.be/3l0BLog1rQY
Also blues but
https://youtu.be/G3LvhdFEOqs
I like bass (I only have a bass left anyway);
https://youtu.be/w_8NtbKsYuA
https://youtu.be/Kyw-Lere8Kc (did not watch this but any Steve Harris)
and drums
https://youtu.be/nC0QUrya3eA
https://youtu.be/LQqNJwa5lig
Like said my definition is surely different than yours. And a lot of it is taste.
A simple "Well, post a video of you doing that and I will Paypal you $10 as a token of appreciation" is just a simple challenge guaranteed to weed out anyone who is even remotely qualified to make such a call.
So far, none of the more trollish posters have ever come back with evidence of them being able to do it. Better players however (who usually NEVER talk smack about another player of Mayer's calibre, thus never have the challenge gauntlet thrown at their feet) have done so.
When I started to learn guitar several decades ago, I would learn guitar solos off of records by slowing them down to 16 rpm (old turntables could do that) and moving the needle back repeatedly to listen to tricky phrases over and over again. It was frustrating, time consuming, and hell on on the records.
Today, for just about any popular and many obscure guitar-oriented songs, you can find a Youtube video where someone breaks it down note by note and chord by chord. There are all kinds of resources online for learning scales and theory and online communities where an aspiring guitarist can connect with thousands of other like-minded people.
I would like to see guitar-oriented rock and roll make a comeback. The heavy metal subculture is thriving without any mainstream radio airplay to speak of, but aside from that, there's just not that much going on.
If I see a local rock band play in a bar these days, about 80% of the time it will be all middle-aged men who have been playing for decades. Some of them are even retirement age.
This made you a much better player than just looking up a video or tab though.
>I would like to see guitar-oriented rock and roll make a comeback. The heavy metal subculture is thriving without any mainstream radio airplay to speak of, but aside from that, there's just not that much going on.
> If I see a local rock band play in a bar these days, about 80% of the time it will be all middle-aged men who have been playing for decades. Some of them are even retirement age.
Sounds to me like you aren't looking very hard. In my city, I can find current, young rock bands playing at multiple venues weekly. Some of my favorite albums have come out since 2010.
Bar bands are dying because the economics don't make sense anymore for bar owners. Why dedicate a ton of space to 3-5 people with tons of equipment when you can just get one guy with a laptop. The latter is probably cheaper, too. In my area, most people don't go to bars for music anyway outside of places like dedicated jazz or piano bars.
I disagree. Not about the "just looking up a tab" bit, but about the general gist of your argument that "the hard way teaches you better". Easier access to knowledge is always better when you want to learn things, and the internet is absolutely the best access to knowledge that has ever existed.
I've been playing guitar since long before the internet made it easy to find a tab or chord chart for almost any song. I learned the "hard way". I've taught guitar lessons (also before all the modern options for learning came along), took college level music classes (in high school and in college), etc. All that knowledge was hard-earned, and I appreciate the time and effort it took to learn, but if I could go back in time and give my twelve-year-old self Rock Band and the Internet I sure as hell would.
To put it into perspective, in addition to guitar I tinkered with drums even back in high school and college (though I never had my own real drumset until adulthood). When I played in bands, I'd always push for at least one song where we'd switch it up so I could play drums for a little bit. I wasn't good at drums, but it was fun and I could hold down the rhythm for a simple song. As a grown up, I started playing Rock Band. Damned if my drumming didn't go through the roof in terms of quality and confidence. And, it happened fast, too. Within a few months of playing Rock Band maybe three or four hours a week and occasionally watching a video on YouTube about problem areas, I was a completely different drummer.
What I'm trying to say is that educational tools matter and the tools provided by technology today are incredibly better than they were when those of us over, say 30, were learning to play.
Not only that, I can browse YouTube and watch hours of instruction from professionals in any field. I've watched master classes on composition for orchestra by people who do it professionally, for example. I had that kind of access to really knowledge pros for a brief window when I went to a high school for the arts and to a lesser degree during college, but after that and until the Internet, it was something I had to get from books. Learning from professionals who're speaking directly to you in a video is way more valuable than slowing down a record and listening to it a hundred times (though there's value in ear-training, the tools for that are better now than ever) or reading a book about the subject.
Anyway, the point of my rambling is: Don't let nostalgia for how it used to be to cloud your view of how much better it is today. There will likely be younger prodigies in every musical genre than ever before because of the Internet (and Rock Band and apps that let you practice your intervals, etc.) if kids still want to learn how to play instruments. I think about folks like Lorde; she was writing fully formed, mature, and extremely competent, music at a ridiculously young age. I doubt it could have happened without tech.
And, I don't know if it's awful that kids may spend time learning to play other things rather than guitar, drums, bass, and piano; maybe they're learning sequencers and samplers and such instead. It may just be different, not worse. I learned a lot about music making mods in a tracker on my Amiga back when I was a teenager. It allows one to understand the whole song in ways that banging it out by yourself on an acoustic guitar might not.
I try not to let nostalgia cloud my appreciation of art that's happening today. And, there's a lot of great art happening, in music, too, including some real rock and roll played on real instruments. Pop music has never been about the guitar, even though the guitar was ever-present in pop music for a few decades. So, it shouldn't be all that surprising that pop music isn't going to cling to the guitar; all pop really cares about is pretty fa...
That said, it seems you had a lot on your chest and it feels good to get it off
We don't tell beginning programmers, "Go read the Linux kernel, it's the best way to learn." And, we shouldn't tell beginning musicians, "Go listen to an incredibly complex work recorded on 24+ tracks, with dozens of overdubs, and pitch-correction, and compression, performed by professional musicians with years of experience, and copy them."
I struggled when learning stuff as a kid, for years. I did it, but it wasn't productive practice. If I'd had competent ear-training, interval training, and sight-singing instruction at the beginning of my musical life, I would have found learning from records by ear much easier and much more productive within a year.
Kids today have access to those resources, even if they aren't lucky enough to go to a school for music. Will they do it? I dunno. I did tedious stuff even when more fun stuff was available; I had video games, friends in the neighborhood, a bike and skateboard to ride, etc., but I banged away at my guitar, making slow progress.
Making it less tedious, by making it more productive, seems like it's more likely to work out for more aspiring musicians. Learning by ear, when you don't have a framework of musical knowledge to hang it on, is among the most tedious things I can remember from learning to play guitar...and, it wasn't nearly as productive as it could have been, in terms of learning.
Easy access to information is not always better. A number of reasons: information had easily isn't valued; information that requires effort teaches determination and self sufficiency that will always be required when you get to the limit of easily available info; an abundance of info can be daunting (information overload) and demoralising. Finally, there's less sense of achievement when you e.g. read about something rather than figure it out, and a lower probability of innovation from not knowing the current "best practices".
I still think easy access is better, but mostly because I'm grown up with hard won learning skills. I'm less certain that easy access develops the right kinds of skills. Primarily because not everyone is a genius with exceptional talent; some of us need skills too.
I think about folks like Lorde; she was writing fully formed, mature, and extremely competent, music at a ridiculously young age. I doubt it could have happened without tech.
Kate Bush was 19 when she released Wuthering Heights (and had been writing for years before that).
Stevie Wonder signed to Motown aged 11. Not sure when he started writing his own stuff in earnest.
[Edit to add, from Wikipedia:
In 1961, when aged 11, Wonder sang his own composition, "Lonely Boy", to Ronnie White of the Miracles; White then took Wonder and his mother to an audition at Motown
First self-penned number 1 hit aged 13. Wow!]
I've been comparing Lorde to Kate Bush for ages now, so I agree with you on that comparison (and I'm a huge Stevie Wonder fan, including his childhood songs..."Up Tight", recorded when he was 15, is among my favorites to holler along with while cooking dinner). But...there's gonna be a lot more of those kids. I'd bet there already are and I just don't follow pop music.
I can name maybe a half dozen super-talented kids that have come along in the pre-internet age; they were exceptional. But, I think they'll be less the exception as time goes on...partly due to tech.
YouTube recommended Grace Vanderwaal to me just last night. Her music isn't really my thing, but it's hard to argue she's not stunningly skilled for her age.
Not so much tech per se (although I also like your point about apps for music practice and other things) but the social changes and prosperity that are partly driven by tech.
That could be part of it. Demystifying something erodes some of the appeal.
How many people have the patience for that? Particularly in Generation Internet Points Right Now?
Search for guitar licks and chord sweeps, and follow a few different branches of linked playlists offered up in the sidebar.
a few examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ipv_l7KoSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18yiVSX7oQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK5P94toDkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBztSKccrDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY63_QR6toA
Plus, I think the mention of all the boutique brands at NAMM helps with this. We all can't afford a magnificent '55 strat, but with far fewer dollars d'Pergo (or some other amazing strat perfectionist) can make something equally as stunning.
And, with enough time these instruments will hit the market again. When enough of them do; we'll make them affordable again; once everyone is play 7+ strings and doesn't want anything to do with 50's guitar technology.
I bet we'll see that with amplifiers, first.
There are obviously various reasons for this: 1. Technologically the instrument ran its course. While the tech was still innovative in the 90s with the new digital effects, it hasn't changed much in 20 years. 2. Electronic music however has brought in a lot of new sounds that gave pop music a fresh start in the 2000s 3. People seem to be more interested in 2 things: dancing and lyrics. You could write songs with totally inintelligible lyrics and a good solo, and you'd have a hit. I don't think that's true anymore. Similarly a solo kind of ruins the dancing.
I think die hard rock fans need to get over it, guitar heroes are not coming back any time soon. I don't think it means the electric guitar is going to die. It still is an amazingly cool instrument. But, it means that your average kid may not want to try to play that "ten years after" intro anymore.
Keep it heavy, and keep it coming \m/ (sorry hn)
Guitar music is I'd say evergreen, but hasn't been the hottest thing for much longer.
(Maybe less so by the late 90s, so maybe I'm a few years old than you :)
Source: Played baritone sax in an early 2000's ska band
Isn't it the heroes in any field that inspire others to take it up? Or are you saying that there can never be another guitar hero again who will be good enough to inspire another generation? That would be naive, wouldn't it, considering how awesome the electric guitar is?
If you listen to the whole of their albums and not only the commercial hits, it's a really solid rock band.
Now give me some of the other examples of rock bands that regularly make it to the top 10.
The Black Keys are good, but maybe not that mainstream.
The best show I've ever seen was Avenged Sevenfold, which is definitely in the metal niche. But I'll never forget when they had a break in the middle of the show, and their lead guitarist came out and just solo'd for a while. Incredible talent.
Like the other commenter said, Foo Fighters would have made a better example. Maybe Coldplay. Chili Peppers. Look, I understand that art is subjective, but at the end of the day, some art is less subjective than others. Nickelback deserves their spot in the pantheon of groups who get shit on whenever you mention them.
[0]https://headlineplanet.com/home/2017/06/20/nickelbacks-feed-...
I'm not a fan because they are unoriginal and re-use the same template in their production software for multiple songs.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4258547
They also seemed to take a few to many liberties with their 'inspiration', e.g.
Hero - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuX0RdK0HF8
vs
Kiss From A Rose - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yivLt9cTaio
The melodies are a little too close to gain my respect. It's like they were tasked with making music for a Batman movie and started browsing the previous movie scores.
The right kind of solo can accelerate the dancing. 80s pop had it all figured out in this regard: some of the best dance music ever made while also being phenomenal pop music.
This is... whilst not exactly incorrect, it's not the whole truth either. The article touched a little bit on this with the robotic tuner thing, but didn't fully explain why.
In my experience partaking in internet guitar forums over the decades, the vast majority of guitar players are really conservative. Extremely conservative. Especially people who mostly are into Fender/Gibson/PRS. They shun every new material (graphite/carbon fiber necks/fretboards), even if it has clear advantages (torsion/tensile/impact strength, weight, temperature/humidity insensitivity), often with unscientific emotional-based hand-waving like "it sounds too cold".
Headless guitars also stayed niche, even though they have clear advantages (lighter, shorter, more well-balanced, can't break your headstock off — a quite common way to damage your guitar).
It also took decades for 7-string guitars not to get scoffed at. The first 15+ years you had a lot of guitarists making fun of people with 7-string guitars. After they became somewhat accepted, 8-string guitars had an easier time, mind you.
People are very sceptical of True Temperament (http://www.truetemperament.com/) as well, believing that you can't perform string bending (you can, it doesn't really feel any different), and decided that to be the truth without even bothering to try.
There are still many areas on the guitar you can improve and innovate (and some stuff out there already that primarily Ned Steinberger showed us in the 80s could (and IMO should) be standard), but people want fragile, heavy and climate-sensitive "tonewood" in their guitars. They want soft brass bridges. They want maintenance-heavy soft "nickel/silver" (actually brass and nickel) frets. They want headstocks.
Maybe these old people in the article (I'm 37 so I'm one of them as well, I guess) are the problem, and when younger people that don't revere the word "vintage" so much can usher in the era of the truly modern guitar that Ned Steinberger has shown us glimpses of? One can only hope.
It's already happening. A huge proportion of young guitarists are playing metal, which is a hugely progressive scene in terms of technology. The coolest young guitarists are playing Strandberg Bodens, Kiesel Vaders and the weird and wonderful stuff from Ibanez's Iron Label. 7, 8 and 9 strings, fanned frets, headless, active electronics, carbon and titanium reinforcement, it's all on the table. They're abandoning valve amps in favour of Helix, AxeFX and Bias. They couldn't give a toss about Hendrix and Clapton - they revere the likes of Tosin Abasi and Rob Scallion.
The baby boomers have disproportionate influence because they've got a ton of disposable income, but big changes are afoot in the guitar business.
The future of guitar looks very much like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMbW4sptVnE
Wooden body, wooden neck, wooden fretboard, and in the case of Strandberg, Ibanez AANJ-style neck joint and silver/nickel frets (Carvin/Kiesel have neck-through and SS frets as options, or at least used to have). Most, if not all parts, you can get from Warmoth/All Parts, no custom designed parts there, apart from maybe the Strandberg's string fastening mechanism/headpiece, but that one is pretty crude, to be honest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR01zIjj4_w
Line6 has created the Variax that uses the piezo signal of each string to model other stringed instruments and their electronic system (and even things like banjos and resonator guitars)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHJaL6g6Jc
and now even Music Man is adopting steel frets lately. Guitars evolve slowly but they do evolve.
There are merits to both the neck-through construction used on the Kiesel Vader and the bolt-on joint used by Strandberg. Through-necks are arguably more stable, but bolt-ons are far easier to maintain and repair.
The Strandberg neck profile is anything but conventional:
https://strandbergguitars.com/strandberg-endurneck/
There's nothing terribly wrong with wood construction. It's aesthetically pleasing, relatively economical and more than strong, stiff and stable enough when used appropriately.
Really? Are people using their guitars as hammers? I think it's pretty damn hard to break a headstock off. Much more common damage to a guitar is denting the frets, distorting the neck or busting the tuning pegs. I'd put "breaking off the headstock" as the 99th percentile of common ways people materially damage their guitar.
https://www.google.com/search?q=gibson+broken+headstock&tbm=...
http://jacksinstrumentservices.com/why-do-les-paul-headstock...
Tuning pegs don't really tend to fail. Unless you have those "vintage" Les Paul-style ones (yuck), but they're easy to replace.
Frets get worn down, necks tend to bow or arch, or at worst warp (more seldom). Fret recrowning/redressing, truss rod adjustment and fretboard leveling are part of the regular maintenance of a long-lived electric guitar.
Now, headstock breakages are usually pretty easy to fix for a luthier, and the result is stronger, since a glued joint is stronger, just not as strong as a glued scarf joint.
Graphite and carbon fiber has superior properties in some respect, but substituting carbon fiber for wood doesn't necessarily make the guitar sound or look better or improve playability. Compared to acoustic instruments, electric guitars are low maintenance and durable. People in very humid or very dry environments might prefer carbon fiber to wood, but for most of us, wood is fine.
Robotuners similarly don't solve a significant problem that most players have, and they're complex and probably costly to make and introduce a battery to a guitar that didn't need one before. The convenience of automatic tuners probably aren't worth the costs.
Headless guitars similarly don't solve a particular problem, as far as I can tell. I expect to be able to rest a guitar on leg and not have it tip one way or the other while I'm playing. Most guitars balance fine with a proper headstock. I haven't tried a Steinberger, maybe they're really great guitars, but there's no particular reason for me to expect that I would enjoy playing a headless guitar more than a "normal" guitar. (Note: I have built headless cigar box guitars [1], and I kind of like the design, but that's a bit different than a full-size electric.)
True Temperament is more interesting because that actually is addressing a real problem, sort of. Electric guitars are pretty bad when it comes to tuning, but the problem isn't so much intonation, the bigger problem is that 12-tone equal temperament is a compromise -- you can sound okay in every key (12-TET) or you can sound really good in one particular key (just intonation), but you can't have both. (The latter alternative leads you to some interesting looking fingerboards [2].)
I would be more interested in the TT guitars if they were focusing on temperament rather than intonation errors. (I suspect they may actually be doing that, but their marketing material says they're correcting intonation. I'm skeptical that any normal guitars would need such extreme corrections just to play in exact 12-TET unless the action is set unreasonably high.)
TT also has the problem that normal frets can be repaired or replaced by any competent luthier using ordinary guitar tools, but I wouldn't even know you would do a fret dress on TT guitar. Maybe you'd need a special crowning file that goes around corners or something?
I think there are some ways that the electric guitar could be improved, but to some degree, I think unscientific emotional hand-wavy reasons can be a better guide to making an instrument people want than to approach the problem by using science to optimize specific criteria based on some untested assumption that optimizing that criteria will make the guitar better.
[1] http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/cbg/neck2.jpg
[2] http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/CAM00441.jpg
I disagree. The guitar isn't gone yet, and even if there are newer instruments, the guitar will be with us for a long time.
And there's more to music than dancing. Even if guitars will be playing second fiddle to computers, they'll remain relevant just like violins are still relevant (and perhaps making a comeback in the hands of people like Lindsey Stirling). Besides, I need guitars in my dance music. Dance music shouldn't be sterile. The dirty, distorted sound of a guitar gives my the energy to dance in a way that an electronic beat does not.
DUPE ( 2 days ago) => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14617079
Therefore we'll leave this post up, but merge the previous comments in to unify the threads.
Pretty cool! I did not know that you could do that.
Sorry, but my 17 year old son was so inspired by Mayer about 5 years ago that he invested a LOT of time learning how to play guitar and sing like him, and other artists with similar styles. [0]
He is now building quite a steady music career even while finishing high school (he was booked for 3 gigs just this weekend).
He is also interested in past guitar heroes such as Eddie Van Halen, Mark Knopfler, Angus Young, Andy Summers etc. and spends a lot of time going through 'older' stuff to learn more.
While he has a lot of natural ability, there is no arguing that it takes a LOT of hard work. He practices for a minimum of 2 hours a day - sometimes even up to 4 or 5 hours, not counting gigging time. We often have to call him away from his guitar to do school work or eat.
I envy the time he lives in though - I started playing when I was 15, back in the early 80's and it was really difficult to find decent gear, and the only way to learn anything new was to try and figure it out by ear or find someone else who knew to teach you. Nowadays, the proliferation of Youtube and other online learning resources, the huge selection of reasonably priced gear, and things like software and hardware modelling amps mean players can dial in ANY sound they want under any situation. Unheard of in my time.
It just needs kids who are interested enough to turn it into their passion.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJK-R3HGG09uGBRDs7fhpZw
This article was probably right, but it's so focused on the good ole days that it's sad. Times change. Art changes. Diplo and TSwift are as legit as SRV and Dylan. Rock on.
When my son said he wanted to learn to play that song solo, I told him it would be nearly impossible. But he learned it and plays it just like John does. I have been playing for > 30 years and there is no way I could do that! :)
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DfQC5qHhbo
https://youtu.be/qfNUY8IrJi8
https://youtu.be/-B7btsk6ASE?t=1m
Or Mike Dawes, same deal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYksCAhjthk
Most of the people Candyrat Records sign, really.
Tommy Emmanuel is another one, and one of the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPkQn5nDTZs
First, if they are, then that's part of the focus of the article. That guitar and guitar rock is waning -- and surely Diplo and TSwift are not bringing it back.
Second, no Diplo and TSwift are not as legit as SRV and Dylan. Not because they are different genres, but because they are inferior artistically (regardless of genre).
They might be equally entertaining or whatever, in a "it's a free country and I can listen to whatever I like", but artistically they're not even close (and SRV is not in the same league for cultural impact as Dylan anyway).
It's not about the past. There are contemporary electronic, edm, r&b, hip hop etc artists that are on par with SRV and Dylan on creative merits, but TSwift and Diplo are not them -- like the Monkeys weren't as good as The Beatles, and Frankie Avalon was no Elvis.
Because populism doesn't say much. One can find tens of millions supporting any kind of trash in all areas of public life (wanna talk about politics for example?).
Informed opinions matter more than uninformed ones, and we're beyond the point that the merit of Taylor Swift vs Dylan (or sugary constructed commercial pop for quick consumption and singing songwriting that defined a generation and then some and made it to the Nobel) is seriously argued.
Dylan himself probably never thought he'd be as important a musician as his heroes - Elvis, Little Richard, etc. but now they are all in the same conversation.
music is fun. the expected almost never happens.
It feels great. It's called culture, and being aware of it, not a blind consumer of what tastes good (McDonalds tastes good too).
>there are no absolutes in music (as an art form)
No, but human culture has, and always had, a way to prfioritize what's important and what's not besides mere consumption or influence (crap has also influenced a lot of imitators).
>Dylan himself probably never thought he'd be as important a musician as his heroes - Elvis, Little Richard, etc. but now they are all in the same conversation.
That's irrelevant though, because it's not the artist that determines their own worth but their work, its quality, and its cultural impact.
>music is fun. the expected almost never happens.
Except with TSwift, Diplo and co songs. Where it almost always happens.
oh please, elitism isn't culture it's a perspective. you have a perspective about the things you like which is no more or less valid than anyone else's. no matter how enlightened you think you are when it comes to music I promise there is an entire subculture that finds your tastes closer to "blind consumption" than "true music fan". 100% relative.
>No, but human culture has, and always had, a way to prfioritize what's important and what's not besides mere consumption or influence (crap has also influenced a lot of imitators).
please, please describe for me this mechanism by which "human culture" has prioritized important art. I would love to hear what unassailable framework you think draws a line between "important" and "crap".
This a hundred times. If you look at YouTube views, Diplo is orders of magnitude ahead. Do you think YouTube is going anywhere?
So, if anything, the read is indicating the other way.
Emphasis on a bunch of kids. As someone who likes guitar it pains me to say that this seems true.
My son is 11, in a (very) music-heavy school. When I was his age I think almost every boy (and some girls) in my class learnt guitar - it was the instrument.
In my son's class I think there are 2 learning it.
The guitar will never die, but the popularity isn't what it was.
Not saying that will be the case in every instance, but I do remember the actual video that got BOTH my sons into music was an "AC/DC Live In Germany" video that I put on TV when they were both toddlers. They were duck walking all over the house and begging me to put the DVD on over and over again until I (who am a huge Angus Young fan) was thoroughly sick of it. Many years later, I took them to an AC/DC live concert in Sydney, during their "Black Ice" tour.
Exposing kids to such raw energy and musicianship on a semi regular basis is critical IMO. What they don't see, they cannot be inspired by. I also know that they won't always be inspired by what I like, and that is fine. Both my sons went through a 'thrash metal' phase, which wasn't my favourite, but it still formed a large part of their musical journey.
I learned in the mid 90s, probably inspired by Oasis, and related Britpop artists. Of course very quickly I was listening to older musicians like Page, Hendrix, and Clapton. Even then though my friends who played music and I were well aware that the age of guitar hero was over and that it was quirkier to want to play guitar music than it had been ten years before. There were no more Slashes on the horizon.
Music scenes seem likely to never be so one dimensional as they were in previous decades, because there's something for everyone online, and I can't see a time when Top of the Pops has three big rock bands playing on the same night ever again.
I'm sure we can find kids into Foxtrot too, but I don't think we'll see a Foxtrot revival.
Emulating Clapton, or Hendrix, or Page, etc was a mass phenomenon, which is what the "bunch" alludes to.
The last to inspire anything of that kind in a mass way would be someone like Jack White, and even that is was more subdued and fragmented that what it used to be.
In keeping with the 'guitar sales are dying' theme - back in the 80's Fender Jazzmasters, Jaguars and Mustangs were pariah guitars. They were nothing more than the oddly shaped relics from the 'surf music' craze of the 50's and 60's.
Then Kurt Cobain played one on stage in the 90's. And not played like a guitar god either, but all of a sudden, the Jaguar and Mustang offset shaped guitars exploded into popularity again, across more than just grunge bands. My son I mentioned above actually plays a J Mascis Jazzmaster as his main stage electric guitar.
On another note, I really wish I could find the thread on a popular guitar forum that I participated in about 7 or 8 years ago. Back then I predicted that the vinyl market would have a small, if temporary blip again. This was before the whole Hipster fad became mainstream too. I was literally laughed out of that thread by other members claiming, similarly as you did in your reply, that vinyl was about as relevant as be-bop or spandex clad lead singers in music.
Well, we are sitting in the middle of a vinyl resurgence right now. It will never reach the numbers of the heady days, but there definitely is a renewed interest out there. I couldn't believe it last month when I went to my local electronics and whitegoods store and there were as many turntables in the HiFi section as boom boxes and bluetooth speaker systems.
My theory is based on the fact that learning to play well is difficult and time consuming.
Popular music is by and large not the product of humans, moving muscles, energizing mass, thus generating sound waves. "Sounds" that we hear in pop music are in main generated digitally, usually with software instruments, in a computer.
Pop music is still uses the more traditional aspects of music composition, but only as a component of an ever expanding sonic palette.
Modern production is based increasingly on the ability to manipulate "sound" in a computer, and assemble it into listenable compositions.
The human voice remains one elements that is still generated by biological processes. But even the voice is subjected to increasing amounts of digital manipulation.
Learning to produce music in the modern style is also difficult, though in a different way from learning to play an instrument. Specifically, it is not a realtime process.
Given the finite amount of time and resources available to individuals, especially young people, it is inevitable that learning more modern pop production will be at the expense of investing in the extensive training needed to perform music in realtime.
This is compounded by the fact that the economic weight of the music industry is in the world of pop music, meaning the various strains of digitally created music. This is where the money comes in. People that want to make of a living doing music will increasingly need to be proficient in modern music production.
This creates a "virtuous cycle" which directs more resources towards this aspect of music, and a "vicious cycle" towards the traditional aspects of musical performance.
There are actually two significant technological forces that enable this structural shift in music creation. The first was the advent of recording, and mass distribution of music. It broke music away from the need to have human performers, playing in realtime, to hear music. This dramatically lowered the marginal cost of experiencing music.
The twin forces of time shifting and mass replication were turbocharged with the advent of digital audio. This, combined with the ever increased use of digital manipulated in music generation, amounts to a "singularity" in humans relationship with music. A line has been crossed that is permanent, it can never be uncrossed.
To be sure (ha ha), music will continue to be performed (and listened to) by live musicians, indefinitely. But it will be in the context of decreasing cultural influences.
The financial resources needed to support the creation of skilled musicians will continue to dwindle. This effect has been ongoing for decades in the world of orchestral music; now it has come for the world of all performed music.
One might think, what about live music? Won't there always be a demand for live, performed music? I don't think so. Or rather, it will continue the dramatic decline illustrated in the article by guitar sales.
Audiences seeme to respond just as well to shows that use essentially pre-recorded music. As long as there is a show of some kind, most of the music consuming population will not mind if the music heard at a show is "canned".
This makes me a bit sad, but ultimately the endeavors of human creativity will march on, inexorably charting new paths using the astonishing arsenal of software applications that are available these days at a very low cost.
That's being fixed.[1] That's a Vocaloid, which is a 10 year old technology. You can buy the software for about $100, from Yahama. "Just put in a melody and lyrics and your virtual singer will sing for you." Vocaloid still requires a cooperative live singer to train the system, but there are research papers which indicate that automatic singer model extraction is not far away.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhYaX01NOfA
And even if you have trained musicians, the are all kinds of social factors that can make things hard, especially in a pop/rock group: infighting, drug abuse, wanting a higher pay, band members that drop out mid-tour, etc.
I think Frank Zappa embodied this realisation: you can deal with all that shit or get a Synclavier [1] and get your ideas played by a full orchestra without the social hassles and pay.
Although I do like a lot of rock music, I think this is a fantastic development. It means that some musically brilliant kid can bootstrap their career in an attic without dealing with all the hurdles they would have to deal with before.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synclavier
You can manipulate elaborate networks of machines and some of the trance guys are very into that, and it takes a different type of skillset. I've got some ideas on how to incorporate live musical performance into this kind of bionic music flow, but it's important to understand most people won't respond positively to a 'human element' tacked awkwardly onto a machine beat: you need very practiced humans to fit into a context like that, and you need very practiced humans to put together a 'Daft Punk' type human context that grooves as hard as the machines.
And if you work that hard on the human groove it leaves no time to be innovative in the tonal/arrangement zone that EDM absolutely requires, so you end up being like 'wow that's good retread funk' but the real progress is being made elsewhere, in areas you can't really reach.
It's interesting. But just as you can't undistort the electric guitar, you can't un-rhythm the quantized robot rhythm. I'm actually fascinated and delighted with what's been done in trance and psytrance: it's not JUST robot rhythm, it's a very carefully crafted and incredibly demanding thing with no margin for error. You can put a-rhythmic texture stuff across it all you like, but you just can't 'play an instrument' as part of that mix, the timing is way way too tight.
Live drumming has been part of "live performance" of electronic music for decades now. The drummers follow a click track. It doesn't seem to bother audiences.
Having grown up listening, and producing, rock music, and related forms, I find the rigid timing of EDM to be unpleasant. Except for occasional dancing, where it seems to work well.
So I don't see it as "correct" timing, just a different feel.
There was a real shift once the music started being produced in the computer, and you could repeat, bit for bit, chunks of audio.
This contrasts heavily with a lot of the best Hip-Hop production of the 90s. I'm thinking of groups like Public Enemy. Because of the nature of the production tools, the timing on their sample based music is inherently "loose."
I have a theory that part of what makes music/art interesting is the ability to perceive how an artist engaged with the limitations of their medium.
Prior to DAWs, having music that was precise, and had precise repetition was hard. Artists often did try, and achieve, some very tight productions, but it was an effort. The effort happens at a boundary, which is what allows us to perceive it.
Now, instead of being hard, getting music to be precise, and to repeat sections exactly, is trivial. There's no challenge to inherently make sound repeat anymore. So it's easy to wind up with loop based music that is super boring, because it lacks the needed variation to keep it interesting. The more interesting producers of various flavors of EDM grapple with this challenge directly, and it is upon this boundary that we, the listener, can share in their expression!
I've been expecting the death of the electric guitar since the '80s, but it seems surprisingly resilient.
Edit: In addition, although I'm incredibly old and don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, it seems to me that in the post White Stripes era playing shitty second user equipment is widely considered cooler than playing expensive new equipment.
Serious players will still spend serious money on stuff. I think it has a lot do with oversaturation of the market.
In the beginning, when White Stripes/Black keys was still regional and people were getting these unique sounds out of old, unwanted gear the cost was cheap. But that drove Silvertone's/Sears/etc prices out of the ballpark when enough people got the read on where that market was going.
It's not hard to see why. Playing music is hard. The ratio of effort to reward is just terrible. I totally understand why people quit.
Several years ago I worked for Fender on their in-house web development team in the marketing department; it was hell during the holiday turnaround, but there were good times, too. I was one of the few people there who didn't play an instrument. For myself, while I have always wanted to try to play a guitar (who hasn't, right?) - even with an employee discount I couldn't justify yet another expensive hobby (I already have too many expensive hobbies as it is).
You are spot on in saying "playing music is hard" and that the "ratio of effort to reward" is terrible. From what I understand, you throw playing an electric on top of that, and you are only going to have the most dedicated of people willing to keep it up after a few weeks.
Electric guitars are hella-hard on the hands and fingers; I learned quite a lot about guitars and electrics in particular during my time there. I never knew, for instance, that there were so many particulars about the instruments, that could have a great effect on whether you liked to play it or not (like the radius and width of the fretboard (?), for instance); that some of these parts were something you needed to take into account before you purchased a guitar, which is why online purchasing is something that people only did after they went to a store to try out the real instruments (in a way, Fender's online offerings were undercutting their dealer network, but there wasn't any way around that - Fender didn't want that to happen, but that's the way the the market worked).
Then you have the hardness of the strings on the fingers; you literally better be willing to bleed to learn to play an electric. Your hands will turn into claws as you have to build up your finger "muscles" - and there's also the pain of having to really stretch your hand around and apart. Everything I learned about learning made me think "this is something that could really put a damper on my career as a software developer"; it really wasn't for the faint-hearted.
I was let go after a couple of years in a downsizing, with a small severance package; not too long after I had moved on to another employer, Fender had decided to move their headquarters from Arizona back to California, to be closer to one of their main production facilities from what I understand.
I wish them luck, but they were already grousing about getting new players, especially younger ones, when I was there. I wish them luck, because even though I know I'm not likely to ever pick a guitar up and play it (and man, did I choose to lose the opportunity of a lifetime to learn the instrument while working for them), I still love to watch people play the instrument, and listen to the wonderful sounds it can make, in all its variations (oh, and don't get me started on the interesting sound of an electric mandolin!).
I'd hate to see all of that disappear...
Electric guitar's strings are far more easier on your fingers compared to a steel-stringed acoustic (not comparing classical guitars with nylon strings). Just about everything is easier to play on an electric, starting with barre chords to slides to bends.
Maybe one reason for more blistering fingers on an electric is because people are more likely to do stuff like slides and bends in solos whereas many people use an acoustic just for chords. But I assure you, if you attempt to do the same stuff on an acoustic, it's going to be far more taxing on your fingers.
I don't think there will be any major technological advances that make factory-made guitars significantly cheaper and better than they are now. I think a more interesting direction is for guitars to become simpler and easier to build to the point where a non-expert can build one easily without a lot of exotic tools. (In a way, this has always been the case. Cigar box guitars are an old tradition; they're ridiculously easy to make, and can sound very good.)
If you think about it, a Fender Stratocaster is a very minimalistic design that was engineered to be easy to manufacture with 1950's woodshop tools (bandsaws, routers and jigs, etc).. Every Strat clone is a reproduction of a design made for that era of technology. When CNC machines came on the scene, a Strat shape isn't substantially easier to make than any other shape, but we keep using that shape because it works well and because of tradition.
A guitar design that's optimized to be easy for a non-professional to make with a CNC router and a laser cutter and some basic woodworking tools might look somewhat different. This could open the door to extreme customization -- one-of-a-kind harp guitars, unusual pickup arrangements, guitars with three strings and four frets, nine string guitars designed for 31-tone equal temperament or just tunings, or whatever you like.
I expect most guitar buyers will continue to buy traditional Fenders and Gibsons and so on with 6 strings and from 21 to 24 frets and a scale length of 25 inches, plus or minus half an inch. However, for those that want something different, there will always be a minority of tinkerers who build their guitar just the way they like it. That's where I think the most interesting advances are going to happen.
If anyone wants to innovate in the industry, they have to come out of nowhere. Strandberg is doing well at this, with concepts you mention. Kiesel/Carvin kinda is too. Line 6 almost did, but cheap-ified the digital transition which made way for Kemper and Fractal (boutique digital brands, LOL, so funny to say) to take the stage and actually change some minds.
Because we all play guitars designed 50-60 years ago we're naturally going to resist change.