31 ms·

The slow death of the electric guitar

• ThomPete 9y ago
  Software eating the world. 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.
  • emodendroket 9y ago
    Well, the article says that in a more detailed and nuanced way.
  • CodeTheInternet 9y ago
    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.
    • ThomPete 9y ago
      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.
  • SwellJoe 9y ago
    I for one, welcome the death of the guitar solo. 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).
    • KhanMahGretsch 9y ago
      If that moment in Sweet Child O' Mine when Slash kicks on the wah and runs up the fretboard doesn't give you chills... well...
      • Applejinx 9y ago
        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.
        • KhanMahGretsch 9y ago
          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. p.s. Aja is an absolute classic :)
          • SwellJoe 9y ago
            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.
  • aries1980 9y ago
    At some places, it is the other way round :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwAj-jzeedw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwAj-jzeedw
• clavalle 9y ago
  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.
• dschep 9y ago
  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.
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    8. The answer is 8. 7 was so late-90's/early-00's. 9 string still gets laughs. But wait long enough and everyone will want to get lower.
• pizzicato7 9y ago
  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.
  • Pica_soO 9y ago
    You have a point there- solitary mastering of an art is fought against by social networking.
  • 9y ago
• akytt 9y ago
  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.
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    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.
• akytt 9y ago
  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.
• Neliquat 9y ago
  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.
• deleted 9y ago
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• 3327 9y ago
  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.
  • Animats 9y ago
    We've now had over 30 years of house music. They won.
    • santaclaus 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure southern hip-hop has officially 'won' [1]. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/06/518780898/future-makes-history-with-back-to-back-chart-toppers http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/06/518780898/f...
    • Grue3 9y ago
      Pretty sure rock has existed for longer than that.
    • tluyben2 9y ago
      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.
  • douche 9y ago
    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.
  • VLM 9y ago
    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.
• pmalynin 9y ago
  Completely broken on Safari because of scroll jacking. Had to actually drag the scroll bar until the text starts.
  • kevsim 9y ago
    Was pretty terrible on Chrome (on Mac) too FWIW
• molecule 9y ago
  Previous discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621515
• paulsutter 9y ago
  Slash was the last famous guitarist. There's your proof that guitarists used to be a big deal, but are no more. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-guitarists-20111123 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-guitari...
  • reptarrr 9y ago
    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.
  • khazhou 9y ago
    ??? Jack White John Mayer Are they on the list?
    • paulsutter 9y ago
      They're famous, and they play guitar, but they aren't famous for their guitar playing "fell in love with a girl" is an awesome song but not so challenging to play: https://youtu.be/95HRZ2SLMJk https://youtu.be/95HRZ2SLMJk
      • davnicwil 9y ago
        Contrast with this though: https://youtu.be/mto7vBtabEU?t=24s https://youtu.be/mto7vBtabEU?t=24s 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 :-)
• rhapsodic 9y ago
  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.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • tnecniv 9y ago
    > 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.
• watertorock 9y ago
  Learning an instrument requires commitment and a lot of practice. And more practice. And more practice. And a lifetime of learning. How many people have the patience for that? Particularly in Generation Internet Points Right Now?
  • reptarrr 9y ago
    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.
    • goldfeld 9y ago
      "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?
  • sullyj3 9y ago
    There's a whole subculture of bedroom producers making instrumental guitar driven music. a few examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ipv_l7KoSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ipv_l7KoSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18yiVSX7oQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18yiVSX7oQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK5P94toDkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FK5P94toDkI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBztSKccrDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBztSKccrDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY63_QR6toA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY63_QR6toA
• quadrangle 9y ago
  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.
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    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. I bet we'll see that with amplifiers, first.
    • quadrangle 9y ago
      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.
• badcede 9y ago
  As long as we're talking slow death and electric guitars, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL3pP29N-Wc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL3pP29N-Wc.
  • aguynamedben 9y ago
    That was legit
• d--b 9y ago
  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.
  • zdkl 9y ago
    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. Keep it heavy, and keep it coming \m/ (sorry hn)
  • johan_larson 9y ago
    The electric guitar is now what the saxophone was in the fifties: the iconic instrument of the hottest music of dad's generation.
    • fh973 9y ago
      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.
• justboxing 9y ago
  DUPE's DUPE ( 1 day ago) => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621515 DUPE ( 2 days ago) => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14617079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14617079
  • dang 9y ago
    HN only considers a story a dupe when it has had significant attention. Those submissions didn't quite cross the threshold. Therefore we'll leave this post up, but merge the previous comments in to unify the threads.
    • justboxing 9y ago
      > but merge the previous comments in here. Pretty cool! I did not know that you could do that.
  • crispytx 9y ago
    I posted this story first! My shit should of made it to the front page of hacker news :(
• cyberferret 9y ago
  > “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. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJK-R3HGG09uGBRDs7fhpZw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJK-R3HGG09uGBRDs7fhpZw
  • Hydraulix989 9y ago
    That's incredible, thanks for sharing!
  • aguynamedben 9y ago
    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.
    • 9y ago
• b1daly 9y ago
  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.
• Joeboy 9y ago
  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.
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    LOL, $1k on a new Les Paul. 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.
• estomagordo 9y ago
  Is it just me, or are HN links increasingly often to material behind paywalls?
  • dboreham 9y ago
    It's more that all content is increasingly behind paywalls, no?
• johan_larson 9y ago
  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.
  • cr0sh 9y ago
    > 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...
• splicer 9y ago
  It's time another instrument got a chance at the spotlight. I'm going to call it: the next big thing is Tuba heroes!
  • elihu 9y ago
    Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Hibike Euphonium has caused a surge in popularity in brass bass instruments in Japan at least...
• elihu 9y ago
  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.
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    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.
• crispytx 9y ago
  I've been saying this for a couple of years now. None of the music I listen to anymore features an electric guitar; it's all made on laptop computers. The fun part about knowing how to play guitar is that you can learn how to play your favorite songs. But if none of your favorite songs feature an electric guitar, what fun is it anymore? I'm 30 years old and have been playing the guitar since I was 12, but it's just not as fun anymore... I'm thinking about learning how to make music on my macbook so I can stay young and hip :)
  • dboreham 9y ago
    I give you Daft Punk with Nile Rodgers as a counter example.
    • Applejinx 9y ago
      On the other hand, you have to be a Nile Rodgers to groove harder than robots and sequencers. On the other other hand… guitars still make some of the best 'pluck' sounds. And I say that as someone who owns a x0xb0x, a JP-8000 and an Alpha Juno. People spend a lot of money on synthesizers that can get even close to the immediacy of an electric string. And modern samplers are so accessible you can take that electric string and do whatever you like with it.
    • coldcode 9y ago
      Anything Niles produces or works on features his guitar, even the stuff he does with people half his age or less. You don't have to be a great soloist to add value to a song, even a modern dance type of music.
    • crispytx 9y ago
      lol, I did learn that song on guitar when it came out! But the majority of the songs I listen to now no longer feature a guitar part to learn.
• afpx 9y ago
  Huh, and all this time I thought "rock and roll" and playing electric guitar was all about sex. At least, that's why we learned to play guitar when I was a kid... Guitar playing lost its mojo when it was usurped by aficionados enamored by theory and technique and repulsed by swagger. If I was 14 today, I'd grab a Maschine, load up some tracks in launchpad, and start emulating Avicii until I could pack a small dance hall.
• 0xbear 9y ago
  There are some amazing players out there: Guthrie Govan, Nick Johnston, Plini... The old guard (Satriani, Vai, Gilbert) are cranking out great albums from time to time. Truth be told, people who really know how to play and write guitar music always were in short supply. They're just in slightly shorter supply now for (IMO) two reasons: 1. One no longer needs to know how to play an instrument to be considered a musician: people are perfectly willing to pay for "music" that's just computer drums and bass, and 2. Kids have the attention span of a house fly, and guitar requires daily practice. Even so, YouTube is full of amazingly talented kids.
• superplussed 9y ago
  The person every kid wanted to be in the 70s was Jimi Hendrix. The person every kid wants to be in 2017 is Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerburg. The zeitgeist has moved on.
  • kaoD 9y ago
    Kids don't want to be Mark Zuckerberg. They want to be Wiz Khalifa or Nicki Minaj.
  • ekianjo 9y ago
    Since when Mark has become a youth idol?
• gciruelos 9y ago
  In my opinion boutique competition, economic hardship, drop in quality, and an active used market are what's killing Gibson and other big companies. Not EDM.
• davnicwil 9y ago
  I think there are strong parallels with the tech/startup world here: the often-touted quote "The next Bill Gates won't build an operating system, the next Mark Zuckerberg won't build a social network" comes to mind. The next Miles Davies won't play the horn, and the next Jimmy Hendrix won't play guitar. There will always be jazz, there will always be rock n roll, but the level of interest in those styles, particularly amongst young musicians, will slide inevitably towards the niche as the next innovative style comes along. The world keeps turning. This is a great thing for music.
  • kowdermeister 9y ago
    > the next Jimmy Hendrix won't play guitar This guy comes to my mind: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw :)
  • kaoD 9y ago
    IMHO there will not be a next Miles Davies or a next Jimmy Hendrix. Or rather, they've already been. The last 40 years of music have experienced such a revolution, we've already had many of those (most of them relegated to obscurity through sheer volume and industrialization of music). But now that I've re-read your comment you've already mentioned the niche-ization :) Hip-hop was a revolutionary genre like rock music was to the people. Electronic music turns upside down every 10 years or so (e.g. compare Shpongle to 90's techno). I find it very funny (/sad) that many jazz listeners (around me, mostly trained musicians in modern curricula that goes classical -> jazz) look down upon electronic music (in a way similar to how jazz musicians were looked down upon by traditional musicians in the early 20th century). Electronic is the new jazz (sometimes people forget electronic music is not a genre, just a medium!) Not to mention how electronic music production finally let musicians experiment on a new dimension (timbre) which was very, very hard to innovate on with traditional instruments. I'm so excited to see what's coming next. We're living a great age.
    • agumonkey 9y ago
      I don't listen to much electronic music, but I find no subtleties or sensitivity in what I hear. I understand that dismissing the new for no other reason is useless but I just don't feel it.
• kristofferR 9y ago
  The article didn't even attempt to answer the question it asked in the ingress - why I should care about a certain thing past its glory days fading in the popularity. Times change, and that's a great thing, yet people will always complain. It has happened to things I really loved too. That's just life I guess, but I've realized that being upset at culture change is just a self-destructive thought pattern. The piano is still around, just like the electric guitar will be in the future.
• uranian 9y ago
  I think the drop in revenue is because the market is really saturated. All those millions of guitars produced are not destroyed, it's not the kind of product that you can apply 'planned obsolescence' to. Instead, the vintage one's are often better sounding and therefore more popular. Also, if you find a good vintage guitar you are almost assured it will remain good as the wood has proven to be stable. If there is a slow death to guitar than it is because it's almost impossible to earn any money with it, except for the lucky few. Learning an instrument like guitar takes many, many years, which is quite a hobby.. If you would spend the same amount of time in learning software development you are almost assured to have a solid income as result.
• agumonkey 9y ago
  Allan Holdsworth, one of the most innovative guitar player passed not long ago. If you feel like discovering a new way around an instrument, and even music in general, and are not repelled by 70s/80s synth feel, enjoy youtubing his name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXSd-WyrtfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXSd-WyrtfA The man was an extraordinary among extraordinaries. The guitarit's guitarist as they say. Beside music, the notion of culture itself changed, it's palpable; the previous era was inspired a lot by music; today the passion has shifted down, at least as a mainstream thing. It's an industry in maintenance mode. Youngins may not be thrilled to be a guitar player, but in a way guitar heros aren't that much interesting. The instrument value in itself has not decreased.
  • jacquesm 9y ago
    Oh that sucks, I totally missed that. :( I especially love the work that he did with Jean Luc Ponty, and UK's Rendez-Vous 6:02.
    • agumonkey 9y ago
      I missed it too by a week, he has always been in the shadow. I don't think I've listened to Ponty with him, onto it.
      • jacquesm 9y ago
        Here is a nice one to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmC5P_85vhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmC5P_85vhc
        • agumonkey 9y ago
          I love the first minute.. a very nice Holdsworthy theme. I like the electronic vibe, kinda like Civilized Evil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FikOX8KloCk&list=PLzN7jgp6hRfPkfc4zPRMAhsydx7SXgjEi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FikOX8KloCk&list=PLzN7jgp6hR... I see Ponty played with drummer Damien Schmitt, do you know this piece by Schmitt and Feraud ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8au2qIcjJVw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8au2qIcjJVw
• rwmj 9y ago
  Put simply, guitars have a terrible user interface. I have "taught" Korg Kaossilator to a dozen people and they have all picked it up and started making not-terrible electronic dance music within an hour of first using it. Edit: Maybe explain why I'm supposedly wrong instead of downvoting?
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    I didn't downvote, but pegging the guitar as something with a "terrible user interface" was probably your problem.
• ojosilva 9y ago
  One can't just look at revenue, debt and Moody's rating of guitar makers and dealers and proclaim the guitar, the most popular instrument today by a huge margin, is dying. But the lack of prominence of the guitar in the top charts and the way social pop culture influences people today does have a significant impact in new guitar purchases. When I was a kid learning the guitar, dad's old Fender wouldn't do. I HAD to have a Satriani-style Ibanez, my guitar hero at the time. I have a friend that, throughout the years, has invested over $100K getting himself each and every one of his heroes guitars over and over. As guitars are not as prominent in mainstream music anymore guitar sales dwindle. Add to that a huge "installed base" of used guitars, a good that is unparalleled in durability, and you have a very stale market for new guitars that will generate a gap for years to come.
  • fredley 9y ago
    Really what you want to look at is sales of guitar strings as an indicator of how much guitar is being played.
    • thatwebdude 9y ago
      Long-lasting alloys/coatings/technology will skew your results. Especially considering all they had back in the heydey was Nickel (soft). But that's a great idea!
      • fredley 9y ago
        Factoring in relative longevity of different string types would not be too hard, but as with all these things it's just getting your hands on some high quality, representative data...
  • coldtea 9y ago
    >One can't just look at revenue, debt and Moody's rating of guitar makers and dealers and proclaim the guitar, the most popular instrument today by a huge margin, is dying. The "most popular instrument today" is misleading, considering modern R&B, Hip Hop (and to a lesser degree) EDM dominate everything charts and sales wise, and they use mostly computer DAWs and plugins, something that wont register in "instrument sales" lists or music schools.
• douche 9y ago
  You actually have to practice and have some skill to play guitar... not to mention finding a bassist, and an actual, real-life drummer, at minimum, for a full band. Compared to dicking around with a laptop and calling yourself a DJ, or slapping some drum loops and autotune on top of some vocals, rock music does require some actual work.
  • sullyj3 9y ago
    As someone who plays guitar and writes electronic music, getting good at the latter takes a comparable level of effort. I think you're underestimating how difficult it is to make electronic stuff that isn't terrible.
    • Applejinx 9y ago
      Yeah. A very capable (platinum record making) engineer friend of mine recently linked to a facebook video, a friend of his who'd done a parody song about how easy it was to make a pop song, with just a four on the floor beat and simple chords and less than twenty-five words. It was one of those snarky songs, a parody thing about how trivial and easy it was to do it. The kick was absolutely potato quality, like something off a Casio. Even I could tell the 'so easy' backing track was garbage. It wasn't even intentionally awful, it was just so horribly meh and uninspired as far as sound choices and the way it didn't groove or show any interest. LOTS of old school instrumentalists look down on EDM while being completely blind to how it works or how it's done.
• int_19h 9y ago
  Thankfully, it's slow enough that we get to enjoy some new gems. Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axdNAyeLpcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axdNAyeLpcE
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    This is evolution in the industry. It opens itself up to another whole population that wasn't seriously marketed before (Pink cheap guitars, Guitar World Swimsuit edition buyers' guides, "really good for a girl" comments)
• wvh 9y ago
  My generation, the last of generation X, probably wanted to express existential angst with loud music such as altern rock and metal – music centered around distorted guitars. Metal took more hopeful '50s and '60s guitar music and turned it into darkness and despair, just like the hippie philosophy and in a way the general world view did. The millennial generation – my younger brother – clearly follows a different path, more into electronics, going out, partying, and oriented towards the self. I feel they prefer to (comparatively) focus more their own little bubble and pleasure, and less scream about general misery or the state of the world. I'm a guitar player and one of the last of generation X, and as an angry aggressive male I simply can't imagine hopping around on electronics as an outlet. I think guitar music and specifically heavy genres are far from dead – especially here in Northern Europe – but young(er) people have a different way of expressing and listening to music which is not very guitar-centric. They don't necessarily want to sit down and listen to a record full of doom music like us metalheads did/do, or at least, that's not the main way of enjoying music. It remains to be seen how much this pattern of music consumption will influence how people experience music in the long term.
  • kochthesecond 9y ago
    I would also argue metal was never mainstream. The mainstream was always further takes on pop, which to an increasing degree draws from all the others innovating, if in a moderately expressed way. Listen to mainstream popular music now and you can often find some of the intensity extreme metal explored.
    • larrydag 9y ago
      I have to agree that metal was never mainstream. I always looked at metal as an evolution of punk.
      • jghn 9y ago
        By many measures metal predates punk
      • CuriouslyC 9y ago
• djhworld 9y ago
  The headline is a bit silly, the electric guitar isn't going anywhere. The actual point it is trying to raise is the guitar is losing it's position as the centerpiece of pop music. The guitar solo, rhythm and lead guitars at the forefront. That's the element that's changed over the years. Guitars still play a role in popular music, but they're just one part of a multi faceted layer of instruments and sounds.
• notspanishflu 9y ago
  Norman's Rare Guitars is a fantastic YT channel for us who still enjoy guitars [0]. Thanks $deity not all new generation is into electronic. I have great hope when listening bands like Greta Van Fleet (ages between 18-21 years old) [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/NormansRareGuitars/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/NormansRareGuitars/videos [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJg4OJxp-co https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJg4OJxp-co
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    Slightly related, and assuming you like Blues, have you seen Joe Bonamassa's videos and tours of his collection? Very cool, too. Emphasis on Fender/Gibson, but still quite entertaining. I appreciate player-collectors.
    • notspanishflu 9y ago
      Oh yes I do love Blues. Joe Bonamassa's Nerdville is like I pictured heaven.
• sametmax 9y ago
  The electric guitar is everywhere. It's just not the central piece anymore. It's mainstream, get over it.
• goodmachine 9y ago
  The clarinet industry went through a similar decline. Seems like people just don't want to pick up the old liquorice stick.
• analog31 9y ago
  I play an "obsolete" instrument, the double bass. And I play jazz. So my gut reaction is: Welcome to the club. Electric guitar (and electric bass) enjoyed their day in the sun, and it was well deserved. When the Fender guitar came on the scene, a dance band required as many as 19 musicians, all playing instruments that took years of training just to even make a decent sound, much less to play at a performance level. The electric guitar and bass had a much different learning curve (not better or worse, like C vs Python) and 3 or 4 musicians could take the place of 19. Of course changing musical styles played a role in this transition as well, so I'm really over-simplifying here. The simpler harmonic structure of songs made it easier to crank out hits, and the manipulation of electronic effects allowed the creation of new styles such as hard rock, heavy metal, and so forth. Rock music also had a certain social appeal. As opposed to taking lessons and then sitting at home and practicing scales, you joined a bunch of friends, and all learned together in the absence of any adult supervision. Many bands create new songs together by trial and error. Styles and songs were learned by ear -- the folk music tradition, which certainly has its own historical precedent. It couldn't last forever. Fifty years is a pretty darn good run. New instruments have emerged, with their own learning curve and cultural appeal. That's great. Meanwhile, playing an obsolete instrument can still have its own attractions.
  • zwieback 9y ago
    Finally bought an upright after years of playing bass guitar. Couldn't be happier but transport is a pain. Still play the bass guitar, though, I don't think anything is going obsolete, half of the electric guitars people bought in it's golden years were just collecting dust anyway.
    • scarecrowbob 9y ago
      I play upright (I'm actually getting ready to go my gig for today). I dunno if it helps, but when I started I did not know I could put it in the front seat of most cars with the seat laid back. That's made transport relatively easy ( though it is a very bulky instrument).
      • 9y ago
• logn 9y ago
  Guitar Center never adapted to the electronic era and are now being run by bankers to squeeze as much money out of the business as possible. They will go the way of Radio Shack. It's a lot easier these days for young people to mess around with Ableton or Fruity Loops and make music alone than save every last dollar to buy a cheap instrument and try desperately to find the drummer and bass player which were always in short supply. The guitar will be on more equal footing with every other instrument and hardware that musicians/composers use for live performance. There is still a need to perform music and people like seeing musicians do something, whether it's fiddle knobs or play an instrument. And there will always be something magical about an instrument that fully digital electronics will never have.
• norswap 9y ago
  Clickbait. Rumors of the guitar's death have been greatly exaggerated.
• codingdave 9y ago
  Let us assume for a second that we don't have a vested interest in any of the music companies, or in guitars, or even in music... the underlying question then becomes simply whether or not the youth of today still have passions that are sparked, and if they still follow them as fervently as we did in our youth, and pursue new skills as much as we did. Do they pick things up and drive their lives towards perfecting a craft? I know this might sound blasphemous to some, but... so what if it isn't guitars? As long as they do have passions to follow, and they produce creative works, its all good.
• squarefoot 9y ago
  Yawn... after the 70s the guitar had a similar decline and in the mid eighties everyone and his dog wanted to be a keyboard or sax player, then came the nineties with grunge etc and guitars became hot sellers again. History repeats itself, so I expect the trend to change in a few years according to what the marketing droids will feed the the radio and TV stations with.
• ssharp 9y ago
  There isn't much evidence that EDM is much more than a passing fad, either. Rock music has held fairly strong on over the past 60-70 years and has been able to accommodate and integrate fads, shed them, and then reincorporate them in throwback form. 70s glam rock gave way to 80s emo synths. Grunge brought things back into simple form, which gave way to the rap/rock craze that then gave in to the Stokes, White Stripes, etc. We're now at a point where music incorportes a lot of ideas and those ideas don't fit into the molds we are used to seeing. A lot of those molds still have guitars as a key ingredient and live music is as popular as it's ever been.
  • JoeDaDude 9y ago
    You never can tell how long a fad will last, but to be fair, EDM aka House aka Techno has been around in one form or another since the late 80's or early 90's depending on who you ask. That's almost 30 years right there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music
• tyingq 9y ago
  Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys is about as close to a modern guitar hero as I can think of.
• cushychicken 9y ago
  One thing this article mentions, in an offhand way, is the effect of media outlets on mass appeal. There was a time where things like Dick Clark and Ed Sullivan were not just major tastemakers - they were some of the only tastemakers. The internet cracked this singular, self-reinforcing media loop wide open by allowing people to explore alternative genres and art forms. That's not to say that people aren't still influenced by guitars and guitarists; they're still selling almost a million of them every year! But I can't help but wonder how many of those other sales got robbed by people inspired by other artists. Anecdotally, my own experience confirms the "robbed interest" theory. I got into bluegrass music early in college, found and listened to a bunch of it online, and ended up learning to play the dobro. I doubt I'd have ever managed that if I hadn't had the internet to interact with the genre's community, or consume more media in the same vein.
• dexterdog 9y ago
  I think a large part of this might be the outlets that are available to the major introverts because of tech. All of the best guitarists I knew as a kid were major introverts who would lock themselves away and practice for large parts of the day. Kids that are like that have so many more options now.
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    The parallels to technology careers and music backgrounds is staggering, for sure.
• dahart 9y ago
  Rock is what's really dying, the guitar will survive this. The canonical 4 piece band is in decline, as is music that highlights the electric guitar with riffs & a guitar solo. Mass consumption of electric guitar music is what is in decline. Instrument sales are only a symptom and byproduct of changing cultural music tastes. And there's no way to fix it, you can't control what's popular. As a guitar player, I think electric guitar has enjoyed unfair levels of popularity relative to other instruments for the past 50 years. Among other good reasons I've read in the comments here, this may be an equalizing correction. "Death" seems hyperbolic, there's no evidence guitars will somehow disappear, but a decline was probably inevitable. I think it's fascinating to read theories about how to "fix" the "problem". If people buy less guitar music, then guitar sales will fall, and with that in mind it seems so quaint and cute and sweetly misguided to focus development efforts on online guitar classes. Do we think online clarinet classes will bolster clarinet sales?
  • hashkb 9y ago
    > you can't control what's popular. Artists don't, but someone does.
    • kerkeslager 9y ago
      Eh, I believe that to some extent. Someone decided that Black Sabbath would be more popular than The Pixies. But I don't think anyone decided that shared style of music would become popular: that was a function of sentiment at the time. From the perspective of a hypothetical overlord, controlling what people want costs money. It's cheaper to predict what people want and sell them that. Of course if you predict wrong, you have to exert some control to make sure you recoup your investment. But music isn't an industry where you have to manufacture demand, so it's cheaper not to.
    • dahart 9y ago
      Yes, consumers do, they ultimately have the most control. The guitar manufacturers don't, they are the "you" I was referring to. No one person or company can reverse the decline of Rock music, the public is buying less of it over time despite large scale marketing efforts. Publishers certainly have some limited influence over which specific artists get traction through promotion and marketing. They can milk extra sales of declining genres for a while, but no amount of promotion and marketing can ever make renaissance or classical or ragtime or doo-wop appeal to the young mass pop-music consuming market again. Rock will eventually be part of that same past. No amount of money can be spent to create a new style of music that will be guaranteed to be popular. Nobody has the ability to restore the electric guitar to it's former prominence by design. It could happen organically, but it can't be forced.
• colbyh 9y ago
  my (somewhat) unpopular take on this is that guitar heroes are made when new genres break into the mainstream. or at least it has been that way for the last 60 years or so. Delta blues, British invasion, white blues, hair metal, punk, grunge - new sounds were making waves and getting popular on the radio so kids latched on to them (partially because their parents hated it). but we haven't had a new guitar-based genre break the pop charts in the last 15-20 years so kids are only hearing new takes on old styles, like Mayer. brilliant musician but not nearly as exciting as the stuff their parents hate - EDM.
• jvandonsel 9y ago
  Naive question: Do these various electric guitar models (Gibson, Fender, etc) actually sound distinctive? Or is it all about brand cachet?
  • timfrietas 9y ago
    There are distinct sound differences, although they may be less obvious to a layman, the same way functional programming vs OOP would just "look like code" to someone who was not a developer. For example, Fenders, especially models like the Telecaster, have a "twangier", more treble-forward tone (they're used a lot in country music), where as a Gibson model, say the SG, would have a "meatier" more bass-forward tone and generally longer sustain (used more in rock, e.g., AC/DC is a good example).
    • wyclif 9y ago
      Another big difference is the scale length between a Fender and Gibson (the length of playable string between the nut and where the string contacts the bridge saddle). On a Fender Telecaster, Stratocaster, or Jazzmaster, it's longer than on, say, a Gibson Les Paul or ES-335. This means there's more string tension and "snap" on those Fenders, which some players prefer. J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr (who plays a Fender Jazzmaster) says, "I like to be at war with the guitar." It also makes the guitar a little harder to play and a bit less forgiving when you make a mistake.
  • bartread 9y ago
    It's a bit of both, to be honest. E.g., the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul have very different sounds due to different pickups, electrics, tone woods, etc. People will buy a particular type of guitar because they want a particular sound. Choice of amplifier also comes into play here. OTOH, there is definitely brand cachet/snobbery. A Gibson Les Paul will almost always get more respect than a Les Paul copy from another brand. What I'm less aware of, except from perhaps a few niche guitar makers I know, is brand snobbery of the form of, "Well, Fender are better than Gibson and Gretsch because blah", or vice versa (people do tend to be a bit snobby about Ibanez though, for some reason). Most people I know buy premium guitars (and that's a loaded term in itself) for the sound rather than the brand... except that, as I've already suggested, they will often prefer a well-known brand over a "knock-off" or lower end brand: so "serious" musicians will generally buy Fender rather than Squire (low end brand owned by Fender). Different genres of music can lead to different brand preferences. More "classic" music genres tend to favour Gibson, Fender, Gretsch, Rickenbacker, and so on, whereas newer or more experimental genres tend to favour Ibanez, ESP, PRS, Jackson, etc. This is more of an observation than a hard and fast rule though, and there will always be exceptions, like the Fender Jaguar which has been a firm favourite of some more alternative bands since the late 80s. Hopefully that rather rambling answer makes some sense.
• codecamper 9y ago
  And the gradual rise of the keytar!
  • mcv 9y ago
    Didn't the keytar die after the 1980s?
• SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
  Instruments decline in popularity. It happens to everything. I play several instruments of rather low popularity: Highland Bagpipes, tin whistle, bodhran, and pipe & tabor. The last (pipe & tabor) is a medieval instrument pair of a three-holed pipe played in the left hand and a small snare drum hung from the left arm and played with the right hand. Its popularity died out several hundred years ago, yet some people still play and you can still buy them. The industry has shrunk a lot though. WRT guitar I very much like acoustic fingerstyle, mostly the virtuosic type as played by Luca Stricagnoli, Michael Chapdelaine, Mike Dawes, and others. For electric I prefer Symphonic Metal or Folk Metal (Epica, Eluveite, etc). I'd say there's plenty of room for electric guitar, it's a long way from being as obscure as the pipe & tabor, crumhorn, shawm, or theorbo! I'm a millennial (well, Oregon trail generation, caught in the gap between gen X and millennials). My tastes are odd for my generation. Electric guitar isn't dying, it's just shrinking in popularity. Some electric guitar manufacturers will surely die though.
  • jessaustin 9y ago
    I would have thought "Oregon Trail" was solidly Gen-X? I think I played that in the mid-1980s?
    • SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
      Early '90s. There are lots of versions of it. I played the tail end.
• camus2 9y ago
  IMHO the obvious reason for the downfall of the guitar is the complete collapse of the music market, especially the "rock market". Who dreams of being a rockstar today? Nobody, you'll make more money playing jazz these days than rock, and in jazz the guitar is optional. I lived the whole Nirvana craze in the 90's and every kid out there dreamed of becoming Kurt Cobain. A shitload of guitars were sold at the time. These were the good times though.
• OhWhoCares 9y ago
  I think that the very act of playing an instrument is much less impressive than it used to be, and that's because of computers and electronic music. Back in the day, the only way to make those heavenly sounds was to a human to pick up an instrument and play, and that's why musicians were considered demigods - they were the only thing in the world that could render music. And then the computers came and playing music became one of those "a computer can do that" activities, and thus is much less impressive.
• willtim 9y ago
  The guitar suffered one of its biggest losses with the recent passing of Allan Holdsworth.
• kazinator 9y ago
  The thing about the "guitar hero" phenomenon of the 1980's. Let me relay a perspective from someone who plays guitar and who was there: It was a phenomenon fueled purely by MTV and the record companies. And, nothing is different from today in the following regard: all the heroes were current musicians. The teens I was surrounded with were largely ignorant of even the immediately previous generation of rock and roll. Rock listening teenagers in the 80's weren't listening to Clapton. Most wouldn't have known who the heck is Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple or what have you; that had been a hundred years ago (i.e. some ten). Most of the guitar heroes were only some 5 to 15 years older than the teenaged worshippers. They constantly changed. One year you'd go to music stores, and every kid walking in there would pick up a guitar and be doing some Van Halen thing. A few years later, every kid wanted to be Slash from Guns and Roses. Later still, Metallica made a bit of a comeback and you'd hear nothing but Enter Sandman covers. Another thing to know is that there was a lot of criticism of the whole phenomenon while it was happening, even from the musicians themselves. The following is an absolute must read to anyone interested in this topic. A 1987 Guitar Player magazine interview with Frank Zappa, titled "The 80's Guitar Clone". http://www.afka.net/Articles/1987-01_Guitar_Player.htm http://www.afka.net/Articles/1987-01_Guitar_Player.htm I remember this well, because I read it in print when it came out and it made an impression. I respected Zappa. I was one of the fairly rare teens of the generation who actually knew who Zappa is. My dad got me into Zappa. Because of Zappa, I knew who Stevie Vai was before he was a houshold name among guitar players. Quotes: Well, the one thing that seems to be more prevalent today is imitation. I think that the amount of copycat players in the marketplace today is significantly higher than it's ever been before. You see very few truly original guitarists and a whole bunch of people who wish they were Eddie Van Halen. Q: [In the same way that Olympic records are always being broken, guitar playing seems to be getting faster and faster.] Not only is it getting faster, but the solos themselves are becoming gymnastic routines – basically 8- and maybe 16-bar gymnastic routines that are stuck in the middle of songs about fairly common topics. The whole concept of extended improvisations that are compositions in progress is something that is pretty much gone from the pop music scene. That's one of the major losses for the '80s, I think. That's what I was addressing in the old article, talking about the process by which the kid sitting at home listens to a tape, and although he couldn't read it off the piece of paper, learns it by rote like a parrot, and winds up playing faster and faster and faster. I think that's really what's taking place.
• DerekL 9y ago
  The article mentions Guitar Center's $1.6 billion debt, but doesn't say why it has so much. The instrument market is flat, and online is taking a bite, but all of that debt is from a leveraged buyout by Bain Capital.
  • thatwebdude 9y ago
    I ponder GC's choices. It was like a cancer in my major metropolitan area. Within 5-10 years all the mom-and-pop stores with a good solution of beginner and high-end equipment left and these things moved in. Coming from a millennial, it really isn't he way it used to be. Sad.
• wyclif 9y ago
  It's not as if there haven't been many forms of the "Rock Is Dead" rant for decades now. For instance, see producer (cough "engineer" cough) Steve Albini's diatribe on the subject from back in the early '90s, "The Problem With Music": http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 Rock music has become more niche as the recording industry has moved away from the old model of AOR and LPs, where there would be a few good singles on a record at best, to the new model that streaming music has enabled with songs standing on their own merits, and the financial model that necessitates touring and live music. It seems as if the downward pressure on guitar sales is a money and business problem, not a music problem. There's simply a glut of gear on the market. Reverb and eBay have made it a simple matter to pick up a quality used electric guitar. Confession: I've been playing since I was 16 years old, and I didn't buy a new guitar (an acoustic) until I was over 30 years old. There was no need to. I could get whatever kind of guitar I could afford, at the price I wanted to pay, in excellent condition on the used market. And I still can. It made no sense for me to buy new. And it makes even less sense when it comes to amps. I know places where you can find a huge variety of amps in good to new condition. The downward pressure is increasing now as the baby boom generation is retiring or passing on, and a lot of those guys who are still around are thinning out their collection which means many quite nice, well-cared-for instruments are coming onto the market all the time. Richard Ash says: "Our customers are getting older, and they’re going to be gone soon." Baby boomer guitarists tend to have a lot of disposable income. They're far more likely to cruise right into a GC or Sam Ash store and make a GAS-induced impulse purchase of an additional guitar. But that doesn't change the fact that a lot of musicians don't have a lot of dough, and they're surfing eBay for deals. Parallel to this phenomenon, the amount of information that buyers have at their fingertips, via the internet, has never been more abundant. Guitarists know more about the instruments than they did in the past. They know what woods, frets, necks, bodies, pickups, and electronics do and will work, and in what combinations they will be optimized. See the "partscaster" hobbyist trend. After all, an electric guitar is essentially a plank of wood with a bolt-on neck and simple electronics and hardware. If you have one you like, and chances are you do if you're a musician who plays a lot, there's no urgent reason to let it go. If you love how it sounds, you just keep playing it. On top of all that, there's additional downward pressure coming from the low end of the market, and the improvement in quality of guitars from Mexico and China. Just look at all the love for the Fender Squier line and instruments such as the Classic Vibe Telecaster. To sum up, I'm not worried about electric guitar music. Rock music has been in a bad place before. In fact, there's been more than one dark age. It's cyclical. If you're a music history buff, you'll know the significance of this date: February 3rd, 1959. It was called "The Day the Music Died" for a reason. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper—gone. Elvis was in the Army. Little Richard had quit. Jerry Lee Lewis was in career trouble because he married his cousin. Rock 'N' Roll seemed like it was over in the early 1960's—as if it had all been a novelty from the start. The charts were swamped by sweater singers and crooners. The rough, raw, and electrifying music of the late 50's looked like it was gone forever. Then the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Animals, and all the other British Invasion groups re-invigorated the genre. The same thing happened, to a lesser extent, with punk rock, and then grunge. So I'm not worried about rock music. It's not dead. You can find it if you know where to look.
• thatwebdude 9y ago
  When I was teaching guitar, the overarching trend I saw again and again, from the South the Midwest (so not a complete profile, but one large enough) was an interest in playing guitar but no real influences to latch onto. My first question to a prospective student was "who are some of your favorite bands?". With enough blank stares I changed it to "what is some of your favorite music" with equal stares. Kids (and adults) want to play guitar, but the initial excitement and rush comes and goes fast as they have no real guitar music to get into anymore. Pop music has changed, and that's fine. It gets hard to find a memorable or "cool" guitar part in pop music. The last one I can think of is "Party in the USA", and that, of course, is subjective (and quite old now).
  • scrumper 9y ago
    Well for one, Bieber is doing quite a bit of guitar stuff these days. I've actually been surprised by the amount of very obvious guitar sounds in pop in the last ~12-18 months or so. Try your local top 40 station with fresh ears, it's really quite prevalent. You can argue about whether it's influential of course. Guitar isn't really being used in these songs in a way that carries the entire production, so tough to play on your own with any degree of satisfaction (again though Justin Bieber is an exception).
    • thatwebdude 9y ago
      I was speaking more about "riffage" over presence, but I'll keep an ear out for it. If anything to say, "here, listen to this".
  • autotune 9y ago
    Songs and bands with good guitar parts: Pink Floyd - Wishe You Were Here Modest Mouse - Missed The Boat Young The Giant - Apartment The Joy Formidable - The Ladder is Ours Death Cab For Cutie - Soul Meets Body José González - Crosses Maybeshewill - Red Paper Lanters the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and all you need to do is look for it.
• flavio81 9y ago
  Drums. In 1980-82, many people in the recording industry thought that drums (as an acoustical instrument played by a human) were going to disappear. 1980s drum machines (starting with the Linn) were big hits and used everywhere. Entire records done with the Linn drum machines. Even extraordinary, in-demand studio drummers like Jeff Porcaro, started buying their own and learning how to program it, advertising his "drum programming" services. Yet, it is 2017 and drums are still a popular instrument. The bottom line is -- it is really difficult to "kill" a musical instrument. I can think of only some instruments that have been really "killed" -- perhaps the Harspsichord and the lyra. This means you need 300 years to kill an instrument...
  • elihu 9y ago
    A lack of builders can kill an instrument eventually. As far as I know, there isn't anyone building reed organs anymore, even though they were popular about a hundred years ago. They're complex enough that you'd have to be pretty motivated to build one as a hobby project and it's hard to imagine a business making money selling reed organs, unless it were transformed into a substantially different instrument.
• Techn0logist 9y ago
  It's obvious why: 1. How much does an electric guitar cost? Comparatively, how much does it cost to pirate music software on the device you already own? 2. How many people do you need to form a rock band? Comparatively, how many people do you need to start producing? 3. How many sounds can an electric guitar make? Comparatively, how many sounds can a computer make? Using a computer is cheaper, easier, more versatile, and more original than an electric guitar. Let it die. The only argument to be made for the electric guitar is that you actually play it, and this applies to every other instrument, so I see no reason to mourn for the electric guitar in particular.