
The slow death of the electric guitar - paladin314159
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/the-slow-secret-death-of-the-electric-guitar/
======
analog31
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
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
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).

~~~
zwieback
A guy I know squeezes his homemade mando-bass (still a large instrument) into
a Karman Ghia. Only he knows the magic twists and turns to get it in and out.

~~~
joshuata
I had an old 86 Honda CRX (two seater), and figured out how to fit my bass,
amp, and two cellos. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it again. The main trick,
though, is to recline the passengers seat and sit the bass in it.

------
d--b
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.

~~~
johan_larson
The electric guitar is now what the saxophone was in the fifties: the iconic
instrument of the hottest music of dad's generation.

~~~
fh973
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.

~~~
johan_larson
OK, so it's the music of dad's dad's generation. I was double-extra right. :)

------
cyberferret
> “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)

~~~
aguynamedben
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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.

~~~
markeroon
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.

~~~
coldtea
> _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.

------
davnicwil
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.

~~~
kaoD
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
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.

~~~
kaoD
Could it be that you're uneducated (which is fine, there's so much music
produced nowadays that's hard to be educated in all niches) and listening to
shitty electronic music that the mainstream industry is advertising endlessly
to recycle the same formula again and again for cheap gains? Similar to shitty
music like "The Archies - Sugar Sugar" or anything from The Ramones. There's
an endless stream of shit music from all years and genres.

Don't expect subtleties from an industrial product, just like you wouldn't
expect them from an apartment building (compared to art-chitecture).

As I said, electronic music is a _medium_ , not a genre. You could listen to
an electronic version of Bach's _Toccata In D Minor_ played live by a virtuous
pianist and it wouldn't lose subtlety or sensitivity due to the electronic
process of sound synthesis. If done well, it could actually _acquire_ new
subtleties through timbre manipulation techniques.

Don't confuse medium and product.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EaHMq3Jg5E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EaHMq3Jg5E)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkMt4GudJzg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkMt4GudJzg)

Listen to those back to back and if you still find no subtleties or
sensitivity go check a doctor ;) Now seriously, it's fine not to like them,
but you have to concede these are very well done pieces of art.

~~~
agumonkey
How many people in the electronic genre could play Bach ? I mind no medium, no
genre, nothing at all. If you give me something musical, even tapping on
bamboo, or an old DX7 (see this demo
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3rrjQtQe5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3rrjQtQe5A),
the pianos samples are dense, and the harmonies aren't dull) synth, I'd
welcome it.

The link you gave are not bad, but they lack soul, feel, weight. It's a common
thing in electronic music, sampled drumbeats, tiny vocals, steady and fragile
melodic rhythm.

ps: other electronic sounds that I found a bit more telling

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-k7QhOVl4M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-k7QhOVl4M)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgGNZABDqZA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgGNZABDqZA)

These two are simplistic but have a strong rhythmic backbone and are
surprinsgly twisted at times
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4r_94EvDZ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4r_94EvDZ4)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebjXsc0UjdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebjXsc0UjdQ)

I'd love to keep on but I have to leave, I'll be back in an hour

~~~
kaoD
I find your links completely soulless and unimaginative (mostly rehashing 80s
black music) so to each their own I guess :) Not that I dislike them, they're
just... plain (to me).

I really like Todd Terje, which you linked, but I wouldn't call it subtle in
any way (it's just generic italo-disco updated to sound like 21st century
dance music). It's something I'd play to dance on a night out, not to listen
and enjoy as art.

> It's a common thing in electronic music, sampled drumbeats

Well, both links feature live drum beats so... ;) Amongst other instruments
(Shpongle's flute is analog, Younger Brother features analog instruments both
at the studio and live).

Here's Younger Brother rehearsing
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIYH6SXdjE0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIYH6SXdjE0)

\---

As I expected it's a matter of taste (as expected) more than medium.

I can see you like funk influenced music full of harmonic complexity. You
might like some 70s electronic music I guess? Try
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LF438wbUTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LF438wbUTI)
(Beaver & Krause, pioneers on electronic music). There are literally too many
productions to chose from until I hit the key that tingles your own personal
taste :P

We'll never agree but I'm glad we exchanged opinions (and I'll keep an eye on
that Redinho guy!)

~~~
agumonkey
I do have very strong funk roots, but I've walked extensively into prog,
fusion, and recently classical music (which any sophisticated piece of jazz
and fusion will go into once they leave the groove sections a bit aside).

Terje beat is subtle, other than that it's as simple as it can get.

It does influence my needs though, Funk, and Jazz have a swing, a tension that
I often need in music, unless it's displaced by classical crescendos.

ps: I wonder if Redinho peaked on his first album, I expected more things to
come since but .. anyway.

pps: I'll have to relisten to younger brother now

~~~
thirdsun
Have you tried Floating Points? "Eleania" is a beautiful, rather quiet
electronic / jazz mixture and one of my favorite albums in recent years:

\-
[https://floatingpointsluakabop.bandcamp.com/album/elaenia](https://floatingpointsluakabop.bandcamp.com/album/elaenia)

\- [https://www.discogs.com/Floating-Points-
Elaenia/master/90855...](https://www.discogs.com/Floating-Points-
Elaenia/master/908559)

Another suggestion is Azymuth, a brazilian cult band that blends funk, latin,
fusion and electronic music. They have a very long discography but their most
recent album is a very good starting point:

\-
[https://azymuth.bandcamp.com/album/f-nix](https://azymuth.bandcamp.com/album/f-nix)

\-
[https://www.discogs.com/Azymuth-F%C3%AAnix/master/1094986](https://www.discogs.com/Azymuth-F%C3%AAnix/master/1094986)

Let's stay in brazil: Music From Memory, a fantastic re-issue label, recently
released a fantastic compilation that collects brazilian electronic, avant-
garde music from the late 70s to early 90s. It's more on the experimental,
difficult end of the spectrum but very rewarding with repeated listenings:

\- [https://music-from-memory.bandcamp.com/album/outro-tempo-
ele...](https://music-from-memory.bandcamp.com/album/outro-tempo-electronic-
and-contemporary-music-from-brazil-1978-1992)

\- [https://www.discogs.com/Various-Outro-Tempo-Electronic-
And-C...](https://www.discogs.com/Various-Outro-Tempo-Electronic-And-
Contemporary-Music-From-Brazil-1978-1992/release/9621899)

------
dahart
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
> you can't control what's popular.

Artists don't, but someone does.

~~~
dahart
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.

------
wvh
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
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
I have to agree that metal was never mainstream. I always looked at metal as
an evolution of punk.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Metal shares with punk (unless you're talking about crossover genres like
crust) a rejection of the established order and affirmation of the individual
against the collective. They both also tend to be angry responses to
alienation. The aesthetic of the two is radically different though. Metal is
about creating a fantastic, otherworldly soundscape, while punk focuses on
capturing the raw quality of life.

I think industrial music was the true successors to punk. They took the raw
grit of punk and made it modern and danceable.

~~~
jghn
Original industrial was far from danceable. It wasn't until the post-
industrial in the early 80s w/ groups like Skinny Puppy that what you describe
started to happen.

However the first part of your point holds, acts like Throbbing Gristle (who
coined the "industrial" term) definitely came out of the British punk
community.

------
pizzicato7
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.

~~~
thatwebdude
> 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.

------
elihu
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
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.

------
quadrangle
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
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
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.

------
agumonkey
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
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
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
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
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=PLzN7jgp6hR...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FikOX8KloCk&list=PLzN7jgp6hRfPkfc4zPRMAhsydx7SXgjEi)

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)

~~~
jacquesm
I don't know either, thank you! Will listen on headphones later today, on the
road now.

------
ThomPete
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
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
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
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
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
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.

~~~
ThomPete
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

~~~
ThomPete
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.

------
akytt
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
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.

------
johan_larson
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
> 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...

~~~
sowpati
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.

~~~
xtracto
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.

------
clavalle
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.

------
kristofferR
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.

------
ssharp
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
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)

------
SAI_Peregrinus
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
I would have thought "Oregon Trail" was solidly Gen-X? I think I played that
in the mid-1980s?

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
Early '90s. There are lots of versions of it. I played the tail end.

------
ojosilva
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
Really what you want to look at is sales of guitar _strings_ as an indicator
of how much guitar is being played.

~~~
thatwebdude
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
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...

------
logn
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.

------
squarefoot
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.

------
codingdave
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.

------
goodmachine
The clarinet industry went through a similar decline. Seems like people just
don't want to pick up the old liquorice stick.

------
Joeboy
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
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.

------
jvandonsel
Naive question: Do these various electric guitar models (Gibson, Fender, etc)
actually sound distinctive? Or is it all about brand cachet?

~~~
timfrietas
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
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.

------
dexterdog
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
The parallels to technology careers and music backgrounds is staggering, for
sure.

------
uranian
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.

------
badcede
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
That was legit

------
crispytx
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
I give you Daft Punk with Nile Rodgers as a counter example.

~~~
Applejinx
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.

------
sametmax
The electric guitar is everywhere. It's just not the central piece anymore.
It's mainstream, get over it.

------
notspanishflu
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
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
Oh yes I do love Blues.

Joe Bonamassa's Nerdville is like I pictured heaven.

------
gciruelos
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.

------
afpx
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.

------
djhworld
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.

------
cushychicken
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.

------
thatwebdude
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
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
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".

------
flavio81
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
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.

------
DerekL
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
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.

------
Techn0logist
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.

------
OhWhoCares
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.

------
camus2
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.

------
splicer
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
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Hibike Euphonium has caused a surge in
popularity in brass bass instruments in Japan at least...

------
rwmj
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
I didn't downvote, but pegging the guitar as something with a "terrible user
interface" was probably your problem.

------
3327
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
We've now had over 30 years of house music. They won.

~~~
santaclaus
I'm pretty sure southern hip-hop has officially 'won' [1].

[1]
[http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/06/518780898/f...](http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/03/06/518780898/future-
makes-history-with-back-to-back-chart-toppers)

------
willtim
The guitar suffered one of its biggest losses with the recent passing of Allan
Holdsworth.

------
colbyh
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.

------
int_19h
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
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)

------
b1daly
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.

~~~
Applejinx
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.

~~~
b1daly
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!

------
superplussed
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
Kids don't want to be Mark Zuckerberg. They want to be Wiz Khalifa or Nicki
Minaj.

------
tyingq
Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys is about as close to a modern guitar hero as I
can think of.

------
wyclif
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
> 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.

When I started playing guitar, and took it seriously, my teachers always
insisted to buy up and used, instead of something you can afford new. Now,
with the salary of a software engineer, I still do it today.

When no one will buy a new car they have blowout sales on the lot. Perhaps
that's what we're trying to force, here :) Sadly it doesn't work that way.

------
codecamper
And the gradual rise of the keytar!

~~~
mcv
Didn't the keytar die after the 1980s?

------
norswap
Clickbait. Rumors of the guitar's death have been greatly exaggerated.

------
watertorock
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
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
"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?

------
kazinator
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._

------
estomagordo
Is it just me, or are HN links increasingly often to material behind paywalls?

~~~
dboreham
It's more that all content is increasingly behind paywalls, no?

------
rhapsodic
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.

~~~
tnecniv
> 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.

~~~
SwellJoe
"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 faces and
very catchy repetitive songs.

So, while pop goes wherever the wind blows, there are plenty of guitar rock
bands being started even today. Most major cities have a great music scene of
real bands playing real instruments. They may never again rule the charts the
way album rock did in the 70s, but they aren't extinct.

~~~
srean
I dont think he meant "better because you did it the hardway" but "better
because you spent time on the finer details of the phrasing"

That said, it seems you had a lot on your chest and it feels good to get it
off

~~~
tnecniv
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

------
0xbear
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.

------
pmalynin
Completely broken on Safari because of scroll jacking. Had to actually drag
the scroll bar until the text starts.

~~~
kevsim
Was pretty terrible on Chrome (on Mac) too FWIW

------
dschep
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
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.

------
justboxing
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
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
> but merge the previous comments in here.

Pretty cool! I did not know that you could do that.

------
douche
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
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
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.

------
molecule
Previous discussion yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621515)

------
paulsutter
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-
guitari...](http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-
guitarists-20111123)

~~~
cyberferret
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.

[0] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DfQC5qHhbo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DfQC5qHhbo)

~~~
tluyben2
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.

~~~
cyberferret
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-69Djk5HdQ)

~~~
tluyben2
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 ;)

So some things I find amazing:

[https://youtu.be/v1c1SaG_gKA](https://youtu.be/v1c1SaG_gKA) (with his huge
fingers, playing one note with feeling you cannot copy)

[https://youtu.be/9IrWyZ0KZuk](https://youtu.be/9IrWyZ0KZuk)

[https://youtu.be/3l0BLog1rQY](https://youtu.be/3l0BLog1rQY)

Also blues but

[https://youtu.be/G3LvhdFEOqs](https://youtu.be/G3LvhdFEOqs)

I like bass (I only have a bass left anyway);

[https://youtu.be/w_8NtbKsYuA](https://youtu.be/w_8NtbKsYuA)

[https://youtu.be/Kyw-Lere8Kc](https://youtu.be/Kyw-Lere8Kc) (did not watch
this but any Steve Harris)

and drums

[https://youtu.be/nC0QUrya3eA](https://youtu.be/nC0QUrya3eA)

[https://youtu.be/LQqNJwa5lig](https://youtu.be/LQqNJwa5lig)

Like said my definition is surely different than yours. And a lot of it is
taste.

