The slow death of the electric guitar - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/the-slow-secret-death-of-the-electric-guitar/ <comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER4> 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.

<comment><USER5> 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).

<comment><USER4> 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.

<comment><USER6> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> 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.

<comment><USER7> The electric guitar is now what the saxophone was in the fifties: the iconic instrument of the hottest music of dad's generation.

<comment><USER8> 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.

<comment><USER7> OK, so it's the music of dad's dad's generation. I was double-extra right. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "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)

<comment><USER10> 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.

<comment><USER11> > _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.

<comment><USER12> 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.

<comment><USER11> > _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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> 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.

<comment><USER15> 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.

<comment><USER14> 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.

<comment><USER15> 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

<comment><USER14> 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!)

<comment><USER15> 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

<comment><USER16> 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)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 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?

<comment><USER18> > you can't control what's popular.

Artists don't, but someone does.

<comment><USER17> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 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.

<comment><USER20> 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.

<comment><USER21> I have to agree that metal was never mainstream. I always looked at metal as an evolution of punk.

<comment><USER22> 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.

<comment><USER23> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 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.

<comment><USER25> > 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> 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.

<comment><USER25> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> 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.

<comment><USER25> 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.

<comment><USER27> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 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.

<comment><USER28> 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.

<comment><USER15> 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.

<comment><USER28> Here is a nice one to start with:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmC5P_85vhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmC5P_85vhc)

<comment><USER15> 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)

<comment><USER28> I don't know either, thank you! Will listen on headphones later today, on the road now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 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.

<comment><USER30> 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).

<comment><USER31> 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...

<comment><USER32> 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.

<comment><USER31> 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 :)

<comment><USER30> 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.

<comment><USER29> 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.

<comment><USER30> 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.

<comment><USER29> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 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.

<comment><USER25> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 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.

<comment><USER34> > 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...

<comment><USER35> 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.

<comment><USER36> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> 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.

</comment><comment><USER38> 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.

</comment><comment><USER39> 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.

<comment><USER40> 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)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> 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.

<comment><USER42> I would have thought "Oregon Trail" was solidly Gen-X? I think I played that in the mid-1980s?

<comment><USER41> Early '90s. There are lots of versions of it. I played the tail end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> 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.

<comment><USER44> Really what you want to look at is sales of guitar _strings_ as an indicator of how much guitar is being played.

<comment><USER25> 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!

<comment><USER44> 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...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> 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.

</comment><comment><USER46> 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.

</comment><comment><USER47> 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.

</comment><comment><USER48> The clarinet industry went through a similar decline. Seems like people just don't want to pick up the old liquorice stick.

</comment><comment><USER49> 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.

<comment><USER25> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Naive question: Do these various electric guitar models (Gibson, Fender, etc) actually sound distinctive? Or is it all about brand cachet?

<comment><USER51> 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).

<comment><USER52> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> 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.

<comment><USER25> The parallels to technology careers and music backgrounds is staggering, for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> 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.

</comment><comment><USER55> 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).

<comment><USER10> That was legit

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> 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 :)

<comment><USER57> I give you Daft Punk with Nile Rodgers as a counter example.

<comment><USER32> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> The electric guitar is everywhere. It's just not the central piece anymore. It's mainstream, get over it.

</comment><comment><USER59> 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)

<comment><USER25> 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.

<comment><USER59> Oh yes I do love Blues.

Joe Bonamassa's Nerdville is like I pictured heaven.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> 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.

</comment><comment><USER61> 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.

</comment><comment><USER62> 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.

</comment><comment><USER63> 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.

</comment><comment><USER25> 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).

<comment><USER64> 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).

<comment><USER25> 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".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> 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...

<comment><USER26> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> 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.

<comment><USER25> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> 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.

</comment><comment><USER68> 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.

</comment><comment><USER69> 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.

</comment><comment><USER70> It's time another instrument got a chance at the spotlight. I'm going to call it: the next big thing is Tuba heroes!

<comment><USER26> Well, I wouldn't be surprised if Hibike Euphonium has caused a surge in popularity in brass bass instruments in Japan at least...

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> 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?

<comment><USER25> I didn't downvote, but pegging the guitar as something with a "terrible user interface" was probably your problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> 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.

<comment><USER73> We've now had over 30 years of house music. They won.

<comment><USER74> 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)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> The guitar suffered one of its biggest losses with the recent passing of Allan Holdsworth.

</comment><comment><USER76> 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 - <USER2> 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.

</comment><comment><USER77> 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)

<comment><USER25> 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)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> 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.

<comment><USER32> 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.

<comment><USER78> 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!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> 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.

<comment><USER14> Kids don't want to be Mark Zuckerberg. They want to be Wiz Khalifa or Nicki Minaj.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys is about as close to a modern guitar hero as I can think of.

</comment><comment><USER52> 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.

<comment><USER25> > 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> And the gradual rise of the keytar!

<comment><USER82> Didn't the keytar die after the 1980s?

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Clickbait. Rumors of the guitar's death have been greatly exaggerated.

</comment><comment><USER84> 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?

<comment><USER85> 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.

<comment><USER86> "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?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> 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._

</comment><comment><USER88> Is it just me, or are HN links increasingly often to material behind paywalls?

<comment><USER57> It's more that all content is increasingly behind paywalls, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> 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.

<comment><USER90> > 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.

<comment><USER30> "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.

<comment><USER91> 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

<comment><USER90> 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.

<comment><USER30> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> 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.

</comment><comment><USER93> Completely broken on Safari because of scroll jacking. Had to actually drag the scroll bar until the text starts.

<comment><USER94> Was pretty terrible on Chrome (on Mac) too FWIW

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> 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.

<comment><USER25> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> 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)

<comment><USER97> 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.

<comment><USER96> > but merge the previous comments in here.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> 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.

<comment><USER99> 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.

<comment><USER32> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Previous discussion yesterday:

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

</comment><comment><USER101> 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)

<comment><USER9> 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)

<comment><USER102> 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.

<comment><USER9> 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)

<comment><USER102> 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.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to think about OO - <AUTHOR> http://misko.hevery.com/2009/07/31/how-to-think-about-oo/

<comment><USER2> Great article and REALLY great blog. Definitely going to be added to my reading list.</comment>