The slow death of the electric guitar • Hacker News Board

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#181

Post by agumonkey » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:37 PM UTC

badosu wrote: post #177

agumonkey wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Send me names, I'd gladly feed my ears with beyond jazz subtleties. I'm all for the musical experience, as long as it's well done. But to the point, the thread is about mainstream guitar playing going away. So I was talking about mainstream electro. Surely there are deeply satisfying electronic music out there if you dig.

Made a selection with an eclectic variety of modern electronic sounds, enjoy! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnXVIsMimHY (a gem of prog trance) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyORieDhpkg (dark electronic jazz) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rk1K5Mmnbg (black metal + breakbeat + classical) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2GDEKCIVTE (amazing psy chill album) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQKsuZ5a3_U To…

Thank you very much, especially for the annotated subgenre :)

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#182

Post by logn » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:40 PM UTC

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.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#183

Post by badosu » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:41 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #181

badosu wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Made a selection with an eclectic variety of modern electronic sounds, enjoy! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnXVIsMimHY (a gem of prog trance) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyORieDhpkg (dark electronic jazz) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rk1K5Mmnbg (black metal + breakbeat + classical) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2GDEKCIVTE (amazing psy chill album) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQKsuZ5a3_U To…

Thank you very much, especially for the annotated subgenre :)

I was editing it and it was marked as dupe, here are some additional ones that could not make into it:

- https://soundcloud.com/isqamusic/6_tree-eater (can't describe)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iBaQrDW544 (dark ambient)

- https://soundcloud.com/crazy_astronaut/funky-shit-2014-with-... (well made mainstrean-ish hitech + dubstep)

- https://soundcloud.com/lucasnassar/toadstool-yamavoodoom-cel... (psycore)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyiB_rkob8o (mainstrean-ish well made dubstep)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tb0CwlQW0M (drum and bass)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBUi-ZYN4QM (trip hop)

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#184

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:44 PM UTC

Applejinx wrote: post #150

b1daly wrote: post #34

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. Po…

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 tra…

> you just can't 'play an instrument' as part of that mix, the timing is way way too tight.

Live drumming has been part of "live performance" of electronic music for decades now. The drummers follow a click track. It doesn't seem to bother audiences.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#185

Post by norswap » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:52 PM UTC

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

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#186

Post by ojosilva » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:52 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #108

ojosilva wrote: post #101

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 h…

> One can't just look at revenue, debt and Moody's rating of guitar makers and dealers and proclaim the guitar, the most popular instrument today by a huge margin, is dying. The "most popular instrument today" is misleading, considering modern R&B, Hip Hop (and to a lesser degree) EDM dominate everything charts and sales wise, and they use mostly computer DAWs and plugins, something that wont register in "instrument…

Can't compare a DAW to an instrument though. Lots of guitar players use DAWs as well, so that's not really comparable. It's a whole different segment in fact.

To correctly account for "computer-only musicians" we would have to also eliminate electronic artists that have a primary instrument such as keyboards or drums/percussion. And in any case, computer-based instruments do register sales and have their place in most music schools.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#187

Post by zwieback » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:55 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #175

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.…

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.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#188

Post by zwieback » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:57 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #121

johan_larson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funny how saxophone was a big sidewinger in 80s pop too.

I tried and failed at playing the solo from Urgent on my sax

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#189

Post by alexilliamson » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 1:57 PM UTC

kochthesecond wrote: post #160

wvh wrote: post #126

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 pat…

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.

I would argue that KISS and Van Halen were incredibly main stream and are usually considered metal... at least van Halen

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#190

Post by ThomPete » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 2:01 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #59

ThomPete wrote: post #2

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…

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 rol…

There are many types of solos there are many types of music that uses it as an integral part and where it makes sense. Those might be types of music you don't like but that does not make solos pointless.

So each to their own of course but a very weird comment.