Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The slow death of the electric guitar

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 343 posts

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#271

Post by jghn »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #198
larrydag wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 indu…

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.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#272

Post by Symbiote »

badosu wrote: post #183
agumonkey wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) - htt…

I'll add this, since there's the whole dark electronic dance music scene (the music those kids wearing black with bits of neon on it listen to).

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwuOHgateiw (Synthpop / futurepop / EBM)

(And beyond that, there's the harsh/industrial genres, but I can't think of anything I'd recommend for this discussion.)

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#273

Post by colbyh »

coldtea wrote: post #263
colbyh wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does it feel up on that high horse? there are no absolutes in music (as an art form) so you really can't say that Diplo is less important than Dylan until long after both are dead. even then, Diplo is influencing a ton of kids and will have impact that way for decades to come so where do you draw the line? Dylan himself probably never thought he'd be as important a musician as his heroes - Elvis, Little Richard,…

> how does it feel up on that high horse? It feels great. It's called culture, and being aware of it, not a blind consumer of what tastes good (McDonalds tastes good too). > there are no absolutes in music (as an art form) No, but human culture has, and always had, a way to prfioritize what's important and what's not besides mere consumption or influence (crap has also influenced a lot of imitators). > Dylan himself…

>It feels great. It's called culture, and being aware of it, not a blind consumer of what tastes good (McDonalds tastes good too).

oh please, elitism isn't culture it's a perspective. you have a perspective about the things you like which is no more or less valid than anyone else's. no matter how enlightened you think you are when it comes to music I promise there is an entire subculture that finds your tastes closer to "blind consumption" than "true music fan". 100% relative.

>No, but human culture has, and always had, a way to prfioritize what's important and what's not besides mere consumption or influence (crap has also influenced a lot of imitators).

please, please describe for me this mechanism by which "human culture" has prioritized important art. I would love to hear what unassailable framework you think draws a line between "important" and "crap".

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#274

Post by hnarturpl »

rhapsodic wrote: post #17

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 frustr…

Maybe the instant gratification and easier learning curve just doesn't give them the same amount of gratification that we got from tabs an figuring stuff out our self. I've learnt songs from tabs on the internet but the resources people have currently are amazing and make the process big learning easier.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#275

Post by joshuata »

zwieback wrote: post #266
scarecrowbob wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

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.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#276

Post by eyeJam »

jdietrich wrote: post #248
eyeJam wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can't break your headstock off — a quite common way to damage your guitar Really? Are people using their guitars as hammers? I think it's pretty damn hard to break a headstock off. Much more common damage to a guitar is denting the frets, distorting the neck or busting the tuning pegs. I'd put "breaking off the headstock" as the 99th percentile of common ways people materially damage their guitar.

Gibson guitars are notorious for broken headstocks, due to an archaic and inherently defective design. Modern scarf-jointed headstocks do occasionally break, but they're more prone to cracking around the machine head holes. https://www.google.com/search?q=gibson+broken+headstock&tbm=... http://jacksinstrumentservices.com/why-do-les-paul-headstock...

I stand corrected

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#277

Post by KhanMahGretsch »

Applejinx wrote: post #137
KhanMahGretsch wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

But that's a real PART. It's kind of like the Jay Graydon solo in Steely Dan's 'Peg'. Yes, you can have a bunch of exciting notes doing things, but it can't be just any bunch of notes: fast or slow, content matters.

Absolutely, content matters, and so does context. Take the solo in Living Colour's "Cult of Personality", a gibberish mess of seemingly random notes; he abuses that instrument like it owes him a lot of money! It works perfectly in the song however, so I suppose it's all a matter of taste.

p.s. Aja is an absolute classic :)

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#278

Post by elihu »

moogly wrote: post #217
d--b wrote: post #27

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. Technological…

> 1. Technologically the instrument ran its course. While the tech was still innovative in the 90s with the new digital effects, it hasn't changed much in 20 years. This is... whilst not exactly incorrect, it's not the whole truth either. The article touched a little bit on this with the robotic tuner thing, but didn't fully explain why. In my experience partaking in internet guitar forums over the decades, the vast…

I don't think it's just conservatism. When buying a guitar, most buyers are primarily concerned with three things: does it sound good, is it easy to play, and does it look good.

Graphite and carbon fiber has superior properties in some respect, but substituting carbon fiber for wood doesn't necessarily make the guitar sound or look better or improve playability. Compared to acoustic instruments, electric guitars are low maintenance and durable. People in very humid or very dry environments might prefer carbon fiber to wood, but for most of us, wood is fine.

Robotuners similarly don't solve a significant problem that most players have, and they're complex and probably costly to make and introduce a battery to a guitar that didn't need one before. The convenience of automatic tuners probably aren't worth the costs.

Headless guitars similarly don't solve a particular problem, as far as I can tell. I expect to be able to rest a guitar on leg and not have it tip one way or the other while I'm playing. Most guitars balance fine with a proper headstock. I haven't tried a Steinberger, maybe they're really great guitars, but there's no particular reason for me to expect that I would enjoy playing a headless guitar more than a "normal" guitar. (Note: I have built headless cigar box guitars [1], and I kind of like the design, but that's a bit different than a full-size electric.)

True Temperament is more interesting because that actually is addressing a real problem, sort of. Electric guitars are pretty bad when it comes to tuning, but the problem isn't so much intonation, the bigger problem is that 12-tone equal temperament is a compromise -- you can sound okay in every key (12-TET) or you can sound really good in one particular key (just intonation), but you can't have both. (The latter alternative leads you to some interesting looking fingerboards [2].)

I would be more interested in the TT guitars if they were focusing on temperament rather than intonation errors. (I suspect they may actually be doing that, but their marketing material says they're correcting intonation. I'm skeptical that any normal guitars would need such extreme corrections just to play in exact 12-TET unless the action is set unreasonably high.)

TT also has the problem that normal frets can be repaired or replaced by any competent luthier using ordinary guitar tools, but I wouldn't even know you would do a fret dress on TT guitar. Maybe you'd need a special crowning file that goes around corners or something?

I think there are some ways that the electric guitar could be improved, but to some degree, I think unscientific emotional hand-wavy reasons can be a better guide to making an instrument people want than to approach the problem by using science to optimize specific criteria based on some untested assumption that optimizing that criteria will make the guitar better.

[1] http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/cbg/neck2.jpg

[2] http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/CAM00441.jpg

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#279

Post by lz400 »

coldtea wrote: post #259
lz400 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shows how subjective things are. I'm really into electronic music, or at least was. Some of your links are absolute masterpieces like autechre or aphex twin. Some of the the other trance stuff is so far below in my opinion that don't belong together.

> Some of the the other trance stuff is so far below in my opinion that don't belong together. The trance stuff is not that "below" in quality, it's more of the "subjective opinion" thing that's not to taste, if not a reaction to automatically associate "trance == bad". It's not like I linked to some cheesy GOA stuff. If you look at those "trance" pieces, the craftmanship and complexity is obvious, sometimes to the p…

Again, that's what I said, it's subjective. To me infected mushroom and splonge (or however it's spelled) is nice sounding gym music, very little complexity or depth. It sounds like 1000 other trance or rave songs and little else than overlying the same synth patterns over and over. Honestly first time I played with a synth and turned on the arpeggiator I suddenly lost a bit of respect to most dance music out there. Nice production, little art. Autechre for example if a completely different thing, people who have created a completely unique and risky musical vocabulary and have been defiantly experimental all their careers.

But this is just like, my opinion :)

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#280

Post by lz400 »

agumonkey wrote: post #170
lz400 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shows how subjective things are. I'm really into electronic music, or at least was. Some of your links are absolute masterpieces like autechre or aphex twin. Some of the the other trance stuff is so far below in my opinion that don't belong together.

Maybe he tried to give a broad panel of electronic music. Autechre does have its own universe, I didn't listen more than 2 minutes in because the link loaded slowly and 2h made me skip.

It's the whole record that's why it's 2h. If you have Spotify you can listen to them piecemeal. I recommend Tri Repetae. It's my favorite record of them. It's not for everyone, and it's definitely not dance music. To me, they managed to make music that is a strange and poignant mixture of the cold and robotic and warm and human. It's electronic music at its best, something that can't really be achieved in other genres.
Post reply on HN