The slow death of the electric guitar • Hacker News Board

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#221

Post by moogly » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:39 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #73

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…

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. And even if you have trained musicians, the are all kinds of social factors that can make things hard, especially in a pop/rock group: infighting, drug abuse, wanting…

To be fair, Zappa had a full-time employee helping him with the Synclavier, so he couldn't cut everyone off :)

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#222

Post by moogly » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:40 PM UTC

kyberias wrote: post #69

Animats wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human voice remains one elements that is still generated by biological processes. That's being fixed.[1] That's a Vocaloid, which is a 10 year old technology. You can buy the software for about $100, from Yahama. "Just put in a melody and lyrics and your virtual singer will sing for you." Vocaloid still requires a cooperative live singer to train the system, but there are research papers which indicate that autom…

Yeah and that sounds absolutely horrible.

I agree, but the same can be said for a lot of vocalists on the radio today.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#223

Post by analog31 » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:40 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #211

zwieback wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have seen a double bass player with a homemade teardown instrument that was claimed to fit into an overhead bin.

Well, fortunately or unfortunately for me, I'm not good enough to get called on a fly gig, but there's some priceless pictures in Rufus Reid's The Evolving Bassist on how to load a bass into an airline seat. I doubt that's still possible today.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#224

Post by analog31 » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:43 PM UTC

scarecrowbob wrote: post #201

zwieback wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

I had a compact sedan for a long time, and can confirm your observation. In fact, it worked best for me to feed the bass into the driver's side rear door (of a 4-door car), scroll first, and then upside down in the passenger seat.

Now I have a little hatchback, and am quite happy. Granted, transportation is still an issue -- I'm floored when I hear about bassists getting around in NYC using cabs, the subway, etc. But it's the only instrument that I play well enough for anybody to actually want me to play it, and I do love the bass.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#225

Post by gone35 » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:44 PM UTC

kaoD wrote: post #90

agumonkey wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

De gustibus non est disputandum...

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#226

Post by timfrietas » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:50 PM UTC

jvandonsel wrote: post #220

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

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).

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#227

Post by kerkeslager » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:57 PM UTC

hashkb wrote: post #216

dahart wrote: post #213

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 e…

> you can't control what's popular. Artists don't, but someone does.

Eh, I believe that to some extent. Someone decided that Black Sabbath would be more popular than The Pixies. But I don't think anyone decided that shared style of music would become popular: that was a function of sentiment at the time.

From the perspective of a hypothetical overlord, controlling what people want costs money. It's cheaper to predict what people want and sell them that. Of course if you predict wrong, you have to exert some control to make sure you recoup your investment. But music isn't an industry where you have to manufacture demand, so it's cheaper not to.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#228

Post by codecamper » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:57 PM UTC

And the gradual rise of the keytar!

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#229

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 3:59 PM UTC

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.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#230

Post by throwawaylolol » Sun, Jun 25, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #215

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think even the most flexible definition of guitar hero shouldn't include Taylor Swift. I'd say that style of guitar - using it for texture under the song - is antithetical to guitar heroism. The guitar became heroic because it broke out of the background music section of the band that supports the singer and became a star in its own right. It was another avenue of expression just by itself. Strumming some chords on…

An electric guitar is really just six independent oscillators with an archaic user interface...

And music is really just a the electrical impulses from bunch of soundwaves banging up against the membrane in our eardrums. Jeez, that kind of reductionism really kills the magic (not to mention ignoring the talent and feel involved for an artist to make those oscillators 'speak' to you)