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The slow death of the electric guitar

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Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#321

Post by flavio81 »

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…

Yes, but most solos by Brian May are hugely musical and compliment the music.

Also, Jeff Beck's records are really interesting, good, entertaining, innovative solo guitar.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#322

Post by flavio81 »

Drums.

In 1980-82, many people in the recording industry thought that drums (as an acoustical instrument played by a human) were going to disappear. 1980s drum machines (starting with the Linn) were big hits and used everywhere. Entire records done with the Linn drum machines.

Even extraordinary, in-demand studio drummers like Jeff Porcaro, started buying their own and learning how to program it, advertising his "drum programming" services.

Yet, it is 2017 and drums are still a popular instrument.

The bottom line is -- it is really difficult to "kill" a musical instrument. I can think of only some instruments that have been really "killed" -- perhaps the Harspsichord and the lyra. This means you need 300 years to kill an instrument...

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#323

Post by autotune »

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…

You can also hire someone from anywhere in the world to transcribe songs for you and learn your heart out. As a yuppie with a heavy interest in indie music living in a city still filling to the brim with music this is literally the best time to be a musician.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#324

Post by autotune »

thatwebdude wrote: post #300

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 adu…

Songs and bands with good guitar parts:

Pink Floyd - Wishe You Were Here

Modest Mouse - Missed The Boat

Young The Giant - Apartment

The Joy Formidable - The Ladder is Ours

Death Cab For Cutie - Soul Meets Body

José González - Crosses

Maybeshewill - Red Paper Lanters

the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and all you need to do is look for it.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#325

Post by SwellJoe »

ThomPete wrote: post #299
SwellJoe wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#326

Post by SwellJoe »

iainmerrick wrote: post #318
SwellJoe wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Kate Bush was 19 when she released Wuthering Heights (and had been writing for years before that)." I've been comparing Lorde to Kate Bush for ages now, so I agree with you on that comparison (and I'm a huge Stevie Wonder fan, including his childhood songs..."Up Tight", recorded when he was 15, is among my favorites to holler along with while cooking dinner). But...there's gonna be a lot more of those kids. I'd bet…

I agree that these kids are all amazing (including Lorde, I hope she has a long and successful career like Bush and Wonder). I just don't buy that modern tech makes that much of a difference. It's just... different! If you see what I mean. :)

My argument has always been about access. Some kids are lucky enough to be brought up in a household with music all around; the internet makes it possible to any kid can surround themselves with brilliant music and musical knowledge. That's all. There still has to be a will to make music (or art, or tech, or whatever). It's just an enabler, a lever that wasn't accessible to most kids in the past, is all I'm saying.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#327

Post by elihu »

flavio81 wrote: post #322

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 "dru…

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.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#328

Post by elihu »

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?

Guitars that are substantially different in terms of construction or components do sound different from each other. However, electric guitarists have access to a tremendous variety of tools to alter their sound, so the differences in the basic sound of the guitar might be dominated by effects pedals or choice of amp and gain/EQ settings, or just simple things like which pickup you're using or how close to the bridge you pluck the strings.

Re: The slow death of the electric guitar

#330

Post by kochthesecond »

camus2 wrote: post #241
kochthesecond wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also argue metal was never mainstream. Come on, it is/was, at least in Europe. Plenty of famous metal bands in the late 90's early 2000. Even death metal had a few commercial successes.

Famous, maybe, but not mainstream. Pretty much the closest thing to ever touch prime time radio are Nothing Else Matters or maybe something by Linkin Park, both of which barely graze into metal.
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