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.
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.
> “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.
“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.”
Emphasis on a bunch of kids. As someone who likes guitar it pains me to say that this seems true.
My son is 11, in a (very) music-heavy school. When I was his age I think almost every boy (and some girls) in my class learnt guitar - it was the instrument.
In my son's class I think there are 2 learning it.
The guitar will never die, but the popularity isn't what it was.
>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.
I'm sure we can find kids into Foxtrot too, but I don't think we'll see a Foxtrot revival.
Emulating Clapton, or Hendrix, or Page, etc was a mass phenomenon, which is what the "bunch" alludes to.
The last to inspire anything of that kind in a mass way would be someone like Jack White, and even that is was more subdued and fragmented that what it used to be.
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.
You envy him for the available content and equipment, but he should envy kids in the 80s of the ease with which you could build a well-paying career if you played well. Nowadays you better produce songs on your laptop because the money earned with streaming might not suffice for 5 people. The trajectory of what is possible is just way flatter.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That could be part of it. Demystifying something erodes some of the appeal.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It reminds me a lot of the 80's when synths and keyboards took center stage for a little while. Yet guitar never really died during that time. Guitar is still around its just not center stage.
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.
> 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.
"90% of kids learning guitar quit in the first 2 months" - I wonder if when the industry was doing well it mainly just meant that there were a lot more guitars out there collecting dust.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Guitars (and other instruments) will remain even with the prevalence of electronic means of creation, in the same way the paintbrush and pencil are in no danger from Photoshop. The typewriter was replaced by software because instruments and implements offer what a typewriter cannot.
Nuance.
The "art" of paintings, drawings, and music lives in the nuances and life of the art; the imperfections or subtle changes. Writing is an assembly of language characters to convey the art. The nuance is how those character elements are arranged and interpreted, and thus the means of doing so are unimportant. However, an errant bristle or subtle slide down a string give life and nuance to an art without explicitly standing out on its own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 sales" lists or music schools.
[+] [-] analog31|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] d--b|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cyberferret|8 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] nl|8 years ago|reply
Emphasis on a bunch of kids. As someone who likes guitar it pains me to say that this seems true.
My son is 11, in a (very) music-heavy school. When I was his age I think almost every boy (and some girls) in my class learnt guitar - it was the instrument.
In my son's class I think there are 2 learning it.
The guitar will never die, but the popularity isn't what it was.
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
I'm sure we can find kids into Foxtrot too, but I don't think we'll see a Foxtrot revival.
Emulating Clapton, or Hendrix, or Page, etc was a mass phenomenon, which is what the "bunch" alludes to.
The last to inspire anything of that kind in a mass way would be someone like Jack White, and even that is was more subdued and fragmented that what it used to be.
[+] [-] aguynamedben|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] manmal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hydraulix989|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhapsodic|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tnecniv|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hnarturpl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autotune|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|8 years ago|reply
That could be part of it. Demystifying something erodes some of the appeal.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] davnicwil|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kaoD|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kowdermeister|8 years ago|reply
This guy comes to my mind: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafxR2HWJRmMfSdyZXvZMTw :)
[+] [-] dahart|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] hashkb|8 years ago|reply
Artists don't, but someone does.
[+] [-] wvh|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kochthesecond|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrydag|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizzicato7|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thatwebdude|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robryan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pica_soO|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elihu|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thatwebdude|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quadrangle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatwebdude|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
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
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.
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
I especially love the work that he did with Jean Luc Ponty, and UK's Rendez-Vous 6:02.
[+] [-] moogly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SwellJoe|8 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] CodeTheInternet|8 years ago|reply
Nuance.
The "art" of paintings, drawings, and music lives in the nuances and life of the art; the imperfections or subtle changes. Writing is an assembly of language characters to convey the art. The nuance is how those character elements are arranged and interpreted, and thus the means of doing so are unimportant. However, an errant bristle or subtle slide down a string give life and nuance to an art without explicitly standing out on its own.
[+] [-] aries1980|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akytt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatwebdude|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] johan_larson|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] clavalle|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kristofferR|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] logn|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ssharp|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] SAI_Peregrinus|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jessaustin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojosilva|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fredley|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
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 sales" lists or music schools.