The slow death of the electric guitar

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've been expecting the death of the electric guitar since the '80s, but it seems surprisingly resilient.

Edit: In addition, although I'm incredibly old and don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, it seems to me that in the post White Stripes era playing shitty second user equipment is widely considered cooler than playing expensive new equipment.

If there is a slow death to guitar than it is because it's almost impossible to earn any money with it, except for the lucky few. Learning an instrument like guitar takes many, many years, which is quite a hobby.. If you would spend the same amount of time in learning software development you are almost assured to have a solid income as result.

Thanks $deity not all new generation is into electronic. I have great hope when listening bands like Greta Van Fleet (ages between 18-21 years old) [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/NormansRareGuitars/videos

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJg4OJxp-co

Guitar playing lost its mojo when it was usurped by aficionados enamored by theory and technique and repulsed by swagger.

If I was 14 today, I'd grab a Maschine, load up some tracks in launchpad, and start emulating Avicii until I could pack a small dance hall.

The actual point it is trying to raise is the guitar is losing it's position as the centerpiece of pop music. The guitar solo, rhythm and lead guitars at the forefront. That's the element that's changed over the years.

Guitars still play a role in popular music, but they're just one part of a multi faceted layer of instruments and sounds.

Anecdotally, my own experience confirms the "robbed interest" theory. I got into bluegrass music early in college, found and listened to a bunch of it online, and ended up learning to play the dobro. I doubt I'd have ever managed that if I hadn't had the internet to interact with the genre's community, or consume more media in the same vein.

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 adults) want to play guitar, but the initial excitement and rush comes and goes fast as they have no real guitar music to get into anymore.

Pop music has changed, and that's fine. It gets hard to find a memorable or "cool" guitar part in pop music. The last one I can think of is "Party in the USA", and that, of course, is subjective (and quite old now).

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...

1. How much does an electric guitar cost? Comparatively, how much does it cost to pirate music software on the device you already own?

2. How many people do you need to form a rock band? Comparatively, how many people do you need to start producing?

3. How many sounds can an electric guitar make? Comparatively, how many sounds can a computer make?

Using a computer is cheaper, easier, more versatile, and more original than an electric guitar. Let it die.

The only argument to be made for the electric guitar is that you actually play it, and this applies to every other instrument, so I see no reason to mourn for the electric guitar in particular.

Edit: Maybe explain why I'm supposedly wrong instead of downvoting?

Delta blues, British invasion, white blues, hair metal, punk, grunge - new sounds were making waves and getting popular on the radio so kids latched on to them (partially because their parents hated it). but we haven't had a new guitar-based genre break the pop charts in the last 15-20 years so kids are only hearing new takes on old styles, like Mayer. brilliant musician but not nearly as exciting as the stuff their parents hate - EDM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axdNAyeLpcE

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.

Pop music is still uses the more traditional aspects of music composition, but only as a component of an ever expanding sonic palette.

Modern production is based increasingly on the ability to manipulate "sound" in a computer, and assemble it into listenable compositions.

The human voice remains one elements that is still generated by biological processes. But even the voice is subjected to increasing amounts of digital manipulation.

Learning to produce music in the modern style is also difficult, though in a different way from learning to play an instrument. Specifically, it is not a realtime process.

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.

This is compounded by the fact that the economic weight of the music industry is in the world of pop music, meaning the various strains of digitally created music. This is where the money comes in. People that want to make of a living doing music will increasingly need to be proficient in modern music production.

This creates a "virtuous cycle" which directs more resources towards this aspect of music, and a "vicious cycle" towards the traditional aspects of musical performance.

There are actually two significant technological forces that enable this structural shift in music creation. The first was the advent of recording, and mass distribution of music. It broke music away from the need to have human performers, playing in realtime, to hear music. This dramatically lowered the marginal cost of experiencing music.

The twin forces of time shifting and mass replication were turbocharged with the advent of digital audio. This, combined with the ever increased use of digital manipulated in music generation, amounts to a "singularity" in humans relationship with music. A line has been crossed that is permanent, it can never be uncrossed.

To be sure (ha ha), music will continue to be performed (and listened to) by live musicians, indefinitely. But it will be in the context of decreasing cultural influences.

The financial resources needed to support the creation of skilled musicians will continue to dwindle. This effect has been ongoing for decades in the world of orchestral music; now it has come for the world of all performed music.

One might think, what about live music? Won't there always be a demand for live, performed music? I don't think so. Or rather, it will continue the dramatic decline illustrated in the article by guitar sales.

Audiences seeme to respond just as well to shows that use essentially pre-recorded music. As long as there is a show of some kind, most of the music consuming population will not mind if the music heard at a show is "canned".

This makes me a bit sad, but ultimately the endeavors of human creativity will march on, inexorably charting new paths using the astonishing arsenal of software applications that are available these days at a very low cost.

http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17

Rock music has become more niche as the recording industry has moved away from the old model of AOR and LPs, where there would be a few good singles on a record at best, to the new model that streaming music has enabled with songs standing on their own merits, and the financial model that necessitates touring and live music.

It seems as if the downward pressure on guitar sales is a money and business problem, not a music problem. There's simply a glut of gear on the market. Reverb and eBay have made it a simple matter to pick up a quality used electric guitar.

Confession: I've been playing since I was 16 years old, and I didn't buy a new guitar (an acoustic) until I was over 30 years old. There was no need to. I could get whatever kind of guitar I could afford, at the price I wanted to pay, in excellent condition on the used market. And I still can. It made no sense for me to buy new. And it makes even less sense when it comes to amps. I know places where you can find a huge variety of amps in good to new condition.

The downward pressure is increasing now as the baby boom generation is retiring or passing on, and a lot of those guys who are still around are thinning out their collection which means many quite nice, well-cared-for instruments are coming onto the market all the time.

Richard Ash says: "Our customers are getting older, and they’re going to be gone soon." Baby boomer guitarists tend to have a lot of disposable income. They're far more likely to cruise right into a GC or Sam Ash store and make a GAS-induced impulse purchase of an additional guitar. But that doesn't change the fact that a lot of musicians don't have a lot of dough, and they're surfing eBay for deals.

Parallel to this phenomenon, the amount of information that buyers have at their fingertips, via the internet, has never been more abundant. Guitarists know more about the instruments than they did in the past. They know what woods, frets, necks, bodies, pickups, and electronics do and will work, and in what combinations they will be optimized. See the "partscaster" hobbyist trend.

After all, an electric guitar is essentially a plank of wood with a bolt-on neck and simple electronics and hardware. If you have one you like, and chances are you do if you're a musician who plays a lot, there's no urgent reason to let it go. If you love how it sounds, you just keep playing it.

On top of all that, there's additional downward pressure coming from the low end of the market, and the improvement in quality of guitars from Mexico and China. Just look at all the love for the Fender Squier line and instruments such as the Classic Vibe Telecaster.

To sum up, I'm not worried about electric guitar music. Rock music has been in a bad place before. In fact, there's been more than one dark age. It's cyclical. If you're a music history buff, you'll know the significance of this date: February 3rd, 1959. It was called "The Day the Music Died" for a reason. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper—gone. Elvis was in the Army. Little Richard had quit. Jerry Lee Lewis was in career trouble because he married his cousin. Rock 'N' Roll seemed like it was over in the early 1960's—as if it had all been a novelty from the start. The charts were swamped by sweater singers and crooners. The rough, raw, and electrifying music of the late 50's looked like it was gone forever.

Then the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds, the Animals, and all the other British Invasion groups re-invigorated the genre.

The same thing happened, to a lesser extent, with punk rock, and then grunge.

So I'm not worried about rock music. It's not dead. You can find it if you know where to look.

How many people have the patience for that? Particularly in Generation Internet Points Right Now?

It was a phenomenon fueled purely by MTV and the record companies. And, nothing is different from today in the following regard: all the heroes were current musicians. The teens I was surrounded with were largely ignorant of even the immediately previous generation of rock and roll.

Rock listening teenagers in the 80's weren't listening to Clapton. Most wouldn't have known who the heck is Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple or what have you; that had been a hundred years ago (i.e. some ten).

Most of the guitar heroes were only some 5 to 15 years older than the teenaged worshippers. They constantly changed. One year you'd go to music stores, and every kid walking in there would pick up a guitar and be doing some Van Halen thing. A few years later, every kid wanted to be Slash from Guns and Roses. Later still, Metallica made a bit of a comeback and you'd hear nothing but Enter Sandman covers.

Another thing to know is that there was a lot of criticism of the whole phenomenon while it was happening, even from the musicians themselves.

The following is an absolute must read to anyone interested in this topic. A 1987 Guitar Player magazine interview with Frank Zappa, titled "The 80's Guitar Clone".

http://www.afka.net/Articles/1987-01_Guitar_Player.htm

I remember this well, because I read it in print when it came out and it made an impression. I respected Zappa. I was one of the fairly rare teens of the generation who actually knew who Zappa is. My dad got me into Zappa. Because of Zappa, I knew who Stevie Vai was before he was a houshold name among guitar players.

Quotes:

Well, the one thing that seems to be more prevalent today is imitation. I think that the amount of copycat players in the marketplace today is significantly higher than it's ever been before. You see very few truly original guitarists and a whole bunch of people who wish they were Eddie Van Halen.

Q: [In the same way that Olympic records are always being broken, guitar playing seems to be getting faster and faster.]

Not only is it getting faster, but the solos themselves are becoming gymnastic routines – basically 8- and maybe 16-bar gymnastic routines that are stuck in the middle of songs about fairly common topics. The whole concept of extended improvisations that are compositions in progress is something that is pretty much gone from the pop music scene. That's one of the major losses for the '80s, I think. That's what I was addressing in the old article, talking about the process by which the kid sitting at home listens to a tape, and although he couldn't read it off the piece of paper, learns it by rote like a parrot, and winds up playing faster and faster and faster. I think that's really what's taking place.

DUPE ( 2 days ago) => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14617079

Compared to dicking around with a laptop and calling yourself a DJ, or slapping some drum loops and autotune on top of some vocals, rock music does require some actual work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621515

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-guitari...