The "death" of the electric guitar..... BULL

[bluesmann]

clean out the cookies and they'll go away.

[catscurlyear]

i think what today's kids are missing out on is the good old tennis racket . tennis racket before a guitar,it`s a well trodden path ,even Steve Vai went that rout.if all fails we might at least have a few more tennis champs.

[RaVenCAD]

I have an 11 year old and exactly ONE of her friends play a stringed instrument, and that's a ukulele. None of them have any appreciation for guitar-centric music. However, the young man that mows my lawn is passionate about guitar and is a wee bit of a celebrity. Some of you might recognize the name, but I'll spare you. Point is, there are still beacons of light in the music world. The guitar will never truly die, even if the industry "only" sells a million new guitars per year.

[bluesmann]

Wow! does that ever bring back memories. Broom, tennis racket, guitar

[catscurlyear]

yeah! ha ha, Jimi used to play the broom,upside down of course.

[GAS Man]

But writers have to make a living' date=' so they come up with provocative headlines.....[/quote']

 

I agree with that statement, it was indeed there merely as an attention grabber. So I quickly dropped the notion of the headline and moved into the gist.

 

I agree with others that the writer presents a lot of good points.

 

It also reminded me of the statement that "The Electric Guitar put a lot of horn players out of a job". And so indeed, newer types of music such as Rap and Electronica have had some effect.

 

But I think there's another issue that they only just barely touch on.

 

Yeah, that age group is passing on, but also what did we experience??

 

We experienced the proliferation of guitar catalogs coming into our homes in the early 90s. Some are still around, others have disappeared. But suddenly you no longer had to travel, sometimes fairly long distances, to arrive at some ma n pa store with very limited selections and stiff pricing. The new catalogs were more exciting to me than Playboys in the 60s and 70s.

 

Then that was followed up by the mega-store GCs popping up in all larger cities. Virtual Disneyland's of GUITAR.

 

Around the same time, on-line companies began to flourish eliminating most of the catalog business. (I can't remember the last time MF bothered to send me a catalog despite my frequent purchases, and Carvin is no longer trying to tempt me.) On-line sales continued to develop with actual pictures and weights of the specific guitar you'd be buying + 3 year free financing.

 

All these things were big turn-ons to us.

 

But now they are just ordinary.

 

Affordable electric tuners arrived around the very late 80s to early 90s eliminating the biggest stumbling block for many learners, and more readily available sheet music and tab of popular music, plus on-line tutorials also exploded, all of which facilitated folks taking up the instrument. My first guitar book in the early 70s was some dumb Mel Bay book with some dork on the cover wearing a cowboy hat and songs like "Yellow River" inside. But try to find something else if you lived in a rural area around that time. Most guitar players of the era either had some formal musical training or were more gifted at learning by ear, playing that record over and over.

 

So there's still GAS, but it's just not "as hot"

 

And even look at the changing culture here on HCEG. It was dang near an ongoing braggadosish competition of who was buying/collecting the most gear the fastest. Now a forumite starting a NGD post every 2 or 3 weeks would not be greeted as warmly here since values of mass consumption vs playing have self corrected to some degree. HCEG used to rip. Many threads would pop up about some new guitar or amp, or "deals" on gear with some fairly spirited opinions being bantered back and forth. You'd see a new post drop off the front page in hours, not days or weeks. And we've all seen the "stop shopping and learn to play your guitar" posts, and that was hard to argue with. My only counterpoint, which is valid, is that new gear can inspire one to keep picking up the instrument. But the end result can be a troubling mass, which luckily is rarely a current goal for many here.

 

Point being, the marketing and resulting consumption was a phenomena. And the marketing is now just the standard rather than attention grabbing.

 

So a 30-odd-year-long bubble on consumption has burst, but obviously the electric guitar is going nowhere, it's here to stay. Obviously folks like George Gruhn are deep into the trees so it's hard to see the entire forest to really fully understand all the reasons for a down turn. Like who really knows how many guitars we all own, versus how many people own guitars. The numbers of guitars people have now accumulated would have been regarded beyond OCD but rather sheer lunacy a few decades ago. One, two or three, would have been about it.

 

I was born in the late 50s and even music 10 years older than me was completely foreign to my tastes. So I'm often amused to see young people wearing T-shirts with the images of Rock bands that disbanded some 30 or more years before their birth. It's not like I'm sporting T-shirt bearing the likeness of artists from the 20s, 30s or 40s (although actually, there were some great jazz and blues artists during those times). Rock guitar music is enduring.

 

So yeah, some small change in musical influences and a bigger change in consumer habits. /story

 

Guitar is here to stay, and possibly credit should be given to one of the heaviest rock n rollers of all time JSB who predated EVH.

 

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[Grant Harding]

Not trying to be difficult, but haven't you been in the business of writing about music for the last 30 years Mr Anderton? I've been reading and learning from you forever. Possibly puts you in a biased position as well doesn't it?

[AlamoJoe]

Lot of good points being made in this thread. Good reading. I'll take issue with one point being repeated in several of them though. Along the lines of..

 

"Kids are lazy and don't want to take the time to learn how to play an instrument."

 

I take issue with that. Condemnation of a generation is what that is, and I for one won't accept it. My Great niece just got a full ride scholarship to a State University...For Clarinet...Clarinet. How many songs that hit the big time lately can you name that featured Clarinet? She lives and breathes music, has also learned how to play piano and sax and is dead serious about music. The friends she has are too...Real music. Played by musicians...On musical instruments.

 

I refuse to believe she is in the minority in her generation. What careens through the airwaves or washes around on the Internet, or sells at Amazon may indicate where the market is heading...It doesn't necessarily indicate the real direction of music in general.

 

Electric guitars are indelibly part of our collective culture now They won't go away. Nor will woodwinds...There will be ebbs and flows. It is natural.

 

There will always be those, in this generation and the next, and the ones after that, that will not be happy with pushing buttons and splicing loops together to make music. They will want an instrument in their hands. There will always be the one in a hundred that wants to plug in and play LOUD.

 

 

 

[AJ6stringsting]

Back in the late 1970's , Pete Townsend of the Who, said the guitar and Rock was both going to fade and die.

He was so wrong, bands like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, AC-DC, Van Halen, Rush and others , prove Mr. Townsend and other doubters, sooooo wrong.

[badpenguin]

And AJ, every band you mentioned is at least 40 years old.

[Anderton]

I am not knocking "DJ Bobo"' date=' but musician...? No. Entertainer, yes. Artist...? Possibly. Musician, oh HELL no. They manipulate work already done, to please an audience. Is it creative? Some think so. But calling them musicians is like calling the kid on his iPhone a musician, because they can do beats and whatnot.[/quote']

 

Having done DJ sets as a solo act (and jammed on guitar with DJs since 2000), I have to say that yes, some - particularly the club and producer DJs, not so much the mobile DJs - are musicians. Instead of taking 12 notes and rearranging them in different ways, they take different sounds and rearrange them in different ways. It takes talent and skill to keep 4,000 Germans whacked out on ecstasy entertained for four hours without making a single mistake Granted, it's a skill set that's more akin to arranging, engineering, or conducting, But DJs need to have a strong musical sense.

 

Also, looks can be deceiving when people think DJs "just push buttons." One of the most amazing DJs I ever saw created what sounded like songs, and it would be easy to assume he just pushed a button and played a song. But he was taking multiple, individual bits and pieces of drums, bass, vocals, etc. and weaving them together so cohesively it sounded like a song. I don't think it's possible to do that without a musical sensibility.

 

[Anderton]

But getting back on topic...the "death" of the electric guitar headline is just a silly piece of clickbait to grab attention. If you zoom out, you'll find that the "market share" of stringed instruments is simply changing. 1,400,000 ukuleles were sold in the US alone in 2016, three times what they were selling in 2009. Add that to the electric guitar, and assuming Postboy got his facts straight, that's 2,400,000 stringed instruments. But wait...there are also acoustic guitars, and 1,360,000 were sold in the US in 2016. Now we're up to 2,360,000 guitars sold, and 3,760,000 guitars + ukuleles.

 

Nor did Postboy actually touch on the one thing that really could impact new guitar sales. The electric guitar has been so popular for so long there is a huge market for used instruments. In spite of this, about 2.3 million guitars are sold in the US each year, and 750,000 in the UK alone. Overall sales of guitars continue to increase, and if you count ukuleles - the new "starter guitar" - then it's a big increase.

 

The main premise seems to be tied to a non-sequitur - that a lack of "guitar heroes" means the end of the electric guitar. I don't play guitar because Jimmy Page did...and I doubt that today's generation is any different. Sure, guitar heroes may inspire people to pick up the guitar, but so does hearing a friend sing a cool song while accompanied by acoustic guitar.

 

The "market share" of stringed instruments will always change; I don't think a lot of lutes are being sold any more. It's possible that electric guitars reached a peak that will not be attained again, sort of like harpsichords. But I've been around long enough to read lots of newspaper articles about the death of rock and roll, EDM, the guitar, internet forums, etc. They're still around...newspapers, not so much

 

(FYI - Newspapers overall have lost circulation for 28 years straight. Digital is helping a bit, but nowhere near enough to offset the conventional losses. So we get half-baked sensationalist stories designed to get eyeballs instead of actual news. Oh well.)