Zulublues wrote:
Singe +1000000000
You have summed it up perfectly, although I must admit that Bob has a valid point that without experimentation, we would have no progression.
Well musical instruments, especially the stringed ones, seem a bit of an odd case to me because they evolved for centuries and suddenly that process of evolution stopped.
A few years back I visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. They had a "guitar" there. Built by Stradivarii. Not much like a modern guitar. Much smaller body. Much shorter scale. IIRC 5 pairs of strings (so a 10-stringer). Gut frets. A sound hole, but not a simple open hole like we have on modern flat tops. That instrument had evolved from earlier instruments that weren't called a "guitar" at all. Somewhere in time there's a common ancestor of the guitar and the violin. Seen an ud? That's a likely ancestor of the guitar. It's not even fretted.
So why have things ground to a halt in the musical instrument field? I think it must be something to do with recording (audio records and reliable hard copy transcriptions). We want instruments that sound like the records, that have the same range of notes that are in those transcriptions.
The electric guitar seems to have hit the doldrums fairly rapidly - given that it must have been preceded by some experimental instruments. Mass production is likely part of the puzzle too. Stradivarii could afford to apply the lessons he learned on each instrument in the next. CF Martin and Co can't do that, or can't work through a process of incremental modifications.
I think everything was going swimmingly until Mike Bloomfield and Eric Clapton decided that old Les Pauls sounded better. The SG was supposed to mark a step forward from the Les Paul, but Gibson were forced to take steps backward to meet the demand.
There have, of course, been steps forward. Gibson's RD series in the 70s. The first Steinbergers. Locking tuners and nuts. Sophisticated tremolo systems. The B-bender....
