Thoughts on the guitar

Bob-Dubery · 2010-02-24T15:00:01+00:00

"Perhaps nothing in music compares with the versatility offered by the guitar. The instrument has served as the basis for masterworks in classical, jazz, rock, pop, rhythm and blues and everything in between. The list of accomplished players covers the gamut of styles and knows no geographic boundaries. The guitar is just accessible enough so that anyone can pick it up and within a few days feel as though they are making a musical connection with the world. But for those who stick with it, there are infinite varieties of styles, genres and approaches that have made the instrument both ubiquitous and unique. " That's according to Robert Santelli, Executive Director of The GRAMMY Museum.

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And Ebow, Volume pedal and a Bassman... from pianississimo to fortississimo in as controlled a manner as you like... Tongue

Ah, the "over achiever" pedal. Does it count when you could realistically apply this to other instruments (with the right ammount of research)? Does it make the guitar more unique or does it just make it more obscure?

singemonkey

It certainly wouldn't apply only to the guitar. I know Hammond Organs, and I assume traditional organs too, have a volume pedal, no? It would be more to combine the volume pedal with the other strengths of the guitar.

Riaan wrote
So basically guitar is more popular because of its players and the image it carries
There is of course, a Freudian explanation for that also...

See: http://www.yaledailynews.com/opinion/guest-columns/2008/03/25/myth-making-men-reify-the-almighty-phallus/

That might explain why the keyboard player just does not have the same appeal.... ?

Wow. That's some sloppy journalism right there ("Yes, I got this factoid from a penis-enhancement-product Web site" Er... Why quote it then?). Not the impression of Yale Daily News reporting quality I got from watching The Gilmour Girls ? I guess almost all undergrads find Fread's thumb-suck theory that anything longer than it is wide is representative of a penis - even if it would be useless otherwise - extremely appealing after getting out of schools in which the p-word was unacceptable.

Having said that, in the case of rock guitar, it's definitely a factor.

Bob-Dubery

I remember something that Trevor Rabin once said. Well I can't remember it verbatim, but I recall the gist of it. He said that there are some guitar players who like to avoid guitaring cliches, who try to do non-guitar things on the guitar. He went on to say that he LIKES the cliches, the guitar is a guitar and you should do guitar things with it and accept those cliches as part of its identity.

This is why we have so many instruments, and why they all cut out their own territory and why they can all do things that other instruments can't do and why NONE of them is the indisputable best.

I do think that "guitar" is now becoming a family of instruments, and that the electric guitar is perhaps the most extendable instrument around. But sometimes I think the boundary between "electric" and "acoustic" guitar is starting to blur. Richard Thompson will, in the studio, take the output from the pickup system in his acoustic guitars and feed it into an amp and overdrive the amp. Even doing live solo shows he has no amp but makes a lot of use of DDL and univibe. Which begs the question of how "acoustic" your guitar is when you fit pickups to it and plug it into a chorus pedal. John Martyn took things substantially further than Thompson. I have heard several "acoustic" players make use of loop stations.

Another way of modifying the guitar is to use capos. I have (or had) a magazine at home with a feature about a player who uses 5 or 6 partial capos on one guitar to give him access to unusual intervals.

singemonkey

X-rated Bob wrote I think the boundary between "electric" and "acoustic" guitar is starting to blur.

This is always amusing for me. It came out a lot in those '90s MTV "unplugged" videos. Why is a piezoed Martin more "acoustic" than an ES335? I think that a few solid-body electric guitar with magnetic pickups sound better for "acoustic" music than hollow guitars with piezo pickups. I hate that piezo sound.

And then people use effects - chorus, tremolo, etc. - on their amplified acoustics. At what point is the hollow-bodied guitar being used as a hangover from the '60s prejudice against the electric guitar in folk music, rather than for its sound?

The Fishman Aura system is only going to emphasise this further. Just as a system finally emerges that can put back the sound of your hollow-bodied guitar while amplified through a pickup, it also puts the acoustic sound in the hands of the solid-body electric. Already Fender has produced a Telecaster with a wooden bridge and a factory installed Aura set up. Seems like a Les Paul with a .012 or .013 high E and an Aura installed could do likewise. ?

Bob-Dubery

singemonkey wrote
X-rated Bob wrote I think the boundary between "electric" and "acoustic" guitar is starting to blur.
This is always amusing for me. It came out a lot in those '90s MTV "unplugged" videos. Why is a piezoed Martin more "acoustic" than an ES335? I think that a few solid-body electric guitar with magnetic pickups sound better for "acoustic" music than hollow guitars with piezo pickups. I hate that piezo sound.

And then people use effects - chorus, tremolo, etc. - on their amplified acoustics. At what point is the hollow-bodied guitar being used as a hangover from the '60s prejudice against the electric guitar in folk music, rather than for its sound?

I hadn't thought about that, but it's a good point. That scene was SO closed. Especially in the UK where, for some people, guitar or even any accompaniment at all was going too far. Forget about people like Carthy and Graham with weird tunings (Graham claiming that DADGAD was the Oud translated onto a guitar). John Martyn with an echoplex? That was REALLY going too far. Everybody thought Davey Graham was a genius, but not everybody was a fan of the North African and East European flavours that he introduced.

I think the US scene was pretty close minded as well, though they just started from a different base because they accepted the guitar, the banjo, the dulcimer etc. Concerns about Dylan actually predated the infamous 1965 Newport festival because he started writing those songs that were about.... well who knew WHAT they were about?

Joe Boyd, in his book White Bicycles divides the 60s US folk scene into two factions - New York and Boston (presumably the rest of the world didn't matter). The New York school was epitomised by Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary who seemed to believe that music and musical values were universal and you could take pretty much any song from anywhere and sing it in a cheery sing-a-long style and that was how it should be. The Boston school were more interested in authenticity and paying respect to different roots styles. Dylan operated out of New York, but I can't see him fitting into the New York school of thought (though Seeger was, initially at least, a big Dylan fan).

And sure, there were prejudices around instrumentation that lingered a long time and which still form the basis for distinctions that people draw.

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