Neville’s AdvocAte
Nev Marten recalls some fads, fears and foibles that have set the pages alight over his time working on guitar magazines...
When I joined Guitarist in 1985, a question we asked every artist interviewed was, “Will guitar synths kill the electric guitar?” This was the days when Roland, Yamaha, ARP and others were piling pots of money into guitar synth R&D and there was a genuine fear that, if someone got it right, the electric guitar could become obsolete just decades after its invention. As we all know, despite my leaving Guitarist to join SynthAxe, this never happened. I was back within a year, along with the timely arrival of Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen and others, who made guitar-playing exciting again and gave us new music to write about instead. Apart from wacky geniuses Allan Holdsworth and Robert Fripp doggedly toiling away, the guitar synth returned to the back burner. Roland and one or two others still plough bravely on, and I know several players who use guitar synths to make fantastic keyboard-like sounds.
The Malmsteens, Vais and Satrianis did, however, provide us with another debate – that of technique versus feel. Did speed automatically eradicate expression? Were GIT-educated musicians soulless and identical because they’d been squeezed through the same sausage mincer? And did it mean guitarists such as Albert King, Joe Walsh or Peter Green, who didn’t know their Mixolydian from their Superlocrian or play a million notes per second, were innately more tasteful? John McLaughlin said: “Technique doesn’t rob a musician of feel, it simply allows that musician to express themselves more eloquently.”
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Gary Moore had his own views and was never backwards in coming forwards with them. Gary though was an enigma – he could play so sensitively, then in the next breath overdo it terribly. But at least he knew it. “BB King told me to play every other note,” he confessed. And then, on watching the G3 tour: “It was like a circus. Yngwie comes out and plays everything you’re going to hear in the first two minutes. Then Steve Vai’s got a guitar with three necks and he’s set up a loop, and it’s all very clever because he’s playing this fretless guitar. I can appreciate the ability, yet it does nothing for me.”
Another issue that reared its head was the one involving valves and transistors. A great debate in Guitarist’s Feedback pages had opposing industry stalwarts extolling or defending the virtues of one technology or the other. It lasted months and actually became pretty heated. Again, there’s no real answer, other than that today you can buy a lightweight, powerful, reliable, and greatsounding transistor amp for a few hundred quid, whereas a handmade boutique valve job – which admittedly might give you the tone of the gods – will set you back the price of a decent second-hand car (which you’ll definitely need to transport it).
In 2018, that question has become supplanted by the one involving Kemper, Helix etc. I’ve covered modelling in previous columns so here’s Guthrie Govan’s take on it: “An interesting parallel is with autotune,” he told me. “There’s a generation of young people who want autotune on their vocal tracks or it doesn’t sound like a real pop record. And that’s just exposure to that technology and coming to accept the sound of that technology. Maybe the same will happen with modelling. My current position is that I will use digital solutions if it’s the best way to get the job done. But I’m having slightly less fun because I don’t feel that beam of sound coming out of the speaker cabinet, and I can’t change the way the note is feeding back by moving around, but what the audience is hearing is basically the same. When you’re depending on inspiration dropping from the sky on every gig though, a real amp is going to get a better performance out of me, whether it’s a psychological thing or not.”
In my view, these things all just ebb and flow. As CDs replaced vinyl, and MP3 streaming looked like it would kill CDs, vinyl made its spectacular comeback; punk briefly brought down prog and bloated rock; grunge and Britrock did the same for guitar excess and spandex; and soppy boy and girl crooners pervade today’s charts. Maybe there’s a new Beatles, Hendrix or Zeppelin around the corner? We can but hope!
Until then, do let us know if there’s something you feel is ripe for another Guitarist debate.