Guitar out of tune with today’s music
“Once you realize that playing guitar is mainly about what kind of shirt and shoes you’re wearing, it all falls into place.”
— Paul Westerberg to writer/ musician Alan Paul
The bottom has fallen out of the guitar market.
The reasons for this shouldn’t surprise anyone. Guitars aren’t the dominant cultural force they once were in popular music; nowadays kids create beats in Ableton Live (a “digital audio workstation” and software music sequencer one “plays” by drawing notes on a virtual piano roll) and popular music, outside the narrow Americana vein, is largely a producer’s medium.
Last year, writer Geoff Edgers wrote a compelling piece for the Washington Post titled “The Slow, Secret Death of the Six-String Electric” in which he highlighted some of the economic and social factors contributing to the decline of the instrument’s primacy, which in turn inspired a number of responses, ranging from the thoughtful to the “Oh, yeah?”
The economics are hard to dispute. Venerable firms like Gibson and Fender are reportedly struggling. Though Fender has recently rebounded, it’s still reportedly more than $100 million in debt. Sales have fallen by about a third in recent years. The giant retailer Guitar Center is more than $1.5 billion in debt and independent stores are facing pressure from online retailers such as Reverb.com and eBay which allow everyone looking to sell a used instrument access to a worldwide market. Acoustic guitars began to outsell electric models in 2010, something that seemed unimaginable from the 1960s through the early 2000s.
The only point of contention I might have with Edgers’ story is the word “secret” in the headline. Guitars — especially electric guitars — don’t matter in the way
they once did, they don’t have the mystery or romance they once had. They’re simply not as cool. This is the way of all things; the only enduring fact is “this too shall pass.”
Still, a lot of people, especially in my generation — those cultural tyrannists the baby boomers — might have trouble accepting this. Guitars represent stuff to us — even those who don’t play them might sense a relationship with them. There is something about guitars and automobiles that feels relational; that’s why so many of us name them. And why it’s difficult to believe they don’t matter much to kids today. (It’s still hard for me to fathom the increasing phenomenon of Uber-driven young people indifferent to driving themselves.)
While the history of the guitar goes back some 4,000 years or so, the steel string acoustic flat top was developed by Christian Frederick Martin, a German cabinetmaker-turned-luthier who emigrated to this country in 1833. Orville Gibson, a self-taught and eccentric woodworker, started building the first arch-top guitars (and mandolins) in 1896. (He was estranged from the company that bears his name not too long after it got started for, historian Bellson wrote, having “visions and dreams that were considered eccentric.”) The first electric guitar appeared in 1931, and within 30 years it was the most important instrument in popular music.
One of the reasons guitars — especially electric guitars — became so popular was their combination of versatility, relative cheapness and portability compared to other instruments.
There are 88 keys on a fullsize piano, 88 discrete notes, spread over seven octaves. A traditionally tuned guitar covers four octaves (fewer than 50 notes, with some redundancy),
it lacks the piano’s ability to play in the bass clef (hence the need for bass guitars), but allows access to an infinite number of microtones between notes that can be accessed by bending strings.
A cheap (acoustical) piano will typically cost more than $5,000, while there are perfectly good guitars available for less than $200. Pianos are fantastically difficult to move. No matter how flamboyantly Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis (also a guitar player) or Elton John attacks the keyboard, they’re still tied to its bulk. Guitars travel — across the stage and across the country. (See Guthrie, Woody and other peripatetic legends.)
In the first half of the 20th century, Maybelle Carter, Robert Johnson and Charlie Christian (among others) explored new modes of noisemaking. Blues and gospel got electrified (see Tharpe, Sister Rosetta), making the instrument’s single-note lines loud enough to allow the guitarist in an ensemble to solo like a saxophonist or a brass player.
An electric guitar is more than an acoustic instrument amplified. It makes a different kind of loud, not just the loud that allows a musician to produce single-note lines and solo like a saxophonist, but a vaguer and more thrilling kind of mystery. You turn it up; you bring all sorts of other factors into play, not just the pick and your fingers and the vibrations that they make, but hands and body and likely soul too. You get the
entire instrument humming, lively in your hands, casting out fields of overtones and interference patterns, rings of shock and awe.
It didn’t take long for players to begin taking advantage of the new tool.
After World War II, the teenager was invented so Chuck Berry could exploit the demographic. Sam Phillips and Scotty Moore (with an assist from Elvis Presley) started a brush fire that spread over the world. Duane Eddy, Link Wray, James Burton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and Jim Hendrix happened.
One thing that often goes overlooked is how easy a guitar is to play.
Just put your index finger on the lowest string at 5th fret — if your guitar is in standard tuning, that’s an A note. Now place your third finger two frets up on the next lowest string on the 7th fret. (If you’re feeling frisky you can also hold down the fourth string at same fret.) Now you’ve added an E, the fifth to the root A. (And if you’ve also pressed down on the next lowest string, you’ve added another A, an octave up.) Stroke down only on those three strings.
What you have just made is called a power chord, and if you hold your fingers in their relative positions you can move them all over the fretboard, up and down from the first fret to the 21st or 22 (if your fretboard
allows for that many). You can also slide that shape down, so your index finger is on the second lowest string, and play more chords. That might sound simple, but people have become rich doing it — some punk rockers even removed the two highest strings from their instruments because they just get in the way.
It’s often argued that the piano keyboard is the simplest and best way to introduce a student to musical concepts, and that’s probably true in so far as it goes. Playing a note on a piano is a straightforward proposition: Press a key and the note sounds. But with the two-paragraph lesson above, you can sound like you’re really playing the guitar. Especially if you play it through an amp with a little distortion. Playing with (as opposed to actually playing) an electric guitar is immediately gratifying in a way playing a piano isn’t. Or at least it was. In Edgers’ story in the Post, he quoted George Gruhn, the owner of famous Gruhn’s Guitars in Nashville, Tenn., an emporium devoted to high-end instruments that caters to rich and famous musicians as well as those who aspire to be rich and famous, as saying what was needed was more “guitar heroes.”
But there are still a lot of remarkable guitar players. It’s just that most of them work in genres that might be considered boutique. Keith Urban might be the player with the highest profile, and he’s 50
years old. Blues and hard rock specialist Joe Bonamassa is 40. So is John Mayer. (Gruhn told Edgers, “You don’t see a bunch of kids emulating John Mayer and listening to him and wanting to pick up a guitar because of him,” a statement to which some guitar aficionados took exception.)
Jason Isbell — a remarkable player better known for his songwriting — is 38. So is the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach.
That said, there are hundreds of remarkable guitar players, most of whom seem to have their own YouTube channels. A lot of whom are female. But very few of whom seem to making any sort of impression on the zeitgeist.
Maybe that’s all right. We get too attached to things in our culture, too caught up in gear and accouterments at the expense of what’s really important. Like the shoes and the shirt.