Guitarist Mag: Living in the past

Phil_aka_Pip

Fozz said:

for music equipment YouTube reviews make much more sense (as you can actually hear the guitar).

So long as you're not listening on a tinny mobile phone speaker. And so long as your playback device doesn't spend more time buffering than playing back the audio.

tbh I'm happy to sit and read what the reviewer has to say about the product

Fozz

Phil_aka_Pip said:

Fozz said:

for music equipment YouTube reviews make much more sense (as you can actually hear the guitar).

So long as you're not listening on a tinny mobile phone speaker. And so long as your playback device doesn't spend more time buffering than playing back the audio.

tbh I'm happy to sit and read what the reviewer has to say about the product

Thats true enough, though I'd say many people have access to a pair of headphones. 

To be honest, for print and videos the biggest issue for me is the reviews are often a bit meaningless - a lot of the vids are done by shops who have a vested interest in saying the product is good. What I'd like is a What Car style mag for guitars and amps. 

john_r

I don't mind a burst feature but there was very little actual info on the bursts they played, that piece could have been written without actually seeing any of those guitars in person. I would have preferred it if the writer had given their subjective opinion on how the bursts sounded, how they differed etc. Huw Price's feature on the Duggie Lock burst in this months competing publication is how it should be done.

mistercharlie

BintyTwanger77 said:

 but it was definitely geared towards one very specific demographic: mainly people who can afford an £8k Les Paul and somehow still have "the blues".

I'd have the blues if I'd just wasted £8k on a Les Paul.

richh

I think I'd be struggling in their place to come up with any new, exciting content that would appeal to a sizeable demographic. I'm not sure there are any really high profile guitar based acts that are coming through now.  The title thread says it all really 'Living in the past...'

Personally I'm much less interested in equipment reviews, and more interested in playing tips. The 1980's Guitar Player magazines had great content on playing from the top guys, but even if you had that kind of content, could you run a magazine successfully when competing with all kinds of free channel on the net, from people of the calibre of Pete Thorn?

Sassafras

I think it's aimed at people who are old enough to have Alzheimer's so that every edition seems fresh and original.

impmann

Fozz said:

 Magazines generally are struggling, <Snip>

Are they? All of them? What evidence have you got for that?

The publishing house I work for is making more money right now than its ever made. All of our magazines are making money across many sectors and we are buying other magazines from other publishing houses, then turning them into profitable concerns too.

Skipped

My problem is that it simply does not look like a specialist magazine. It looks more like a coffee table magazine.
The History of the Fender Stratocaster articles that regularly appear are so bland they would not look out of place in Readers Digest.

Other hobbies are available and some of them have specialist magazines. They are aimed at people who are slightly obsessive about their hobby and who (sometimes) obsessively look for "stuff" related to their hobby. If I read Guitarist Magazine, and,  at the end, I have learned nothing that I did not already know, and I have learned nothing in particular about the famous Guitar Player being interviewed (ask him about his picks, what gauge are his picks.....that is what a "specialist mag" would do.....) then I will feel like I have just eaten a giant candy floss. And I may not bother next time.

Phil_aka_Pip

@impmann maybe you should buy Guitarist as well! Hint: keep the B.O.F. stuff, just add some other things as well to get the young whippersnappers to buy it ..

EricTheWeary

I haven't bought it for years despite being quite a devoted reader for years. I could look at the picture of something for review and guess 90% of the content ( all that ' for metal tones look elsewhere' stuff) and fairly close on the features. 
The best features were Guitar Player in it's heyday, both the extended interviews and the short features on more unusual players ( I still remember the chap who played guitar in a circus band). It was a leap of faith that the reader would be interested in whoever was featured because they were a guitarist with something interesting about them regardless of genre, the market doesn't seem to uphold that anymore. 

Jalapeno

I think the Future have no idea what to do with Guitarist tbh - they also publish GT and Total Guitar and the scope for overlap and repetition is huge.

AlexC

I may be a Luddite here, but I haven’t bought a guitar magazine for about 25 yrs. I have guitars and pedals. I have my own way of ‘practising and improving’, so I just couldn’t care less what tweak Fender have put on their tone knob or how to play Owner Of A Lonely Heart. I also couldn’t give a toss what ‘rig’ someone has either. Although photos of guitars can be pleasing to look at. But I can get that from the net.

thegummy

Isn't guitar playing in general a bit of a "living in the past" thing?

For me at least it's all about the music of yesteryear.

I see young bands who do have guitars but they're strumming away on a jazzmaster as a layer to their sound but don't seem to be focused on the guitar sound like older music.

Maybe I've just not heard the right young bands.

I'd say modern music was more about synth than guitar.

Musicman20

I just don't buy magazines now. Everything is online.

Ravenous

Skipped said:

(ask him about his picks, what gauge are his picks.....that is what a "specialist mag" would do.....)

Just don't ask Andy Summers that - he's likely to bite the interviewer's head off!

(That interview did the rounds here late last year.  He regarded it as a bland and uninteresting question and was much more interested in discussing ideas. Which I think we'd also like.)

EricTheWeary

Jalapeno said:

I think the Future have no idea what to do with Guitarist tbh - they also publish GT and Total Guitar and the scope for overlap and repetition is huge.

I have picked up Classic Rock from time to time and there's overlap with Guitarist and that.

I ended up in a little online chat with Mick Taylor in the comments section of TPS once about Guitarist and how they did lists features as filler and how dull they were, he said they were dull to write. 

At least in G and B there is an attempt at original content even if it's about the right kind of screw for Horner scratch plate. 

Nunogilberto

PRS Monthly. 

A near £7 a month coffee table publication for white boy blooze purists and boutique gear types.

I also used to dislike the way they would do group tests featuring Gibson LPs and Epi LPs etc, which would almost always involve unfavourable comparisons between the two when it came to the lower priced guitar, rather than judging it on its own merit.

hotpickups

I stopped subscribing/buying guitar mags about 12 years ago

guitars4you

Interesting reading your view points on what was traditionally the largest guitar mag regarding readership in the UK - And how 'boring' it has become - I get  a free copy as an advertiser but admit I almost read it with a cuppa in 10 mins and find very little fresh or exciting to read - But is this because we keep re-inventing the wheel many times over - I equally get bored reading new NAMM features now as very little is actually new - Maybe that is our trade all over today

just coincident that I was reading this OP - At the same time I just got an e-mail update from www.premierguitar.com and noticed Tom Wheeler had recently died
  
- https://www.premierguitar.com/articles/26987-remembering-tom-wheeler?utm_source=Sailthru&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=PGN - 021318&amp;utm_term=PG Weekly

many will know him for some excellent books he wrote on the guitar history and I recall him as editor for Guitar Player in the 80's - Maybe there was some mystic with the USA mags and market place back then compared to our own mags, but I always looked forward to reading them - I still have shed loads of them and have debated selling them - Yet part says I should re-read some again - Fun finding out about products we never saw over here back then - World is now so much smaller so many such items are now available over here in one guise or another

Matt_McG

I also get grumpy about the whole 'blues lawyer' focus of guitar mags. Moaned vocally about it elsewhere. I could give less than two sh&ts about playing like any of the 60s British blues guys, or their followers, whose music _still_ dominates UK guitar magazines 50 years after their prime.

I think there's a ton of guitar based music they could be covering:

• Country: specifically people who aren't Albert Lee or Brad Paisley
• Metal: there's the odd bit of it, but really, not much, and there's so many sub-genres and odd little niches that'd be interesting to read more about.
• Prog/Djent/whatever: ditto. And I don't just mean in the sense of an occasional review of a 7 or 8 string guitar. I mean, "what are these guys doing with drop tunings and extended range guitars?"
• Radiohead: so, they've covered Ed O'Brien's signature guitar, but, the playing of bands like that never appears in the techniques sections. A lot of what they do is really interesting, in terms of chord voicing, or use of arpeggiated lines, alongside sequence or synthesised stuff.
• Shit indie: there's tons of guitar wielding bands that get played on Radio 1. It's a mistake to think it's all dance music. I may personally think is lazy, derivative, and not very good. But, they have an audience, and maybe some of them are doing cool/interesting things that I'd like to be exposed to.
• Soul/RnB/hip hop: these genres aren't devoid of guitar. Check Mark Lettieri demoing the kind of interesting muted faux-sequenced licks he gets asked to do on hip hop sessions in his interview with Tim and Pete. And there's guitar all over neo-soul records from D'Angelo or the like. Ditto modern gospel derived styles. I want to know about 'black music' that didn't end with 'Live at the Regal'.

I don't actually like a lot of the stuff above (although I really like some of it). I rarely listen to metal or country, and the indie music my 17 year old niece likes is just not very good, imho. But ... it's guitar based music, that might have interesting things happening in it that I might want to learn about, or which might appeal to readers who aren't me.

When I stared buying guitar magazines in around 1988, there was a mix of 'old people' music (Clapton, etc) and new music, e.g. the latest big haired shred guys out of LA. The balance seems much less mixed now.


Matt