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In this Discussion
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How is the conservatism of guitarists limiting the innovation within the market?
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Comments
Large guitar companies would probably only go with something new after an innovative player comes up with something thst becoes popular and they all jump on the bandwagon.
Where is the lack of innovation you're talking about?
Clarinets come in a huge variety of sizes (keys) and made from several different types of material.
I generally play wooden ones, but that's not necessarily the best material for them to be made from, it's just what was available when clarinets were first made. They needed to find a material that had good sound properties, was stable and was machinable. Certain types of wood were too brittle, or expanded to easily and cracked. African Blackwood and Grenadilla were the preferred choice as they met both requirements pretty well. Now there is a huge amount of snobbery as to what makes a good clarinet and grenadilla seems to be the material of choice. Actually, hard rubber (ebonite) or delrin (teflon) is way better as it never cracks, holds its intonation well even when warmed up, and is more resonant, blows freer and has more even tone across the full range of the instrument. Thing is that so many student models were made from ebonite that very few people dare to use it now as it's always associated with student instruments.
To cut a long story short, the material of the body of the clarinet makes a very small difference to the overall sound. The biggest factors are the mouthpiece, reed and barrel (the bit between mouthpiece and body) the bore (inner dimensions) and finger hole size. Also the way it's played. Embouchure (how you use your mouth) and breath, also have a huge impact on sound. Interestingly, these factors are like "it's all in the fingers" and normally, even a pretty radical change in mouthpiece will end up a few months later, sounding pretty much the same as the previous one, as much of it is about the sound in one's head, and you make small adjustments to get the sound you want and end up the same! It is important to get an instrument/mouthpiece/barrel combination that facilitate getting "that" sound.
And I only play the Simple (or Albert) system as it's best suited to the sound/style that I play in. Think of the difference between a vintage Telecaster and a new shredder-type Ibanez.
And yes, I know the Acker Bilk joke...
Great thread - particularly interesting due to the kind of things I collect (Synthaxe, Stepp, Early Roland GR, Bond, etc). I have a fondness for (allegedly game-changing) redundant tech.
The Synthaxe demo:
Stepp DG1:
Some excellent points re. Offsets, too - how true! I can also remember a time when you couldn't give "those crap old valve amps" away...
Same in the '80's with the rise of Floyd Rose, Kahler*, Big-Hair Metal, Fridge-sized rack systems and insanely over-processed tones - pre-G'n'R and Grunge, it seemed almost inconceivable that Les Pauls, Jaguars, pedals and good old valves would make *such* a return (along with the large rise of the whole 'Vintage' thing).
And here's Andy Summer's demoing his rack system:
I've got a huge library of guitar mags from the '70's, '80's and '90's which make fascinating retrospective reading in relation to the above.
*How many old Strats, etc were butchered for FR and Kahlers? I can think of quite a few local to me, for a start. Incidentally, @spark240 is in possession of my old Yamaha SG3000, which had that treatment (by Bob Barry for a previous owner) back in the day - sacrilege nowadays!
HarrySeven - Intangible Asset Appraiser & Wrecker of Civilisation. Searching for weird guitars - so you don't have to.
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Having said that, I am firmly in the traditional camp when it comes to my own guitars. I think that the Strat, the Tele and the LP are all perfect and timeless designs, as are the Precision and Jazz basses. I really am not interested in owning the 'innovative' stuff personally, although I like that they are out there.
Yet, most guitarists still desire a guitar with retro tones and retro features - harking back to 1950s. Why else would Fender and Gibson and Gretsch etc continually release guitars based / or trying to recreate on 60 year old technology?
I get the impression that many guitarists seems to be happy with embracing technology in the pedals and amps and home recording, and yet when getting an actual guitar they want the purity and simplicity and tone of a 60's strat / tele or a 58 les paul etc.
And yeah @HarrySeven, I had a stack of early '90s guitar mags that repeatedly claimed that *all* 70s Fenders are shite. Funny to see how the cutoff point between "desirable vintage" and "old shite" has rolled back over the years- first they rehabilitated the late 60s and early 70s ones, then the denigration of the later 70s stuff went quiet too. Of course, that story runs in to problems if you want to keep the narrative about the management buyout in the 80s being driven by a desire to restore the declining quality of the instruments during the CBS era.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
Some thoughts:
First, justify your premise. Are guitarists on the whole more conservative than any other instrumentalists? Aren't violinists playing just as much old music on traditional instruments? Are bassists more frequently early adopters of new technology and new musical styles?
Then, justify your assumption. What's so great about innovation anyway? Does innovation in musical instruments have any bearing on innovation in music? For instance, how much did saxophones, trumpets or pianos change between 1900 and 1960 (not much) compared to how much jazz music changed (almost beyond recognition)? Or is rock music a special case in terms of its relationship with technology? (I think maybe it is)
After that:
Guitars are a mature technology. Anything we do to them now is going to be a fairly minor tweak to an established formula.
Guitar playing has to be pretty far down the line towards being fully explored. There's no end to the inventiveness of the human mind, but you do have to wonder whether we haven't exhausted all the ways to get a sound out of a guitar
Guitars have had their day in the sun in pop music, and they had a bloody good run. They're far less relevant to most new styles of popular music than was the case ten or twenty years ago.
Guitars have huge nostalgic value to a lot of older players. They want the sound they had (or perhaps the sound they wanted) when they were your age and still thought they might be rock stars. For a lot of players, that's the sound of thirty, forty or more years ago. They probably want the digitally emulated, portable version that they can use at home without incurring the wrath of the wife of course, so much of the "innovation" in amplification and effects in recent years has been to do with recreating the tone of desirable vintage gear in affordable, reliable, portable digital formats (which is, incidentally, not much different to what's happened to pianists. How many homes now have an acoustic piano rather than a digital one?). Can it really be called innovation when you've just created a new way to make exactly the same sounds?
Even the young guitarists I hear from on here seem more interested in classic rock acts than they are in anything new- it's Pink Floyd and Guns & Roses, not current artists.
Many guitarists earn their living (or at least their beer money) playing in covers bands, which means that the sounds they need to be able to make are the ones that go with the songs they play. Chances are, those will be classic rock, soul and pop tunes. Crazy new sounds aren't any use, although innovations that make their guitar lighter, more reliable and less likely to go out of tune are, as are things that make their load-in/out from gigs easier- got something that can sound just like my Fender Twin, but that I can lift with one hand and get in to the boot of my car at 2AM without a forklift or a burly mate? I'm listening.
Is it better for innovation to be driven by manufacturers, or by players? Is it better, for instance, for a manufacturer to come up with a gadget that allows guitarists to do something they couldn't previously do, then let them work out how to use that new ability, or is it better for players to identify where their instruments can't do what they want them to and have manufacturers create solutions to those problems?
Is consumerism a factor here? Manufacturers have to at least be seen to be selling something new and different each year/season, so is everything that gets labelled "innovation" really innovation, or just something a bit different from last year's model to get you to buy something else?
Have a look at the response on internet forums to Gibson's 2015 range. Gibson changed a lot of things from what they'd previously been doing, and they got so much criticism for it in forums, not to mention the dealers. Some of what they changed was dumb, but some of it (new neck shapes, metal nuts, automatic tuning systems) could legitimately have been argued to be innovative. Didn't matter.
NAMM season (that's now) is a great time to watch gear forums like this one to see how guitarists react to new products. You'll see just how interested in right new equipment people can get, and why. Look at a range of forums (The Gear Page, Harmonycentral, Ilovefuzz etc) and you'll also see how different kinds of players react to different kinds of gear. It's worth noting that the kind of guitarist who frequents internet gear forums is of a certain subset of guitarists who care more about this sort of thing than most.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
How many times have people posted about a Mesa amp for example, only for certain people to start whinging about the amount of knobs etc. It's really not hard, it's usually three sets of treble, middle and bass plus a master section, it's so simple a five year old could work it. Your TV remote has more buttons for gods sake, so where does this attitude come from when it comes to guitar equipment?
Likewise digital gear. I can understand people not wanting loads of options, but I shake my head when people say they won't be able to work it. If you can use a computer you can use digital gear.
It's a strange thing that when it comes to gear some people are proud to be seen as uneducated luddites, where in general technology is embraced in other walks of life readily.
We're not all Luddites, I'm willing to bet a lot of us are nerdy technophiles, happy as pigs in shit in our digital studios or even programmers in our day jobs, but we just want to jump on stage at night, hold a guitar like a machine gun and beat hell out of it through a simple valve amp.
When you're using a TV remote it's totally passive, you're just drooling on your cardigan and/or scratching your nuts, when I'm creating music I'm too busy for that stuff.
I'm with Jay here.
I've always thought amps with one set of knobs per channel are way easier to use than multi channel amps that share channels. With shared controls, unless you share the same taste as the designer there's always going to be an element of compromise, whereas you could just set individual controls the way you'd want. Also, if you don't need a channel/all the sounds, just use what you need unless it'll be cheaper or more practical to downscale - this goes for amps as well as pedals and digital gear.
In any situation where the majority of the sound isn't reproduced by a guitar cabinet (i.e. it's coming out of a PA system, or a recording) then the high end digital solutions these days are fantastic, more flexible, and in many cases cheaper than the comparable rig that they'll sound so close to through non guitar cabinets. Through a guitar cabinet a real valve amp is still hard to beat (hence why some people use digital preamps with valve poweramps).
Hours programming is a generally a myth unless you have no idea what you're looking for or are doing something exceptionally complicated (which would likely also be complicated with 'real' gear). Plus one major advantage is once done your settings can't accidentally get knocked as there are no physical knobs on the floor like with a pedalboard.
Another thing that is daft. The use of digital pedals to modify an analogue signal. Think about it. Analogue in, convert to digital, process signal, convert to analogue, analogue out. A process that is repeated if the next pedal happens to be digital. The obvious solution is to include a digital output on guitars with a digital input and output on pedals and have a decent digital to analogue converter at the end of the digital chain. The lack of collective thinking by the guitar/music industry is nothing short of astonishing.
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum
I don't know any people who even claim they can hear a difference in this scenario through a typical guitar cabinet.