The death of the electric guitar can be summed up in ONE word:
EMASCULATION!
Cheers to the best, right here:
Posted on 06/22/2017 4:29:03 PM PDT by Drew68
The convention couldn’t sound less rock-and-roll — the National Association of Music Merchants Show. But when the doors open at the Anaheim Convention Center, people stream in to scour rows of Fenders, Les Pauls and the oddball, custom-built creations such as the 5-foot-4-inch mermaid guitar crafted of 15 kinds of wood.
Standing in the center of the biggest, six-string candy store in the United States, you can almost believe all is well within the guitar world.
Except if, like George Gruhn, you know better. The 71-year-old Nashville dealer has sold guitars to Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift. Walking through NAMM with Gruhn is like shadowing Bill Belichick at the NFL Scouting Combine. There is great love for the product and great skepticism. What others might see as a boom — the seemingly endless line of dealers showcasing instruments — Gruhn sees as two trains on a collision course.
“There are more makers now than ever before in the history of the instrument, but the market is not growing,” Gruhn says in a voice that flutters between a groan and a grumble. “I’m not all doomsday, but this — this is not sustainable.”
The numbers back him up. In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million. The two biggest companies, Gibson and Fender, are in debt, and a third, PRS Guitars, had to cut staff and expand production of cheaper guitars. In April, Moody’s downgraded Guitar Center, the largest chain retailer, as it faces $1.6 billion in debt. And at Sweetwater.com, the online retailer, a brand-new, interest-free Fender can be had for as little as $8 a month.
What worries Gruhn is not simply that profits are down. That happens in business.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I love Bonamasa...and although I haven’t played any music in a while, I’m thinking about picking up some new instrument. I’m a singer and have played guitar,but singing is my thing, so playing an instrument has to be easy.
And I am a big fan of the new style of American folk music. It’s been around a while and is a bit hard to describe, but it’s just good stuff!
I love a lot of different styles of music- as I get older it gets harder to narrow it down to even a few- I just love GOOD music and whatever I’m in the mood for!
SZQ
I have a great-sounding Martin acoustic. I “loaned” it to my nephew to play. I never really learned to play, but he is using it every Sunday. He plays at the church, and leads a children’s choir there also. It sounds beautiful.
He played, and I sang “Blackbird” at the service for my lost brother last year. He played a LOT better than I sang.
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Kids today are poorly educated, and have no patience whatsoever.
Learning the string instruments is both physically and mentally challenging, and with the human IQ falling like a rock, there will be few great players.
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The death of the electric guitar can be summed up in ONE word:
EMASCULATION!
Cheers to the best, right here:
Watch this. It's really good.
How Steely Dan Wrote “Deacon Blues,” the Song Audiophiles Use to Test High-End Stereos
They don't make music like this anymore. People just don't know how to.
If Fender owns Squire and Gibson own Epiphone how can that hurt their bottom line though?
Stamp collecting was dying when I was a kid 50 years ago. Coin collecting was ruined when it became a big business and your chances of finding something in circulation became dead zero. Electronics as a hobby (as in building and programming otoh is very educational and creative. You can do things now for 20 bucks in a week on a kitchen table that would take a team of engineers working for a substantial company with thousands of dollars of equipment 6 months to do 35 years ago.
In the Navy I deal with a lot of young people who are showing up right out of high school and I am endlessly amazed at the increasing number of them who don't drive, don't know how to drive, don't have a drivers license and seemingly have no interest in getting one.
Almost all of them reply, "My parents wouldn't let me/never taught me" when I ask them why.
But you are right. When I learned to drive in the 80s, we all had muscle cars from the 1960s. This had little value at the time. They were just cars with crappy gas mileage the parents passed down to their kids. But we could work on them and there were a lot of hotrod shops that catered to making them fast.
Kids aren’t playing in brass bands on the village green so much anymore either. Nor forming barber shop quartets and singing to the coeds outside of the sorority houses. Music is dead.
Any idea the market value on these right now?
You held on too long. You should've let them go ten years ago, before the housing crash. You could've gotten $50-60k for your Strat. There were some crazy times.
Get rid of it now because the market is about to be flooded with "Grandpa's old guitars" once the Boomers start dying off and nobody is going to care about them.
Sorry.
Mark Knopfler. Al diMeola.
It might be what’s keeping them afloat. But it certainly cuts into the sales of the American models. As the cheaper brands become better the higher end brands have been incorporating cheaper components. They may become identical sooner than later.
I don’t think Fender wants to just become known for Squiers and Mexi-Fenders.
There are guitar players. And there are guitar owners. I’m an owner. I went 20 years without one. On my 51st birthday my wife bought me what I had always wanted. A Telecaster. A few years ago I bought a Taylor CE 114. It sucks. I’m still just an owner. I sing a lot better than I play.
Yep. These days it's rappers singing about money, fast cars, women, and partying, the stuff hair bands used to sing about in the 80s. I'll tell you what, you never saw more hot women that you'd see at a Poison or Bon Jovi concert in 1987.
These days, you've got metal acts singing about hobbits and elves and crap and there isn't a female in sight.
That, and candy ass school boards are to craven to let kids get some grease on their hands. A couple of years back I was at a school at a small town in the middle of nowhere. They had constructed a brand new state of the art automotive shop instruction building with a full body work section with paint booths and drying room. It was like 2+ million dollars and I’d be willing to bet you could buy the majority of the towns dwellings with its cost.
This was the kind of place probably 80% of the guys here over 40 would have had to have been pried out of after hours by administrators. It was in its 2nd or 3rd year of complete non-use due to the administration squabbling and hand wringing over the potential for students to be exposed to hazardous materials during its use!
Fender already had to move Squire out of Japan and into Mexico. The Japanese Squires were developing an epic reputation. Still very highly coveted.
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