>Almost everyone who picks up a guitar, about 90 percent, abandons it within the first year, according to Mooney.
I'd guess that a similar 90+% of beginners quit the clarinet, violin, piano, drums, etc.
If the macro trend of hobbyist guitar playing has declined, I think it's correlated with its lack of prominence in current music.
For curiosity's sake, I just clicked through the top songs on Billboard Hot 100 chart[1]. As of today November 22, 2016, the top 20 songs do not have any obvious guitars. It's all synths, electronic beats, and other artificial sound effects. The first song with obvious guitars is the country song "May We All" by Florida Georgia Line sitting at position 30.
In previous decades with higher guitar sales, you had the popularity of 50s Elvis, 60s Beatles, 70s Led Zeppelin, 80s hair metal bands, 90s Nirvana, etc. It's easier for guitar novices to stay motivated when everything on the radio had lots of guitars in it. At the moment, the zeitgeist is electronic music until guitars make a comeback in mainstream pop. However, it's possible guitars will never become fashionable again and will recede further into isolated genres like country and folk music.
>I'd guess that a similar 90+% of beginners quit the clarinet, violin, piano, drums, etc.
I blame this soley on how piano is taught. Instead of focusing on music and sound, music teachers try to teach note names, sitting posture, curving your hands ect. You are sent of with the impression that you'd need years of daily practice to be half decent. This is an immediate turn-off. I want to play music, not memorize ridiculous memory tricks like ' every good boy does fine' .
I would imagine most people are trying to make new music and play existing music. 99% of ppl are not trying to become professional pianist. Yet music teachers just teach how they have been taught, with endless instructions about keeping your back straigt, keeping the curve in your fingers ect. This makes one feel like they are not "cut out" for music and they give up .
We need a new crop of music teachers that can take advantage of new midi instruments, iphone apps ect to teach music. Piano should be introduced much later one you have grasped the how notes sound, how chords sound, why you need them ect on a simpler interface instead of endless repetitions of twinkle, twinkle from day one. Classical music should not be taught to a hobbyist. Instruction should be fun from day one, you should be making new music from day one. Endless learning of grammar doesn't make one a good author.
I strongly disagree. What you're suggesting leads to really mediocre practice and that in the long run will get people to give up because they've reached a plateau they set upon themselves without realizing it.
Your teachers know and understand stuff you're years away from grasping as a beginner. Its not about being "professional" but rather having the proper foundations upon which you can build knowledge and muscle memory. Its about spending the least amount of effort at any point in your practice so it becomes actually effective. Its about having a logical progression where each new concept adds up to existing knowledge (music theory is VERY well structured in that regard.)
I personally dread that new crop of teachers using MIDI/apps to teach music. This is anything but teaching music - its teaching MIDI and apps. You dont learn to ride a bike by downloading an app or playing "bike simulator" - its just obvious.
Saying "endless learning of grammar" and other forms of "oh god, I have to put in effort?!" mentalities show off a very shallow understanding of the domain - this is what you expect a teenager to say when looking at his courses because he's years away from understanding why they're useful. Sorry to sound harsh but its just how it comes out as.
I had two of the world's worst piano teachers as a young kid. Everything was exactly the boring nonsense in the parent comment. There was honestly more focus on posture than on actually making sound come out of the piano.
The songs I had to learn were obscure classical pieces. It was all so horrifically boring, and GOD FORBID if I ever just sat down at the piano and played around, making sound that interested me or trying to replicate something I heard on the radio. That was "unstructured time" on the instrument and was counterproductive to "real" practice.
I absolutely hated every single second of it, and finally quit in a huge blowout fight with my mom when I was about 9 years old, and just refused to keep playing.
As a teenager, I taught myself to play bass, and spent my 20's playing in bands, working in music, touring and all that good stuff. I still play bass and guitar constantly and I've never had any formal instruction in either instrument, but honestly I really wish I had kept playing the piano. The problem was, the way kids are taught, the same way I was, seems designed to make it as repellent as humanly possible.
It would be so easy to make piano interesting, and more importantly, FUN to practice and play, but the old-school approach, making kids play garbage they have no interest in, yelling at them over and over about sitting up straight, is the worst possible way to go about it.
Music, language learning and fitness all fall into this category of things that are difficult because they require so much regular investment, are optional in every day life, but anyone could in theory do them. For things like this, the number one factor any teacher or system should be optimizing for is motivation. No matter how important every other goal is, if you don't optimize for motivation people will just never learn. If you can't make it fun, don't even bother trying to teach most people, because only those with a burning passion will make it across that hump where it begins to have a real impact.
For examples of this effect in language learning, check out the writings of All Japanese All The Time, and for this in fitness, see Crossfit where the group setting and competitive features provide additional motivation and is wildly successful.
Of course, this doesn't ONLY apply to those things. This is also the secret of success for unschooling. As far as I have heard unschooled kids have the effortless joy of learning whatever they want at their own pace end up going much deeper on subjects that are of interest to them, and in the end they end up only 1 grade level behind their peers who went through 12 years of relative suffering.
That pretty much sums up what I said earlier: your teachers know and understand things you're years away from grasping.
They don't put you through all that out of some perverted wish to make you suffer. They do because they know what's at the other end of that practice.
I do agree not all teachers are good teachers (if you get yelled at, you DEFINITELY have a mediocre teacher) - teaching is first and foremost about transmitting a passion, then explaining the theory which holds it up. And in order to do so you've got to figure out what your student's interests are.
But see, that's the point I'm trying to make. Having the benefit of hindsight as someone who actually went on to recording records and regularly playing live in front of paying audiences, my teachers were focused on ENTIRELY the wrong things.
You get people interested in the instrument first by giving them a taste of how they can actually play things they like. Let them explore and have fun. Point out problems they might have with technique, but do it within the framework of getting them where THEY want to be, playing what THEY want to play.
Don't force focus on theory and reading sheet music. When you're a kid who just wants to play something cool that shit is boring and it sucks. Once you get a handle on the instrument and really get passionate about it the theory end starts to become interesting on its own.
Seriously, these teachers didn't know a damn thing I don't know now, and there's a much better way to go about this.
Theres probably a better way to go through it, but at some point you HAVE to learn the language. Theory and reading sheet music are incredibly important (more so than most people realize) especially if you'd like to have a large musical repertoire.
> You get people interested in the instrument first by giving them a taste of how they can actually play things they like.
That can work, but its very dangerous for the student to develop bad habits in doing so - which are then next to impossible to undo to learn the proper method required to play effortlessly. My first year in music school was basically unlearning everything I learned before. Not fun. I saw a lot of people giving up right there.
Learning to read and write text is boring and sucks, yet absolutely nobody will argue its useless. Once you realize the world of possibilities knowing how to read/write opens - you forget it was a pain to learn. You're even thankful for the people who forced you to learn it. Everyone learns it, even if only a handful push it all the way to university as their major.
Music should be the same, it looks alien to teach theory and posture because its not the norm like teaching how to read is. But when you think about it people saw reading the very same way when only the elite had access to this knowledge. Promoting a culture of anti-intellectualism does nobody a service.
> Seriously, these teachers didn't know a damn thing I don't know now
I very highly doubt that, simply because its impossible for you to know what they knew, and they most likely knew a whole lot more than they made it seem when teaching you.
I'm a fluent sight reader, and it does figure into the kind of work that I get hired for, even as a part time musician without a music degree.
I used to look down on non-readers, but have had to re-think that attitude, simply due to the reality of how music gets played by a lot of people.
But the parent is talking about the electric bass, which I also play. There are plenty of successful electric bassists who never read a single dot off a page. A lot of music is performed without having a written bass part, or improvised from abbreviated notations such as chord charts, Nashville numbers, etc.
Also, it's hard to get motivated to learn reading, when your preferred genre has no written repertoire. Written charts are used in the studio, but seldom by working bands.
A problem with reading is that it's a long learning curve -- especially for adults who already know how to play -- and not much use for it unless you can do it at a fairly advanced level and seek out work that requires it. So, the so called "reader gigs" are covered by a cadre of players who specialize in that kind of work, including myself.
As a jazz musician, I live in two worlds. When I play in larger ensembles, or bands that have heavily composed / arranged repertoire, then I do a lot of reading. But when it's a jazz combo playing standards, I don't even bring a music stand.
It could very well be that different kids respond to different ways of teaching. Also, I think that a really good teacher adapts to the temperament of each kid, and some teachers are just not suited to teach the youngest kids.
There are plenty of counterexamples. My kids have both done quite well with traditional training, as have I. They are both at the top level of the local youth orchestra program. They love classical music, especially the modern stuff. One is also exploring fiddling, the other, singing.
But I've talked to parents, and have told them: The classical thing is great, but if it doesn't work, don't force it to the point where it becomes miserable. Try something else. And just like we don't know why some people seem to learn programming more easily than others, we don't know why some musicians can learn to read. It's kind of a strange skill.
Oddly enough, I've also played electric bass live in front of paying audiences, though the double bass has become my main instrument. Every instrument has its own requirements and learning curve, and each of us gravitates to the instrument that works for our temperament and interests, that change over time. I'm grateful for my classical technique and fluent sight-reading ability, because they figure into the instrument and music that I happen to enjoy playing.
In the Suzuki method, which is favored today, they don't focus on theory or sheet music until the kids have already been playing for a while.
I suspect there's probably a balance - my Russian trained piano teacher was tough, but also threw a lot of music in front of me. We played easy songs in the beginning eventually building in complexity and a lot of variety with theory mixed in. There was never a strong focus on posture or anything like that.
She also didn't believe in using mnemonics to memorize notes - that knowledge would just come from repetition. Though she did hit me pretty hard when I messed up so not sure if that's good or bad.
This reminds me of my elementary school years. This was in school in Japan I had to learn recorder. I sucked at it for first three years or so, felt that classroom instruction took me nowhere getting good at it. There was a student who was good at piano routinely played after the class was over. For some reason, five others, including myself joined and started playing their recorder to that music, every time after the music class. In couple of months, I was one of the best recorder players in the class.
From that experience I feel having fun is very important, and so is repetition. But also seemingfully boring practice session in class probably helped setting foundation as well.
Some pain in learning process is not probably unavoidable and could even be beneficial but then it's very hard to keep yourself motivated enough to continue when it's not compulsory.
> The problem was, the way kids are taught, the same way I was, seems designed to make it as repellent as humanly possible.
My hypothesis is that the "old-school approach" works for adults but is directly at-odds with teaching children.
As an adult human being of average IQ, you can keep "proper posture", note names, etc. all in mind quite easily as you learn, such that it then needs relatively little reinforcement and you can quickly get to playing music.
As a child, focusing on one thing makes you instantly revert to your "natural behaviour" in every other respect. You can pose, or put your hands on the right keys, but you don't have enough executive control to keep track of both.
The simple solution: stop trying to teach kids piano; start trying to teach adults piano (and encouraging adults to learn piano.)
The people you are talking about giving up when they plateau are likely the same people that would have given up when forced to learn the grammar. The net result is a similar number of people at the higher level but the people at the beginner level have more ability to generate music.
Down the road an ability to bang off a tune at a party is far more useful to a beginner than knowledge of music theory. Makes people happier too!
One doesn't prevent the other! I was lucky that my music teachers found it important for us to both learn theory every week, but also a complete song matching our skills level.
So while we'd have scales and chords to practice, we'd also have songs to play at parties and whatnot from the beginning.
What I didn't realize at the time is that practicing chords and scales not only builds knowledge of how notes sounds and relate to each other, it also builds muscle memory and makes you play with less and less effort until it becomes effortless. At which point the songs you learned really, really start to shine.
Its easy to dismiss practice as boring and "only for professionals" but once you start seeing what it yields you realize it is incredibly important to any musician.
Much like reading a book from an author who understands grammar and has a large vocabulary is a much richer experience than reading a book from someone who hasn't put the effort in learning it all.
Not only that, understanding the grammar makes you appreciate the works of others on a much deeper level. Same goes for understanding music theory - it improves your listening experience.
I think you're mistaking technical virtuosity and hand-eye coordination for musical talent. There's nothing wrong with being an accomplished concert pianist, but most people learning probably just want to be able to play a half-decent melody on a midi controller and lay a sick beat on it. And if you're going to say that that's not worthy, you're getting into the comparative judging of genres, which is just silly.
> most people learning probably just want to be able to play a half-decent melody on a midi controller and lay a sick beat on it
Heck, I'd go further: for a lot of people, all they really want to do is to be able to "peck" notes out well-enough—and have enough understanding of theory—to compose music in some sort of software.
Personally—and this applies to quite a few people I've talked to, as well—I don't give a one whit about my ability to play live, any more than a novelist cares about being able to improvise stories live. I want to build songs on a canvas, laying down one melodic brush-stroke at a time. It's only what happens when I hit "play" that matters.
I've never ran into any type of music-teaching paradigm that has even vaguely addressed my needs as a student.
I didn't talk about virtuosity and talent, I talked about learning. What you learn is completely independent of musical genres, technical difficulty or even talent. Its the foundation which allows you to reason about these things and build all your knowledge and experiences upon.
Even the guy wanting a half decent melody on a midi controller needs to understand to some degree the relations between those notes, both in melodic and harmonic terms. Otherwise the best he can do is hit random notes and hope it sounds good then wondering why it does sound good and being unable to apply that to different situations.
If I never learn how to write, how am I going to produce an essay?
> Otherwise the best he can do is hit random notes and hope it sounds good then wondering why it does sound good
...and then experimenting with short snatches of melody in the attempt to replicate the effect under different conditions, gradually reinventing music theory themselves; and then coming later in life to the study that gives names to the library of intuitions they've built, finally being able to talk about them with people—but happy that they did in fact build the intuition first rather than just carrying around the bulky handles to the concepts without first seeing the use.
I find that theory helps you reach intuition much, much faster for whats already out there, and then you're equipped to reach out into truly new areas.
Its the same for engineering - if you don't read the existing work in the space of the problem you're trying to solve, chances are you'll spend years doing what could've taken weeks.
>Instead of focusing on music and sound, music teachers try to teach note names, sitting posture, curving your hands ect. [...] This is an immediate turn-off.
100% agree on this! I believe the teacher's first interaction with a new student on piano should be asking what song(s) they like. If possible, start the instruction using that particular song because that's the juice that got them curious about the instrument in the first place!
Yes, Mozart's Sonata 16 K545[1] is an enduring staple of typical piano instruction but while it's a decent tune, that classical piece is not the music that made the student want to learn the piano. It's more likely the student was sparked by something mainstream like Adele's "Someone Like You"[2]. As a bonus, that Adele song happens to be easier than the Mozart piece. Please don't kill the budding pianist with Mozart and piano drills if that isn't what he/she likes.
For some reason, it's blasphemy to let beginning piano students practice on real pop songs. (Possibly due to emphasis on sight reading sheet music of which there is more of it available for classical pieces.) This is less a problem with guitars because more kids are self-taught, lessons are informal, and every guitarist shamelessly attempts whatever is currently on the radio.
The other hard part with trying to learn piano from pop is that most of the available arrangements of current hits are trying to transcribe the hit recording rather than to put something on paper that is comfortably readable and playable.
If you want comfortable arrangements that a beginner will stand a chance of being able to make it through, you have go to back to hits from before 1965 or so. That's what I've been doing myself, but to a lot of people that's not too different than asking them to play something from 1765.
A few thoughts from a pianist with three professional music teachers in the family:
0) Someone already came up with a classical piano repertoire that perfectly increases in difficulty from "Primary" to Grade 10, in neat, progressive steps. If you look for sheet music for that Adele song, I guarantee you you'll never find a version that's appropriate for each of those levels. You might find several versions, each somewhere in the middle of that range, but no one will spend the time to interpret "Someone Like You" in eleven different ways--from an 8-bar melody up to some 15-page virtuosic piece--and then repeat that for every other song in the top 100. Can't even crowd-source that effort due to copyright.
1) You're vastly overestimating what a complete beginner can do. Remember, these are normally 5 year old kids with barely enough motor control to hold a pencil properly, no concept of beats or rhythm, etc. Pop music is usually easier, but it still takes years to work up to that Adele song. "What about adult students?" Adult students are even worse for quitting things early because it'll still take months to play anything remotely interesting and there's no one forcing them to continue. Proof: note how many adults will join and then quit the gym between New Years and February 1st because they're not seeing results quick enough.
2) To build on the above, piano has the shortest possible path to making in-tune sounds. Think how long it takes to learn to play even a single note on an oboe. You need the many lectures on posture and finger position--not to mention tons of boring practice!--just to stop squeaking.
3) How do you go about teaching Adele without explaining note names, how counting works (fractions!), and all the associated music theory? "I play, you copy?" That's not considered good music education. Kids get decent at rote memorization of finger patterns, and then plateuau at that (very, very low) level.
4) Beginners already start with "fun" music like Old McDonald, London Bridge, etc. Most of it is lame, but then again, kids might find recently-mainstream music like N'Sync lame too. Fashion moves pretty fast. On that note, copyright/royalties on modern music are a pretty good barrier to just playing whatever you want. (And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.)
5) Trust me, teachers are intimately aware of the fine balance between motivating their kids with fun repertoire and actually teaching them something. Vocal teachers probably work that fine line the hardest since every pop song is fair game.
6) Pop songs in addition to classical repertoire is fine; not a single music teacher will object to this. My mother held three recitals a year (popular, christmas, classical) and kids held free reign over repertoire selection in two of the three (and the third was mostly a "trial run" of the pieces they'd have to play anyway for their upcoming piano exams). Pop songs as a replacement for classical repertoire is not fine. Adele wasn't thinking about teaching you anything about fingering or expression marks when she wrote her songs. On the other hand, Chopin/Liszt/Czerny/Debussy/etc. were writing with exactly those concerns in mind when they wrote their Etudes (read "studies"). They're written to be lyrical and interesting, but also to focus your practice towards a specific, technical challenge (perhaps one etude is just about fast arpeggios for the right hand, another etude for long trills with the weak fingers of the left hand, etc.)
7) Along the same lines, "classical" education isn't just Classical-era music, like Mozart. Good teachers want to expose you to lots of styles. Yes, every pianist has to play Bach--even if you hate Bach--because it's instrumental to learning about polyphony. But somewhere in that repertoire book there'll also be jazzy music, latin music, cinematic-style music, etc. written by still-living composers (although probably not as modern as Adele). In RCM books you'll find that kind of thing in sections 'D' and 'E'.
8) And yes, nobody likes scales, but drills are drills; you just have to accept that some parts are laborious and annoying. Athletes spend time running between plastic pylons and sweating it out at the gym because you can't efficiently build fundamentals just by playing games. You need a good mix of performance and practice. If you're only looking to "have fun", you can just stick to pick-up games with your friends (or teach yourself how to strum a few guitar chords), but if you're taking professional lessons in something there's an implied expectation that you're there to improve.
Obviously music is there to be enjoyed. And I'm certainly not claiming that traditional music education can't be improved. I just wanted to make the point that teachers already try to balance motivation with other goals, and that no activity worth doing is "all fun, all the time".
>" Adult students are even worse for quitting things early because it'll still take months to play anything remotely interesting
Do you think adults should start with Piano at all. I know you can come up really cool sounds music in Ableton within months. There are plugins which make sure you are always playing in key. You can even use those pad things with chromatic layout, which is much more logical, and do fun stuff like pitch bends.
> piano has the shortest possible path to making in-tune sounds.
prbly true for traditional instruments. I would start with a computer or an iphone app. No lectures on postures needed.
>How do you go about teaching Adele without explaining note names
Even kids can tell if something is 'going up/staying the same/going down' . Give them the root note and let try to replicate it on the keyboard. Let them come up with their own 'system'. Don't ruin their natural curiosity of discovery by telling them note names and stuff.
>And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.
I totally disagree with here, like a lot. Even beginners can start playing 'by ear'. Countless people have learnt just by playing by ear. you can play kumbaya by ear within couple of hours of piano instruction. Surely everyone must try to play by ear before they spent years on piano lessons.
> I know you can come up really cool sounds music in Ableton within months. There are plugins which make sure you are always playing in key.
That's fine. Music is music; do what you enjoy. I'm not saying you need to take piano lessons to enjoy music, or compose music. I'm saying you probably need to take piano lessons to (efficiently) learn to play the piano effectively.
> Even kids can tell if something is 'going up/staying the same/going down'.
Actually that's not as easy for kids as you'd think. Anyway, what you're talking about here is ear training (melody playback, specifically), and that's already integrated into every classical music program. I was talking about trying to play a complete, two-hand, Adele piece on the piano by reading sheet music. At that point you'd definitely have to know a bunch of music theory already.
> Let them come up with their own 'system'. Don't ruin their natural curiosity of discovery by telling them note names and stuff.
Sure. And for consistency, forget about BEDMAS; let's give kids the axioms of ZFC set theory and get them to just work their way on up to arithmetic on their own. (Also, parents, don't forget to pay $50 an hour, every hour, while your kid tries to discover the concept of a square root on their own.)
I'm kidding. But look, music teachers already try to push students towards as much discovery, creativity, expressivity, and musicality as the students can muster. Pop songs aren't a panacea for the motivation problem.
> Countless people have learnt just by playing by ear.
Like I said above, I didn't mean stumbling through a chopsticks or kumbaya melody by ear; I meant transcribing a full Adele song. Or anything you would reasonably hear on the radio or see in a movie.
Playing around, composing, improvising, etc. while simultaneously taking music lessons (or at least studying from a book) is great. Fantastic. I recommend that to everyone. But if your goal is to learn how to play the piano and you're trying to do it with no music theory or classical education whatsoever, you... just won't make efficient progress. I don't know how else to put it. You'll learn something, sure, but you'd learn it faster with the teacher and the teaching system.
>I'm saying you probably need to take piano lessons to (efficiently) learn to play the piano effectively.
that's fair. Not sure why parents still force their kids to learn piano, an instrument so divorced from their digital reality. Parents probably have some romantic fantasies about piano or its just lack of knowledge and availability of new style music programs.
>Yes, every pianist has to play Bach--even if you hate Bach--because it's instrumental to learning about polyphony.
This is nonsense. There are near-infinite varieties of non-Bach music to teach polyphony. Even the "chopsticks" song demonstrates polyphony. If you meant counterpoint instead polyphony to demonstrate the left and right hands playing two independent melodies interwoven with each other, Bach may be reasonable. It depends.
>And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.
This is terrible advice. It's misguided. You can have any student at any young age explore "playing by ear" in the first 10 minutes of the first day of the lesson. When a 4-year-old preschooler listens to her mother hum a tune and is asked if he/she can hum it back... that is playing by ear! The child's ears heard the notes and the child's vocal cords hummed it back. With a piano, it's fingers instead of vocal cords. Deliberately delaying any joy of playing by ear until a later "advanced" lesson has no basis in pedagogy.
> "all fun, all the time".
I don't claim that all invested time into skill building is fun. My emphasis is that joy of the activity must be used as the gateway drug to the mundane drills and boring classical pieces. If joy means informal pop songs or the simple intro piano to Frozen's "Let it Go"... then start with that. If the student is happy and motivated, the door can then further be opened to Bach, Chopin, Art Tatum, etc.
Yes, sorry, polyphony was a bad choice of words. I'm not even talking about polyphony or counterpoint as musical concepts--you can certainly get the gist of these without years of playing Bach--I mean it more like this: they put those four part fugues in the repertoire because it's an excellent technical exercise for student pianists. It's easy to just play the notes, but much harder to bring out the melody as it bounces around the four voices, especially as it goes into the left hand and the weaker fingers of either hand, and more so when the voices overlap. In fact the whole thing teaches voicing in general.
> Improvising... is terrible advice.
Vocal call/response is different. I meant that it's a non-starter to expect a five year old (or an average fifteen year old, by the way) to listen to a random song on the radio and just improv what they hear on a piano with no sheet music. Hell, I've been playing for like 27 years and it would take me ages to transcribe by ear some random Chopin prelude that I could otherwise easily sight read (well... one of the easier ones anyway).
> If joy means informal pop songs... then start with that.
This is what I mean; you don't start with even "songs". I'm a fully grown adult. Reasonably good musician, I think. Played piano my whole life, trombone in high school, picked up flamenco guitar on my own. A few years ago I was left alone for a few hours with a clarinet; do you know what I accomplished after like 3 straight hours of practice? I could barely get through "London bridge is falling down", and I considered that an achievement.
My point is that you have to deal with the motivation problem well before you're anywhere near playing "Let it Go". And when you're ready to play a real pop song, trust me, your teacher will let you do anything you want if it'll get you to practice.
That can't be true. Most ex-musicians I know quit for many reasons, and most of those were self-taught.
Posture is important so you don't hurt yourself while sitting on a backless piano bench for hours on end. Finger position is important because playing with splayed fingers will limit your repertoire down the road. The best way to prevent bad habits is preventing them from forming in the first place.
The same goes with guitar. I don't teach, but I could and I can assure you that the two exercises I would begin students with would be pretty bad, but so fundamental that it'd be inexcusable of me to not teach them this stuff.
Do a down strum on each one count while I count to 4 and repeat. This is surprisingly difficult to do when you first start. This one is actually pretty fun and can make people laugh at themselves.
Hold your fret hand on your lap, then try to make a C chord. Pick each string from bottom to top. If one of the strings don't ring out, fix your hand and keep down picking until each string rings out. Keep doing this until you get it right on the first time five times. Got C? Lets work on G. I'm actually surprised at how many experienced musicians can't do this.
Yes, it is hard, yes it is work, but it's no different than programming. Nothing worth having is given to you.
The Suzuki method[1] uses a similar approach to teach music by introducing notation later on in the learning process, after desire, curiosity and music appreciation has been sparked first.
My kids both started in Suzuki programs. In fact, from what I can tell, Suzuki is now the leading teaching method for small kids on nearly all instruments. Teachers tend to modify the method somewhat. Since "Suzuki" is a brand, it comes with a specific repertoire. American teachers tend to draw from a larger repertoire, and also introduce reading fairly early depending on the kid's aptitude and interest.
In my observation, classical music is not a turn-off for kids, if they are young enough that they don't have a strong sense of what is "cool." Reaching teenagers is a whole nother ball o' wax, and I suspect, is rarely as successful.
Part of Suzuki's ideology involved the parents. He expected them to be enthusiastic partners in their kids learning music. This can be a problem if: 1) The parents don't like classical music. Many people viscerally dislike it. 2) They oppose all structured musical education for whatever reason, including their own childhood experience.
I grew up when Suzuki was still controversial in the US, and my training (on the cello) was along classical European lines. Music is a huge part of my life, though I now play jazz on double bass almost exclusively. I'm not sure that the less structured approach to learning guitar actually leads to less attrition. Among people I know (for instance at my workplace) who still pursue an interest in music at any level, relatively few play the electric guitar. Without supporting evidence, I wouldn't assume that the supposedly structured, old-fashioned approach to teaching music is actually less successful in the long run.
One possibility is people wait longer to quit. A student who sticks with it for 2 years might not get very far, but they pay for a lot more lessons than someone quitting after 3 months.
If that's how you're getting taught music you need a better teacher!
I strongly disagree with using 'apps' to teach music, it's counter productive and you won't learn. To learn piano you need a piano (or keyboard) and a proper teacher that's it, you're also not limited to learning classical pieces. And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time, effort, patience and practice. There's no shortcuts.
>And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time
This meme has to die. Do you think Djembe players in west African village learned chords and scales to come up awesome sounding percussions ? I've seen young kids come up sweet rhythms with zero musical training. You can create new music on day one, it's built into us. Chords and Scales should be used to understand and enhance what you can create, its not a prerequisite .
Producing a rhythm is completely different than producing a song. Rhythms don't have tones, notes do. Not understanding chord structures, scales and how songs are built will make it quite difficult to produce any type of song. There are basic fundamental building blocks of how to build a song you'll need to understand or you'll just run in circles hitting notes. Imagine trying to learn to program without understanding the basics of MVC.
I am often inspired by Giorgio Moroder's interview on the latest Daft Punk album in which he praises the fact that nobody told him the rules and there was no "preconception of what to do." He just did it, and we are all better off for it, whether music or MVC -- and I could not disagree any more forcefully with your closing remark about MVC.
Fuck the rules, make stuff, see what happens. Nothing truly creatively wonderful in your life gave a shit about the rules.
...generations of programmers learned to program without understanding the basics of MVC.
When I was a kid, I read Anne McCaffery's book Dragonsong, and thought that I should make up a tune for the lyrics of one of the songs that the protagonist writes. We had a piano available, so I came up with said tune. I couldn't have (and still couldn't) told you which key it's in, and, you know, I'm certainly not going to claim that it was a brilliant composition that will endure for the ages, but it wasn't dissonant and was, through trial and error, in some minor key or other.
Obviously, having a keyboard helps, since you are forced to only play notes on the chromatic scale somewhere.
Since when is MVC a requirement of programming? I completed an entire MIT-based CS curriculum and received my degree without writing a single line of MVC. It was mentioned in passing regarding GUI development, but I never needed it during those years when I wrote a compiler, a network stack, a raytracer, etc.
It's more important to understand chord progressions and relationships than scales, and that's a lot of the philosophy of Suzuki and related approaches— you learn to sound out a melody, and then you learn what major chords sound good with that melody, and then you learn where to substitute an appropriate minor chord, and then you learn how create an accompaniment using those chords.
And at that point you've learned to recreate a song you already know, and it's not a huge step to improvise from scratch on your own melody.
There's a huge body of potential source material for this approach, including folk/pop songs, oldies, scores from musicals (think Disney Renaissance era), and most contemporary religious music.
Chord progressions and relationships are all built off scales. If you don't understand the underlying scale of a particular key you wouldn't know where the I,IV,V and VI progressions are.
MVC was a bad example imo. It's closer to trying to build something interesting without knowing what a conditional. It's possible, but why would you do it when they're so easy to learn? Scales are the same. It's not difficult to teach someone major and minor scales and have them go from there. You don't need to be able to play them flawlessly at 200bpm to be able to make something with them, but I think it's much easier to create knowing them than not knowing them.
Ummm.. I don't think this is true. I think Djembe has open tone, closed tone, slap, base tone ect. I What about folk songs from India, how did they come up with it ? I am not arguing against music theory, I am arguing against saying music theory is prerequisite for creating music.
Music is nothing like a programming language, there is no compiler rejecting your bad music. Sure people have discovered what sounds good and what doesn't and turned it into some sort of theory but those are merely guidelines not syntax rules that are enforced by the compiler.
A djembe is played with rhythm and tone, but the rhythm itself doesn't have any tone color.
Rhythm is time.
Notes are wavelength, and in Western music we use a 12 note system to denote them, and musical theory is a shorthand used to denote the complex mathematical intervals at work in it. It's fascinating stuff, and if you're interested in learning more about it there's a great BBC series available on YouTube that describes what's happening in Western musical theory: How Music Works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnbOWi6f_IM
Suggesting that students don't need to learn basic music theory is kind of ridiculous. Can the human ears find the tonic/dominant/sub-dominant interval relationships on their own? Of course. That's part of the reason we find them so pleasing. You don't need music theory to hear. You need it to communicate with other musicians. Music is a group activity. It's an ongoing conversation in our culture. If you want to participate in the musical traditions of our society, you need to be able talk to other musicians.
This means different things for different traditions, but the amount of learning needed to get your feet under you in music is less than learning how how to play most video games or even the most basic syntax of a programming language.
Can we teach it better? Absolutely. But we still need to teach it.
I've played the piano for about 3 years now, took lessons for the first year of that then stopped. Using pianomarvel.com worked pretty well for me for a while for learning certain skills. I had already taken some lessons, so I wasn't completely lacking instruction in basic technique, but I was poor at reading music (let alone sight reading). My reading skills improved significantly over a few months of doing most of their course, which basically just has you plug in your keyboard by midi to your computer and then play along to songs until you get it nearly correct. If I had been self-studying, I wouldn't have been exposed to as wide a range of pieces (more even than when I was taking lessons). I'm now much more confident picking up a new piece of classical or modern music. So, I'd say that "apps" are still useful. (Though you definitely need one that uses a real keyboard or piano and not a tablet touchscreen - bleh!) Had I been more dedicated, I could have used it to practice chords, scales, and arpeggios too.
Not sure what you mean - are you saying that the program wouldn't have provided motivations for the structure of chords and so it would have been brute memorization? That's pretty likely. It had very minimal instruction in music theory, and actually the program is more marketed at instructors to give their students structure to their non-lesson practice time and add some gamification to motivate young (and not-so-young) learners.
> And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time, effort, patience and practice. There's no shortcuts.
If one has passed high school mathematics, the amount of music theory sufficient to compose typical pop tunes can be covered in about one day.
Diatonic scales, blues scale, intervals, 3-chords, some 4-chords, a hint of higher n-chords. Chord roles and examples of typical chord progressions. Something about bass lines and drum patterns.
It will probably not make you able to compose hit tunes, but you will learn enough terminology to understand what is going on.
There is nothing wrong with introducing kids to an endeavor that still requires good old fashioned hard work. Music (like all arts) really does require thousands of hours of practice, and that isn't a problem that needs to be solved by replacing it with the video game version.
You could easily make the same argument for any discipline. Chemistry shouldn't be about learning boring periodic tables, it should be fun explosions. 99% of ppl are not trying to become professional novelists, so English classes should focus on comic books.
If some give up along the way because they don't enjoy it, so what? I gave up on baseball at a young age because I didn't like it and wasn't good at it. Does it matter?
This is very contrary to my experience. I suspect the vast majority of people who learn piano do so with the desire to play classical music, because frankly that's the main thing it's good for. Playing piano arrangements of pop songs is a cool party trick the first few times, but loses its lustre pretty quickly (they end up all sounding similar); for composition there are probably better options in the age of computer sequencers, and fundamentally most people aren't in a position to get much value out of doing original composition.
Instead of focusing on music and sound, music teachers try to teach note names, sitting posture, curving your hands ect
Poor hand and back posture can lead to very serious injury, potentially even the loss of mobility. Of all the tedium of learning to play the piano, this is one area you should not skip.
Further, you need to learn note names so you can communicate with others about your music. You need to learn good fingering or you'll never be able to play fast, and your fingers will be tripping over themselves all the time.
This sounds conceptually similar to how teaching CS or teaching programming to some one later in life focusses on algorithms data structures and other "inside baseball" concepts rather than asking them what is something you would like the computer to do for you or a real life application they would like to see in the world and show them the simplest path to getting a MVP of the thing they are interested in. Once they have that they will be more curious to build something else using their first experience as a base. Maybe a few months or a year or so later they would explore deeper concepts like learning data structures, algorithms and other optimizations
Kind of an ugly but related anecdote about learning piano: I know someone who grew up in Tennessee, and started playing around on his family's piano in his teens. He liked jazz so that's what he tried to teach himself. At one point his grandma said he can't keep playing like n....rs and enrolled him in lessons like parent talks about.
Surprisingly, that's how most jazz musicians learned to play, for the past century: Take the formal lessons that you're supposed to take, then sneak out and learn jazz yourself. White parents were conflicted by the racial biases in music, but even black parents wanted their kids to learn "proper" music as defined by the academe.
My parents had no idea that jazz was my main musical interest.
oh how I wish any of my guitar teachers would have bothered to teach technique, music, notes, hand positioning, anything!
All of them asked for their $40 and then asked me to bring in music I liked so I could memorize a few songs without any explanation for what was going on.
Are the Hot 100 likely to be guitar driven though? Taking a look at the #1 songs from 1991 (chosen because it was just as Nevermind broke), most of the songs back then were R&B and electronic pop too. There's Bryan Adams, Extreme and Roxette in there, but nothing else leaps out to me as guitar driven (it's Mariah Carey, Michael Bolton, Madonna, Whitney Houston, C+C Music Factory etc):
I remember the guitar bands of the 90s being album bands, so I thought I'd do a quick check of today's Billboard Top 200 albums. But before I even got there, at the top of the search results was a news headline from today: "Metallica On Course for Sixth No. 1 Album on Billboard 200":
From my quick survey of the charts in 1991 versus now, I would say that the guitar bands overall have declined. In 1991, you had bands like harder rock bands like Van Halen, Metallica, Skid Row, and Guns N' Roses on the charts along with some more "alternative" bands (REM, U2) and a little dose of country (Garth Brooks).
Now? Alternative bands (now labeled "indie") are increasingly all electronic -- how much guitar is in the Twenty One Pilots album currently on the charts, for instance? Hard rock is still on the charts (Avenged Sevenfold and In Flames among others have albums on the charts) but it's a shade less prominent. Country is probably the one genre in the US which is both very popular and has prominent guitar, but even that is more electronic than it used to be -- just listen to all the synth in certain Keith Urban tracks.
The synthesizer is now what rules pop music these days, in my opinion. Even hip hop, which always used electronics as long as I'm aware, reflects some of this change (a lot of hip-hop has abandoned samples in favor of pure synthesizer tracks).
This change makes sense to me. As long as you have a computer, you can nowadays download an entire studio for practically pennies, and start creating satisfactory loops fairly quickly. A guitar most likely will cost more and definitely will take a lot more practice to get to that "instant gratification" point.
I'd agree with that, and especially the part about downloadable studios & instant gratification.
I don't make much music anymore, but when I do play around I'm more likely to fire up some software & run some programmed synth sounds through the AmpliTube Fender effects plugins, than to grab my guitar & StealthPlug & Tube compressor & remember that I'm not actually very good at playing anyway...
"Alternative" (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, I Mother Earth, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, Oasis, etc.) was big in the early 1990s. That is exactly why I took up guitar in early high school.
Right, but that was the "Alternative" to the Top 50 Billboard stuff at the time (and also arguably 80 hair metal). Most pop was not guitar driven, and it wasn't until alt rock became mainstream in the mid 90s that guitars were featured again.
I agree. I imagine anyone who picks up an instrument, about 90 percent abandon it within the first year. I also would be almost anyone who picks up learning to code, abandons it within the first year.
Learning to play an instrument is hard and like anything else that is hard, you need to put in the work to reap the rewards.
"The industry's challenge—or opportunity—is getting people to commit for life," said Andy Mooney, Fender's chief executive officer. "A pretty big milestone for someone adopting any form of instrument is getting them through the first song."
Goal: Get players through first song.
Solution: Package with each guitar a mini songbook written in guitar tablature, not sheet music, containing a small collection of classic, canonical three-chord songs demographically targeted towards age of buyers. It could be a page or two front and back. Something physical they can take out of the packaging in the middle of the floor and start working through right there. Include a link to youtube videos of instructors playing them, but really it's about the piece of paper they can look at right there and go.
Solution: Package with each guitar a mini songbook written in guitar tablature, not sheet music, containing a small collection of classic, canonical three-chord songs demographically targeted towards age of buyers.
I've been playing guitar for over 40 years. I've bought plenty in my day, along with mandolins, a banjo, and a few other instruments. Not a single one included anything but a truss rod wrench. Not a "getting started" guide, nothing. The instrument industry relies upon others to make the new purchase accessible, which will hopefully result in repeat business. And that's just asinine. Nearly 70 years in business and it has never occurred to anyone to include some bootstrapping documentation so that your new customer enjoys their purchase even more? You're hoping the stoner salesperson at the music store fixes them up with suitable material instead of just taking the commission and calling it a day?
Partner with an online lessons company. Put a little pamphlet in there as suggested by parent. "Here's four chords that will get you through a lot of rock songs." Something other than a truss rod wrench and a hardy "good luck".
EDIT: oh, and for fsck's sake, do whatever you need to do to make sure that guitars are properly setup before they ever see a customer's hands. Guitars aren't quite as bad, but I've purchased some used low-end mandolins recently that I gather the owner bought online, meaning it was shipped from China and the original box was not opened until it showed up on someone's doorstep. One of them I would describe as unplayable as it was. Strings were a mile high; I'll bet I cut half the nut down. Another one was better quality and playable as-is, for small values of "playable". An hour or so cutting the nut down, setting the bridge, etc., and it turned out to be a nice little player. But a beginner with no callouses on their fingers wouldn't last long on either of those mandolins as they were sold. It's like trying to do Couch-to-5K with lead weights on your ankles.
I've been playing guitar for over 40 years. I've bought plenty in my day, along with mandolins, a banjo, and a few other instruments. Not a single one included anything but a truss rod wrench.
Seems almost insane in hindsight, doesn't it?
oh, and for fsck's sake, do whatever you need to do to make sure that guitars are properly setup before they ever see a customer's hands.
Good point. To this end, a link to a free cross-platform guitar tuner app would get a beginner 99% of the way there after unboxing.
Instructions:
Before playing for the first time and learning a song on the included song-sheet, make sure it is properly tuned. Go to freefenderguitartuner.com to download our free guitar tuning app to your phone, or find one you like better in your phone's app store.
(Then app walks you through turning the tuner heads to the proper note).
I understand you have something to contribute, but sending multiple links to your own products comes off as really self-promoting. Try engaging in the discussion about the article. Do you agree with it? How does the article make you feel? How does your solution attack the problems described by the article?
I do agree, the guitar industry is in crisis mode since their main customers (older men) are dying off, literally.
How does the article make me feel? Makes me feel super excited to the nth degree! As the article states, it's a pretty big milestone to play your first coherent song, but in most people, they never get there and quit. We have a low entry, high ceiling instrument that gets you playing right away. We are trying to disaggregate almost every part of the guitar, but when you actually play it, you can play the entire song from day 1, check out the video if you haven't!
That is a terrible solution (not in a vacuum, just to the stated problem).
The problem was stated by an OEM selling traditional guitars, who needed their new customers to learn their first song so they purchase again in the future.
This is a non-scaling, costly solution that does a worse job of tackling the problem. The goal is to sell more Fender Stratocasters, not have your customers buy a non-guitar from somebody else. Maybe a good solution for a different problem, but not for the problem we're addressing here.
What if I told you there was a more rewarding way from day one?
In the article: "The industry's challenge—or opportunity—is getting people to commit for life," said Andy Mooney, Fender's chief executive officer. "A pretty big milestone for someone adopting any form of instrument is getting them through the first song."
>It's easier for guitar novices to stay motivated when everything on the radio had lots of guitars in it.
Statistically when it comes to most things I'm almost always an outlier and I'm unsure as to why that is. Perhaps I'm just a willful person. Ever since I first heard Oasis' Live Forever I wanted to become Liam Gallagher or Noel. Things happened in my life that made it impossible for me to pursue that dream. Then, two years and 11 months ago I thought to myself: hey, nobody is producing radio friendly (pop(ular)) rock'n'roll anymore. I saw it as an opportunity and gave myself three years to write my first song. The fact during these years I never once heard a decent rock'n'roll song on the radio motivated me enourmously to continue practicing. So, six hours a day for almost three years. Practice practice practice. I even called in sick once from my programming gig because I thought I was so near a billboard #1 that, well, I could quit my day job. Well, three years later and I think I am dangerously close to a Swedish top list #1 ;)
Sounds pretty nice, can't understand any of the lyrics as I don't speak or write swedish. Been playing 15 years, and I have yet to write a complete piece. Have improvised with friends a lot, learned a number of songs of interest. Wrote some short music for game jams, but nothing special.
Anyways good luck on producing. So agree with practice practice practice.
>I'd guess that a similar 90+% of beginners quit the clarinet, violin, piano, drums, etc.
Or coding. How many people pick up a "How to make a video game" book or tutorial and get flabbergasted at all the learning, practice, time, and work you need to do just to get something very basic working?
These are classic motivation and personality/talent problems. The guitar is just as unforgiving as the compiler, unless your goal is to learn a few chords and 'fake' your way through a song, the same way you get can RPG Maker and 'fake' your way into a playable game.
I have an entry-level guitar collecting dust and I think ultimately its because I just don't care a lot about making music, find it tedious, and the work needed to get something that sounds remotely like your favorite artists is difficult. Even if it did come more naturally it still wouldn't be a significant part of my life. The problem is its hard to know this until after you've bought the instrument and had lessons and tried your hand at it, thus all these things collecting dust in basements and pawn shops. I think this is a normal and healthy part of being a curious person. We all laugh at the failed musicians and coders, but at least they tried and some of them tried and succeeded greatly. We can't have an Elvis or Beatles without millions of basements full of dusty guitars. Only the .001% are successful professionally.
I disagree. The reason people abandon guitar at such rates is that it is far more complex than, say, the piano. I don't have data to back this up other than the fact that I play both instruments, my wife plays the piano and we have taught all three of our kids.
At some stage on the guitar your left hand (assuming right-handed player) has to start doing some really unnatural and difficult things for you to be able to play anything interesting. Then there's the fact that notes are found in multiple places on the fret board and certain sets of notes cannot be played effectively unless you switch your left hand to those other "magical" positions.
Then there's the need for precise placement of the left hand fingers as they land on the string/fret in order to avoid making weird noises.
If you are learning classical guitar, there's keeping your fingernails to the right length and shape and constantly having to fiddle with them. If you don't have good nail genetics (my case) you have to resort to nail strengthening magic cures and even such extreme solutions as painting on a couple of layers or epoxy onto your nails to thicken them up and allow you to play without them breaking.
For example, my right hand's thumb fingernail is weak and quickly develops this little notch where it contacts the string. I have been suffering with this since I was a kid. It's a pain in the ass. I've done some crazy things at times to deal with it, like bonding a thin piece of carbon fiber sting to the very edge of my nail.
Being creative and improvisational with the guitar is hard and takes a lot of work and study. You need to get past all of the above and that means at least a year, if not two, of daily (and correct) practice.
Piano is easier. You remove a lot of the instrument and musician "organic" factors the guitar introduces. With proper hand position and fingering progression can be steady. It is a one-to-one relationship between note and key, which makes it magical when compared to the guitar. Chords and arpeggios written for piano are generally within the domain on a single hand. Even if it takes two, it's no big deal.
I truly think that someone can achieve much more satisfying results by practicing piano one-half to one-quarter of the time of someone achieving equivalent results with guitar. And, ultimately, I think this is the reason so many people quit guitar early, it can be very frustrating when compared to the piano.
In terms of barrier-to-entry, I'd agree. There's a greater requirement for dexterity in the left hand (assuming traditional layout) to get a good, consistent tone from the instrument, and much more "up front" difficulty in learning.
As experience grows, however, piano opens up a wealth of incredibly challenging literature, for example Bach's Overture in the French Style, Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, and Balakirev's Islamey.
So the "progression curves" of the two instruments, for want of a better phrase, are very different, and certainly look like they favour piano for ease-of-entry.
I agree with everything you said, although I do think it applies much more towards jazz and classical rather than pop music. Making satisfying music by yourself on the guitar is definitely difficult, especially if you don't sing.
However, playing johnny ramone style 3 chord punk in a band is, as you know, just not that difficult. So, I think it's not just the inherent complexity of the instrument, but also the context you are trying to make music in.
I disagree for composition and improvisation : guitar is way easier for that from my point of view. Having always the same interval is the killer feature compared to the piano, where it's easy to play on white keys (C major/A minor scale) but then good luck changing scale, you have to know which notes are sharpened/flattened.
Whereas with guitar any novice can learn the pentatonic scale and then play on anything on the radio, by just starting playing that scale from a random fret and changing until it's in key with the song. All scales are the same on guitar, just starting from a different fret. You can go really far in composition in guitar without knowing which note you're playing, but just scales and chords positions.
I was also looping in the issue of being able to glide across the fret board with ease. This takes time and lots of practice. There's a reason why books like Pumping Nylon exist. It takes a lot of work to stop thinking about "where and how the f&%$ am I going to do that!" to having your mind free enough to improvise. In other words, to think about music rather than mechanics.
> At some stage on the guitar your left hand (assuming right-handed player) has to start doing some really unnatural and difficult things for you to be able to play anything interesting.
I always wondered why the guitar is hold in a way so that the left hand is the one that does the complicated movements.
No, not really. Some stiles, maybe. Once you get past the newbie stage and develop some technique and related musculature it isn't all that strenuous for normal hobbyist playing. A professional who has to play for many hours, well, that's a different matter. The instrument almost doesn't matter at that level. I know both pianists and guitarists battling carpal tunnel and other repetitive motion issues.
" However, it's possible guitars will never become fashionable again and will recede further into isolated genres like country and folk music."
Guitar is a cross-over instrument in the sense that it can be used for rock, jazz, blues as well as classical. It's supported by a wide selection of composed music for all. Although electric guitar and classical guitar are not the same, learning one of them gives a huge amount of resources to learn the other.
I won't link to the awesome guitar solo by Lil' Wayne, but it is interesting to see that guitars can be found on stages for rap and pop bands. It just isn't a front-and-center instrument anymore, but it still looks better than a piano on stage.
I'm also of the opinion that if you are learning music to become a star, you aren't learning for the right reasons. If you become good enough to make money at it, that's awesome, but I don't know many musicians that do earn any money.
When I was a teenager in the 90's I got into guitar thanks to fantasies of being a famous musician (but also more attainable ones of attracting the interest of girls). I never had the time, resources, or motivation to become anything close to professional but over the years I'm still quite glad I took it up.
I don't practice often but as an adult I have a little disposable income to pay for a couple of guitars and an amp. I even picked up a cheap travel electric guitar with a built-in amp/speaker which is honestly awesome for noodling around over top of someone playing acoustic around a campfire or some such.
Not really trying to make any point I guess. I had vague dreams of fame and fortune but found that over time, it was still pretty rewarding to be able to play something even if I don't give it as much of my time as I might. It's a creative outlet, it can be a way to relax, and you know...occasionally, girls still dig it :)
>If the macro trend of hobbyist guitar playing has declined, I think it's correlated with its lack of prominence in current music.
>the top 20 songs do not have any obvious guitars
>It's easier for guitar novices to stay motivated when everything on the radio had lots of guitars in it.
How do you explain the booming popularity of the ukulele then?
I dunno. I'm nothing special when it comes to guitar but my first was a $50 pawnshop special that worked well enough. Then my second (this time an electric) was a crappy Strat knockoff, also used, for $150. Nowadays you can even get them cheaper from Walmart-type brands like First Act or online from importers like Rondo Music.
Sure, they're nothing great but they work for learning to play and screwing around with your friends in the basement or around a campfire (which is probably all you'd be doing with a uke as well if you're a beginner).
There was a major Ukulele boom during the great recession. A lot of people found themselves out of work and needed a way to fill their time, and as you say they are inexpensive compared to a guitar.
Apologies for a bit of digression, but a reason why HN is worth getting hooked to is precisely comments like this. Perhaps, my excitement might be eccentric but someone correlating declining guitar sales to general billboard-100 trends is amazingly profound.
It is not profound. It is one of the first things that you should look for.
Outside of supplier issues, which are not mentioned in the article, the idea that the music landscape is changing and that is affecting the sales is straightforward. I don't want to discount the work that the grandparent post put into listening to the top 30 songs for a single HN comment, but the idea is more than reasonable, it is a clear choice.
On the grandparent comment, maybe we should look at YouTube or Spotify's lists of the top tracks as well. BB does take in the streaming and digital services for the calculation [0] but the YT tracks may be less skewed to the older set. Radio play is strongly associated with car drivers, an older cohort, while YT can be considered to be less skewed in that direction, though it has it's own problems like everything else.
Not to take away from the OP, but if you read the article, the two last paragraphs read:
"Detractors have predicted the death of the electric guitar for years, pointing to the rise of rap and electronic dance music on pop charts.
But Mooney isn't worried. More women are playing guitar these days, he said—something he credits largely to Taylor Swift—and Fender now sees as many women as men playing the acoustic guitar, if not the electric(...)"
This "profound correlation" is suggested in the article itself.
To be fair, pop music charts are rarely guitar driven. Even in the 90s where we had this big rock revival it was Mariah Carey, Michael Bolton, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Boyz II Men, etc leading the charts most of the time. Remember, the Beatles were famously turned down in the early 60s because "Guitar groups are on their way out." Well, that was true as the charts had so few guitars and no one really saw 60's and 70's rock/folk/funk/psychedelia coming.
Rock definitely is less popular now in the charts, but its worth mentioning that a lot of guitar-styles tend to get eaten up the whole Indie/DIY scene, which still has prominent guitar-work and rock-based styles. Again, perhaps not as much as the 90s, but the analysis above seems much more damning than it needs to be.
I imagine Fender is unhappy with this anyway as Indie types are very much into buying used and vintage guitars, which means no profit margin for Fender. Fender sold a hypothetical guitar in 1975 and made, say, $25. They see nothing of a recent re-sale that can be thousands of dollars easy, perhaps even tens of thousands in rare cases.
I think if companies like Fender want to survive they need to do what Apple did and make their own stores to sell their own brand and to sell/broker vintage fender guitars and amps.
Yes, I played guitar a lot 15-20 years ago. But these days I listen to very little guitar-based music at all, and it's a big reason I don't play anymore.
I guess "indie" is such a broad term that you could be swimming in guitars or never hear them. Most/many of the independent bands and artists around me have at least some (if not mostly) guitar-based music in their repertoire.
If I just go by the bands I saw at a local camping/music festival this past summer, probably 85% of them at least featured a guitar and more than half were some variant of the typical guitar/bass guitar/drums/keyboard setup.
Granted a lot of them do weird, unholy, and awesome things with those traditional rock band setups but they're definitely around in the indie world even while the pop world finds studio samples, synths, sequencers, and DAWs to be more efficient at producing guaranteed radio/club hits.
There are two distinct marketplaces for guitars, and almost any musical instrument. There is the 'beginner' level, which is basically school aged children where parents may purchase a guitar for them for school, or private lessons. This is where most big chain music stores aim at.
Then there is the high end collector market, who spend the big bucks, and often purchase multiple guitars to stash away. Most guitar companies (such as Fender) try to become the 'be all and end all' across this range. Fender do have a high end custom shop to cater for the more wealthy or boutique market, but at the end of the day, they are spread pretty thin with their Mexican range, USA Standard range, Custom shop range etc.
The biggest problem with the low end market is that kids these days just don't seem to realise the work ethic required to become proficient at guitar. I've played for over 40 years, I have two young sons who play, and I have done some teaching. Lots of kids seem to think that they can be playing at a performance level after only a couple of lessons (perhaps Guitar Hero has something to do with that?), and they quickly become disenchanted and lose interest once they realise the gruelling (boring) practice routine that they have to repeat over and over again in order to build muscle memory etc.
But for a lot of beginners who approach me, I try and model the same thing I do when learning a new programming language, i.e. the best way to learn - REALLY learn - a new language is to actually build something with it. Which is why I find that it is useful to get a kid to tell me his favourite song, and just work out the melody or the riff to the song and build on that, just to keep their interest going and make the inconvenience of the other exercises less of a burden.
The world is also sadly lacking in 'guitar heroes' these days. Not the game, but actual players. Guys like Hendrix, Page and Clapton inspired kids in the 60's and 70's. Van Halen etc. in the 80's, but then the guitar solo ceased to be a central 'thing' in most bands. Modern guitar players like Joe Bonamassa, Guthrie Govan or Julian Lage etc. just don't pull the crowds in like they used to.
> Lots of kids seem to think that they can be playing at a performance level after only a couple of lessons
That's not just kids and guitar, it's everyone and everything. Most people have a high-level concept of "I would like to be good at X" without actually liking X, they just like the perks that come with being good at it. These people quit after realizing how much effort it's going to be, be it playing an instrument, programming or woodworking.
> the best way to learn - REALLY learn - a new language is to actually build something with it
That's the best way to learn anything, i.e. to like the process of learning, and the best way to like the process of learning is to work on something you like working on. Nobody likes doing scales, even though they're necessary, so you have to intersperse it with something that will keep people practicing.
"There are two distinct marketplaces for guitars, and almost any musical instrument. There is the 'beginner' level, which is basically school aged children... Then there is the high end collector market, who spend the big bucks"
This is missing out the vast midrange of working musicians (or erstwhile working musicians who still play a lot privately).
In the Fender world, collectors might buy old or particularly prestigious models, but your standard MIA Strat is a working guitar that won't necessarily appreciate in value but isn't typically bought by beginners (or collectors, for that matter). Same with many other brands (such as those you'd see played by guitar bands); while Ibanez or Jackson might have a relatively cheap model aimed at beginners, they also make rock-solid working guitars that you see played in your local bar or club, or in studio, or on stadium stages, but not in a collector's vault.
Musical toys - things like Guitar Hero. Instant gratification, very limited musical content.
Entry-level instruments - cheap-ish, poor quality, fine for beginners, basically disposable because they're (ironically) difficult to play and don't sound great.
Prosumer instruments - some minor compromises, not particularly affordable, but not so insanely expensive they're out of the reach of anyone who really wants/needs them. This notch covers a range from good enough to rather fine.
High-end professional and collector instruments - no compromise, nicely finished, often insanely overpriced. The good ones can raise production values a notch or two over the prosumer level, but they're utterly wasted on anyone with average talent. The silly ones are just for show and bragging rights.
The MI firms love collectors because they'll drop five figures on instruments they can't really play. And they'll do it over and over.
Meanwhile name professionals tend to get handed prosumer or sometimes collector instruments for free as part of an endorsement deal or even just on the off-chance the item will appear in a photo. (I used to know a film composer before he moved to Hollywood, and he was always getting offered the latest gear for nothing, even before he was that big a name.)
Entry-level instruments - cheap-ish, poor quality, fine for beginners, basically disposable because they're (ironically) difficult to play and don't sound great.
I suspect this is one of the reasons for the cited 90% quit rate. If it's something you're not sure you'll have an aptitude for or even like, you're probably not going to invest much in your first guitar. But the result of that is an instrument that's far more difficult to get to make nice sounds. AFAIK, guitar is the worst for this - other instruments at the entry level might not have great sound, but aren't going to be downright hard to play.
This! 1000x this! One of the most frustrating things about learning an instrument is that it initially sounds terrible and you feel like you will never get it. If you have a low quality instrument and are inexperienced, you honestly cannot tell if it is you or the guitar.
This is why I heartily recommend to anyone trying to learn to pick-up a mid-range guitar used. You get much higher quality and the price is usually comparble to a "cheap" beginner one.
I was lucky enough to start on a good guitar, but I later tried a couple ~$100-150 "starter" guitars. If I'd started on those I would have quit. Even knowing how to play (more or less) I couldn't make them sound good, and it took a lot of effort just to keep them from buzzing and such.
Agreed that I left out an important segment, but I guess I was focused on the business case for the two extremes. The low end entry level stuff probably makes money for Fender due to the sheer turnover. The high end makes them money due to the larger profit margins.
As for the mid range, or 'working musicians guitars', it wouldn't surprise me if these were 'break even' or loss leaders for them. Most working musicians I know have a mid range workhorse guitar they use on bar gigs and open mics, but they also usually tend to have a high end guitar or two that they use for wedding gigs or purely for recording/private playing.
I can't provide sources (for obvious reasons), but I can tell you that there's a power-law relationship between retail price and gross margin. The cheapest starter guitars are very close to breakeven because of absolutely vicious price competition. Mid-range instruments are less profitable than they used to be, but they're still the bread and butter of the industry. The "custom shop" level of instruments are outrageously profitable, but they're also rather difficult to sell. Buyers for $5,000 guitars are few in number and exceedingly picky.
Prestige brands like Gibson, Fender and PRS rely to a significant extent on the "rich dentist" market of collectors, but most other brands don't sell significant quantities of super-premium guitars. Top-shelf guitars are often halo products, used to elevate the prestige of more affordable mid-range guitars. Having a "custom shop" in America or Japan is often treated as a marketing expense rather than a profit center.
I don't think it's just the Guitar Hero generation, nor just kids, nor just musical instruments. There's a profound lack of discipline which hits often and early when somebody attempts to learn a craft. Most people rely on wanting to be good or motivation based on a fleeting image of some (form of) rockstar. When inevitably that image crumbles, they've got no discipline to follow through. Even good teachers can't always give that to them.
> The biggest problem with the low end market is that kids these days just don't seem to realise the work ethic required to become proficient at guitar. I've played for over 40 years, I have two young sons who play, and I have done some teaching.
Were you teaching 30 years ago? I suspect that people didn't have much of a work ethic back then, either - but you weren't teaching them, so you didn't realize it.
I've been teaching others to play on and off for the past 40 years. Started off with just friends and other band members, then friends of friends etc. Nowadays mainly friends of my sons.
I do see a distinct different in the motivation between then and now. Back then, the kids usually had a particular player they wanted to emulate, or an album of songs they wanted to learn. Yes quite a few of them found that they couldn't play like their hero straight away and gave up, but their motivation seemed to be different.
Most kids I see today seem to want to do it because they just think it will be a 'cool' thing to do. Perhaps they think it is an easy way to pick up members of the opposite sex or something? A few of my son's friends see him play (my son is VERY good) and want to be like him, but when they realise how much work it takes (my son plays for 2 to 4 hours per day, every single day), they rapidly lose interest.
Most kids I see today seem to want to do it because they think it will be a 'cool' thing to do. Perhaps they think it is an easy way to pick up members of the opposite sex or something?
I would be pretty certain that has been the case since the the 1960s.
> Back then, the kids usually had a particular player they wanted to emulate
Back then, they had less entertainment to get fixated on. When you only get one magazine per week and maybe a few releases to listen to over and over, it's easy to pick up the guitar and practice for a while.
Nowadays, the entire knowledge of the world and legions of videogames and brain-candy are literally one tap away. It's the same for all activities requiring concentration or long practice, they are being phased out by the immediacy of electronic content. Similar cultural changes happened when people moved from complex poetry (scarce and expensive books, which you would analyze for months and would require extensive education to appreciate) to serialized novels (frequent updates on cheaper media, requiring less formal education to appreciate).
Learning music is nothing like learning a programming language. Atleast not how its usually taught. I can spend a month or two learning ruby/ror and build an semi-decent website, sure I have no idea how its all working but I have a sense of accomplishment that makes me want to learn more about how it working under the hood to build a better website.
Music on the other hand is where you have to learn syntax of ruby for around 5 yrs and then learn activerecord for 5 yrs before you think you can build a website. This is not true but that how music teachers tell you that it is, perhaps so you can keep coming back for more lessons ?
What you said is definitely true. Being connected with people in the industry I heard the Guitar Hero and RockBand eras brought in tons of players. Multiple teachers popped up only to find it difficult to pay the rent these days now that not as many kids are showing up. Some of it is disillusionment I'm sure, but the instant-gratification mentality of this society isn't helping. It's easier to play a song on Youtube and pretend to play the guitar than actually learn the instrument.
Anyone in particular for more recent artists (guitarists in particular) who you'd at least tip a hat to?
I thought Guitar Hero would help by providing an intermediate, even if fake, land to experience time and melody.
About heroes, don't you think the whole music industry, culture even has faded ? I don't feel anything like the days of Queen at Wembley, Dire Straits, Police, even festivals seeems to be down to mundane and not as glowing as before (granted 1: I wasn't born for these, 2: generation bias can be at play). From 50s to 70s there was a pioneering vibe there.
About teaching, how do you blend theory after the "play your favorite melody" stage ? not a critical question, just curious.
I've recently got back into playing after a 10 year break. Back then I was learning from tablature online displayed in monospaced font, the quality of which varied from nothing like the music to pretty good.
Today, I find not a lot has changed, except the sites where I used to go to find tablature are now charging for the same material.
I'd like to pay for quality transcription of music (like the official music books) but available online or in an app.
I know how you feel. I studied piano as a child but I learned a bit of guitar by myself. I often find myself looking up tabs and then switch to learning by ear because not only they are wrong but also "stupid" (as in, use weird and difficult hand positions which don't make any sense). And yeah, pretty much all the main websites try to force you into paying for some service you don't want or need with popups and stuff that you would only see on a torrent search engine.
I think the main problem is that most people use tablets/phones to look up songs and so they most likely use Apps or learn from YouTube videos. I find the latter option quite time inefficient.
I have been thinking about implementing a github-style website for tabs but it seems that the interest for tab sites is slowly fading away.
I haven't played for about 10 years as well, and I fondly remember the ascii tabs.
But maybe you never found the alternative, which was a program that was basically a midi player that display all chords and notes in timed bars and play the music, with all the instruments split up.
You always knew the quality was good, since you could have the computer play the track to check it out before practising.
I don't remember what program I used back then, but this looks like a spiritual descendant, though I am not recommending anything:
For an open source multi-track tab player/composer, check out TuxGuitar. It reads several popular tab formats. Sound depends on underlying MIDI system, may require a little futzing to get going. Written in Java, runs on Windows/Linux/OSX.
Checkout songsterr: http://songsterr.com there's others similar, but I prefer this one. Bonus points, if you open the web inspector and view a song, you can get the http request that downloads the .gp4/5 file and download the file for yourself.
And no, I'm not ashamed to do this; I was one of the lots of guys that submitted gp3 in early 2000's by manually transcribing them; later these community-generated tabs were takend down (DMCA I guess) but I was dumbfounded when I learned that some companies were selling access to the tabs.
I would suggest you check out Troy Grady [1]. I've been playing the guitar on-and-off for 33 years, and most of the 'off' has been because I've reached a hard limit for picking speed; my left hand has always been pretty good, but right hand and high-speed synchronisation has always been a problem, and I never fixed it, just got frustrated, stopped and then started again. While I teach for a living now, it wasn't until I saw what Troy Grady has analysed and offered that I started practicing properly again after years of neglect. While I have a LOT of work to do to get my right hand sorted, after a few months I'm starting to see glimpses of improvements, and being able to pick well.
If you're of my age (I'm similar age to Troy Grady, 45), then the free cracking the code videos on YouTube are a good watch anyway - entertaining as well as the story of playing guitar that I largely paralleled (but never found the solution that he did, alas, until now).
Not sure what's out there for pop music, but for jazz iRealPro is indispensable. Thousands of chord charts for jazz standards are available on their forums (which is linked within the app) and the it can do playback, including the ability to silence particular instruments.
This probably varies by genre, but I've found that if you add "pdf" to your search, you'll often find high-quality handwritten sheet music, sometimes with tablature. I've also found scans of out-of-print music books.
It's free, it's like Wikipedia in that anyone can edit it (so crappy transcriptions get replaced eventually by better ones), it even plays the song for you. The only bad thing is that it uses Flash.
If you're interested in guitar, it's worth looking at some music from West Africa. A lot of music from that region (at least a lot of what gets exported as "world music") relies heavily on guitar. Maybe the renaissance of the guitar just won't happen in the US / Western Europe.
> And people quit electric guitars more often than acoustic ones, he said, because of the pain factor: Steel strings hurt delicate hands.
Huh? I can only imagine that they meant s/acoustic/classical/, because both acoustics and electrics have steel strings (and, of course, steel strings on an acoustic have significantly higher tension than those on an electric). Classicals have nylon strings.
For me there's the pain factor and also the fact that when trying to set up barre chords or any chords for that matter my chubby fingers always seem to hit adjacent strings. I easily grokked the saxophone, clarinet, flute, and trumpet but it's much harder for me to physically make music on a guitar.
Yeah, I find it much less painful to play on electric than on acoustic. I don't play on electric that much because of the time it takes to get the cable, plugin in the amp, turn it on, etc...
True, but finger picking doesn't really hurt your fingers (or at least it never has for me, a guitar player of 14 years now). It's definitely pressing on the strings with your left hand that's the pain point for pretty much every budding guitarist I've ever talked to.
Funny, for me it's always the right hand that hurts when playing steel-stringed guitar.
I think it is because I don't have particularly strong nails, so they always broke very close to the flesh, so I'd have to do fingerpicking with my actual fingertips.
Most of the pain on the left hand, in contrast, was related to lack of muscle strength. After a few days of practicing it would be gone.
How much sunlight exposure do you get? My fingernails were also very weak until I started supplementing vitamin D, which made them grow noticeably thicker and stronger. I think a lot of people here spend most of their time indoors so they're at higher risk of vitamin D deficiency.
If you really want to finger pick with your nails, you can try some clear nail polish to add a little strength. If that isn't enough, you can go for the old classical guitarist trick of layering superglue and silk to add some nail strength.
I was surprised by this part, too, and I figured the same thing. I've been playing guitar for most of my life, and the lower tension on electric strings is why I recommend to pretty much anyone to start with an electric, even though the electric guitar seems like the more "advanced" instrument.
Not only strings tension but distance as well. As a 5 strings bassist with big hands I find painful any attempt to play a full chord on a guitar. 2-3 notes easy rock rhythm chords are ok but anything more complex forces me to push and bend fingers to an unsustainable level if I want to avoid mutes.
Maybe they were inferring the bending that one usually does more often on an electric guitar vs. an acoustic or classical - without calluses, a persons fingers can get chewed up pretty quickly on an electric.
It's not really the bending that chews up your fingers, it's the steel strings in general. I haven't played an electric in years, but play jazz and classical on a steel string acoustic several days a week. It doesn't hurt like when you first start, but I definitely still notice the bite!
Yes, I noticed that too. Perhaps the writer could have clarified and mentioned 'Classical guitar' or 'Nylon string guitar' as what he meant. Most 'acoustic guitars' are steel stringed, and have a MUCH heavier gauge than electric guitars, thus making it more difficult for a beginner to fret notes and chords.
But look at any entry level (sub $200) guitar and the biggest problems aren't going to be the type of strings, but rather the height of the action (distance from the strings to the fretboard), uneven frets or warped necks - all of which would even make a pro player curse and struggle.
Which is why whenever a parent or friend approaches me to ask what guitar they should buy their kids, I always say to avoid the really cheap ones and go for the mid range ones, which usually have markedly better build quality. That way also, when little Johnny or Susie decides guitar is not for them, there is better resale value in a mid range guitar.
>But look at any entry level (sub $200) guitar and the biggest problems aren't going to be the type of strings, but rather the height of the action (distance from the strings to the fretboard), uneven frets or warped necks - all of which would even make a pro player curse and struggle.
The situation has improved drastically in recent years. The no-brand department store guitars are still awful, but there are plenty of perfectly playable guitars at the ~$200 mark. Chinese-made guitars used to be unplayable junk, but they're now producing excellent instruments in the $200-$1000 range, matching or even surpassing Korean guitars.
Agreed. Asian made guitars nowadays are a several orders of magnitude better than they were a couple of decades ago. I guess what I was trying to say is that the chances of a finding a decent sounding guitar at the $150 mark is still a hit or miss affair. But at $300+ they seem to be consistent, and quite playable 'out of the box'.
Also agreed - that extra ~$100 buys you a lot of consistency and quality. It has to be said that the defects you do see on low-end guitars are increasingly cosmetic and superficial; I don't see very many warped necks these days, but I do see a lot of bad finishes and sharp fret ends.
Some brands are far better than others in this respect - I've seen a fair number of unplayable Squiers and Epiphones, but I don't think I've ever seen a genuinely bad Yamaha Pacifica.
Yup. While the steel strings will leave you sore for a while, the lower action largely compensates for that. The classical, in comparison, requires must more finger strength, more exercise, and generally more soreness.
It's common to wire acoustic guitars with steel strings too. The problem with acoustic guitars is the fretboard. With acoustic you need to press down harder and further to get a clean sound than you would with an electric guitar.
Anecdotally I found acoustic guitars to hurt my fingers more than electric - both wired with steel strings. Yet to play with nylon.
Part of this is also because beginners use too much force on the strings to fret them. It took starting on a bass guitar to learn how little force it actually can take if fretted properly.
Discovering guitar is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I was gifted a guitar at a very young age and haven't been able to put it down since then. Through high school and college I played in various local bands and now it serves as a daily therapy session. In fact, while I'm trying to figure out a complex problem (I work as a software engineer) I often pick up my guitar for inspiration.
If you'd like some affirmation that having music in your life is likely a very constructive habit, I think you might enjoy reading about how fond Albert Einstein was of playing his violin.
Another way to view this is the reward at the end of the rainbow.
Back in the '60s and probably all the way to the '90s. There was a reward for young men to pick up that guitar.
If you played it enough and you got good, you could be a rockstar. And, yes, I suppose you have to start at the bottom, playing in small bands and doing gigs for peanuts but you could work your way to the top and be successful.
I can't imagine that incentive exists anymore for the average kid who doesn't love the idea of playing guitar for the joy of being a musician, but rather, for the promise of fame, money and girls. Especially if they are ugly dudes, like the members of Kiss, or Ted Nugent or all the guys from Metallica, or Tommy Lee etc, etc.
Which means, so what if you learned to play the guitar and you learned it well? How lucrative is it to be a lead guitarist these days? Do you have a good chance of getting a sweet record deal as a guitarists these days? Or will you be relegated to be the in the background, letting all your talent and potential be squandered playing pop song arrangements for Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande? Well either that or you can remain indie, beloved by many people whose financial support barely sustains you and always obscured by the shiny pop talent.
I think the modern version of the rockstar today is the DJ. It's much more rewarding to learn to be a DJ (or a producer for that matter) and whether it be for the fame, the money or the girls.
One thing that isn't often pointed out is that most music making is a social activity. Everyone I know that has stuck with music throughout their lives has actively played in bands/groups/ensembles. There's a misconception that music requires a lot of solitary practice before playing in groups.
I'd hazard a guess that most people don't stick with guitar because they don't have anyone to jam with. As a kid, I started playing in bands way before I got serious about practicing music as a discipline, and most musicians I know fall into this category.
I am not trying to undervalue the benefit of practice: in my 20s I practiced 3-6 hours a day pretty much every day. But, that was long after I had been working professionally as a musician and playing in bands.
What frustrates me about Fender and Marshall is a 100% dedication to "WE ONLY DO THINGS THE WAY THEY DID IN 1970" and 0 innovation in their amplifier and guitar designs.
Granted the 1970s set the bar of what good "guitar tone" sounds like, but no one has even tried to raise the bar as far as making it even better. As a result we still amplifiers that create blocking distortion, and we still have guitars that have intonation problems, and we still have guitars that pick up electrical noise. And why can't I change my amplifier settings from my pedalboard? That's some clever Adruino programming and some digital potentiometers.
None of these are particularly hard problems to solve, but it's frustrating as and engineer and musician to be stuck in another world.
Everything above is an opinion, not a fact, so take as you will.
I heard an interesting theory (alluded to in the story) that high-quality PC and console videogames caused a seismic shift beginning in the 1990s, as teens gravitated to an immersive, often collaborative indoor activity. If gaming (or apps, social media, whatever) are drawing away a large population of teens, not only are fewer people picking up a guitar or drumsticks but the number of available local bandmates declines, further weakening the allure of playing music. It makes a big difference if you have friends who also play. If your peers aren't doing it, music is more likely to be a solo activity which is not as much fun.
Another factor: from the 1950s to the early 2000s pop music heroes more often than not could also play guitar. I grew up in the 80s, and learned to play bass starting at age 16 by intently listening to cassettes of The Beatles, Who, Led Zep, U2, REM and the Sex Pistols so I could play with my friends and explore a new dimension of the music I loved. I was never a hotshot player, but did play in lots of cover and original bands through my late teens and 20s and some of my best friends today are people I played with decades ago.
My tween & teen kids have almost no interest in guitar-based pop music, although my daughter's middle school music curriculum included a segment on "90s music" which later prompted her to ask me, "Dad, did you know there was a song about a sweater unraveling?" (man, that made me feel old). They do listen to modern-day pop music, though, and sometimes to pop from previous decades that is not guitar-centric (Michael Jackson, etc.)
On the other hand, the apps and other tools that are now available to everyone--not to mention the ability to connect with like-minded people--can spark different types of musical creativity, collaboration, and insights. I did a double take a few months ago while listening to a radio special about Philip Glass and my son casually remarked that one of his pieces from the late 1960s "sounds like 'My Singing Monsters'." I hope my kids do get interested in creating music and find an opportunity to collaborate, but I accept that it may not involve rock music.
I wonder how instruments will fare in the "raise your family in a downtown studio apartment" world advocated here.
Instruments take space, and some amount of separation from neighbors (and other household members) seems necessary for practicing to be socially acceptable.
How does children's music practice work in tiny apartments with paper-thin walls? Do European parents rent space in communal practice rooms or something?
In the rush toward luxurious cappuccino bars and climbing walls I don't know if college dorms still have music practice rooms but in the old days we used to have those in the dorm basements.
This should scale to apartments, but in the dog eat dog world of urban living those little windowless rooms are probably be rented out for thousands of dollars per month.
I used to work with a guy who smoked (yeah I'm old, nobody smokes anymore) but the point is if he spent fifteen minutes every hour on smoke break I should be able to take my flute to work and get in a quick practice session maybe twice a day.
I think this is part of it. You can't really practice acoustic in an apartment building, unless you're my rude upstairs neighbor. You can practice electric piano, FLP, and rapping - which just happens to be the major modes of musical production these days.
Electric instruments fare very well in this world, thanks to constantly improving micro amplifiers and amps for headphones. Also, in dense areas, practice spaces are common and affordable because there is enough demand for them. There are two within a quarter mile of my apartment in Boston, one of which (the one I use) has at 60 rooms. There are several more such spaces in the city. I split mine with others but it would be affordable in any case, and I can drive my big amps as hard as I want there. It also doubles as storage space for some of the more ungainly equipment (100lb bass cab, etc), removing a lot of the difficulty of keeping things at home. Frankly, it's also more secure than my apartment -- heavier door, heavier deadbolt, no windows.
A guitar doesn't take up much physical space, but if you want to play with amplification, the noise issue does become a big factor. It is possible, however, to play with headphones, so that your neighbors won't hear you at all.
I'll also add that with an electric guitar, it's totally normal to practice without amplification. If you're playing non-distorted parts, and your room is quiet, and you're not totally deaf, an unamplified electric guitar is loud enough to be heard well, while not being loud enough to be heard outside the room. Playing distorted parts doesn't work so well, however, because you can't really hear all the harmonics very well without the amplifier, and the distortion changes the sound so much.
I've had a metallic blue electric guitar for ten years now.
Bought so many beginner materials and they're fucking awful. I can't understand jack shit.
The closest I got to sticking to anything were the eMedia programs, at least the acoustic one. I bought the metal one but I'm not sure it works anymore on current Macs and I didn't want to rebuy it.
Bought a piano and the situation is even more dire.
Music is awful for self teaching. Absolutely awful.
The best starting point is undoubtedly justinguitar.com. He offers a complete course in guitar, absolutely free of charge, with video lessons and transcriptions. His course will get you from "never picked up a guitar" to being a self-sufficient musician. He has glowing endorsements from Brian May, Steve Vai, Mark Knopfler, Tommy Emmanuel and Woz.
Moving on from the beginner-intermediate level, I recommend TrueFire. They offer a huge range of video lessons from expert tutors in most genres. An all-access pass costs $19/mo, which is outrageously good value IMO.
> Bought a piano and the situation is even more dire.
https://pianowithjonny.com It's awesome :-) I'm playing passable blues riffs and have taught myself to read music with the help of some free apps (Music Tutor on iOS).
There's also a great series of books by Joseph Alexander for the guitar (fretboard fluency, etc). Definitely worth checking out.
For me, the most important thing has always been motivation. Right now I want to be able to walk into a bar/hotel/train station and bash out "Great Balls of Fire" a la Goose in Top Gun. So damned cool... :-D
Ignore all that, sit down with your guitar and start picking out simple melodies by ear, note by note. Begin with "Happy Birthday" or the alphabet song. That's hard and scary, but you'll make more progress in a week than you did in your whole life. Most importantly you'll defeat your fear of music.
It's not awful. It's just hard. It takes a long time to get to anything like basic proficiency, and the first few months/years are spent stumbling around thinking "I am really shit at this."
If music was a video game no one would buy it, because the reward curve is so unrewarding.
At some point you have to accept that unless you're in the 0.01% of the population with genius-level talent, you will only ever make slow progress towards a distant goal. Because that's how it is for everyone who isn't a genius.
The people who can play are the ones who started as embryos, and/or are motivated to keep at it. Not everyone has that motivation or that background, and that's fine too.
When I was age 7-12 and taking piano lessons, it was torture. At 16, with classical/folk guitar lessons, it was still a real slog, as I'd get very bored.
At age 50, when I took up piano lessons again, it was _so_ much easier. After 30 years of working, staying on-task for a 30-60 minute practice session was a piece of cake.
Also, a good teacher ($), a good instrument ($ to $$$), and a tolerant family all really help.
I'm self-taught, and I've been playing guitar for 25 years or so. If I hadn't picked it up as a teenager, I doubt I'd have gotten as far with it. I was obsessed with reproducing the sounds I heard on records, and it didn't feel frustrating at all to spend hours working on a riff until I got it exactly right.
The thing that worked really well for me is MIDI keyboard + Synthesia (+ custom midi instruments to make it sound nice). I wish I had more time to practice.
In this context, I would like to recommend the excellent lecture series about the history of the guitar captured on video offered by Gresham College and Professor Christopher Page. They are very entertaining, with lots of historic background stories! It is mostly about England but the rest of the world is mentioned to give context.
> ...it has been almost universally forgotten that there was an intense guitar craze in England
> between about 1800 and 1835, spanning the lifetimes of Keats, Byron, Shelley and Coleridge, and a
> craze whose history has never been traced. Histories of English music and society in the
> nineteenth century continue to be written as if it never happened, and yet the instrument was
> cultivated from the royal family in the person of Princess Charlotte (d. 1817) down to the
> poorest laundress.
> This is much more than the story of an instrument and its music: the rise of romanticism, the
> creation of an urban poor hungry for self improvement, the proliferation of newspapers,
> serialised fiction and printed sheet music, the social position of women and other aspects of
> English society and culture in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars all have a place within it.
Have been playing guitar off and on for over five years, no musical training. I found the best way to keep playing is to play along to songs you know, and routinely practice them every day. Hours go by without you even noticing, it's great.
What's hard, though, are things like actually moving to the next step. Are you even practicing correctly, continually pushing yourself to new heights, or are you defaulting to the riffs or melodies that you like to play because they're easier?
The hardest part for me, currently, is trying to learn music theory on my own. I've tried getting into the creative side, writing songs and melodies, but so far, that process isn't very fun at all because of my lack of knowledge in scales, chords, and progressions.
> The hardest part for me, currently, is trying to learn music theory on my own
As someone who is currently learning piano and music theory as an adult, I can recommend the youtube channel of Shawn Cheek. This guy has posted something like 3000 videos on various piano and music theory subjects. A good starting point would be his series on the Circle of Fifths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdF-uIeM33o
I find this guy to be an excellent teacher, I like his teaching style, and could listen to his accent all day :)
I highly recommend at least learning the pentatonic scale. It's very easy, and it's the basis for most rock and roll lead guitar. If you're in the right key, you can noodle around on the pentatonic along to songs, and it will generally sound decent.
For learning chord progressions, learn all the basic major and minor chords, then experiment with putting them together. There's a lot of joy to be had in that simple exercise, and with practice, you'll start to get an intuitive sense about it. Once that starts to make sense, you can start looking into the more unusual variants on chords.
Also, lessons can be fun, especially early on, because a teacher can point you in a specific direction for practicing that will cause you to grow.
Try Yousician. It's an app for learning the guitar (I think they are working on adding the piano lessons). There are some theory lessons with practice sessions. I tried learning the guitar by tabs and accords of the songs I liked, but did not get too far. Yousician shows a clear skill progression (easy melodies->hard melodies) and provides some foundation for further learning and improvement. If only I had more time to practice :)
I play some instruments, including a semi-hollow electric guitar. I live in an apartment, so I have to carefully control the volume and which hours I play, I think this is a major difficulty for music in general nowadays.
The electric guitar requires an amplifier, and to use an amplifier in a low volume requires strict discipline. Sometimes I use over-ears headphones which while gives me a more clean sound it does not have the same feeling, and you cannot share the music with other people. It's specially bad when I'm playing with other people.
Apartments/Condos in US have paper-thin walls, they are becoming more common, it creates an extra difficultly to learn to play instruments, specially drums, bass and electric guitars.
The trouble you describe is, kid you not, one of the foundations for the technique Wes Montgomery developed of brushing with his thumb.
I can genuinely say that for about $100 a person can get a PC or Mac sound card that enables 1/4" guitar line-in, probably comes with ProSumer level amp modeling and a DAW license, a set of headphones, and explore a world of tone and recording and jamming along. I also completely agree that doing so is very, very different than filling a room with the din of a jangly tune or distorted growl. Finding a practice space though is as old as I can remember, because between parents, room mates, neighbors...police...people tend to like listening to music but not the practicing part it takes to get good haha.
I have given up on buying new guitars from Fender, Martin, Gibson and the other big names that peddle overpriced kit justified by the name stamped on it alone.
There's no reason their kit needs to be as expensive as it is. Lower end guitars from other brands are fine for beginners. Yeah Fender has $200ish Strat and Tele clones. But you can find those all over CL thanks to the focus of this article.
The days of arena rock are probably long gone. Fender wants to encourage people to take up guitar? Then get off your high horse and cut prices?
It's a piece of Americana most Americans can't even afford. It's their own damn fault.
Yep. As I got older and had a little bit of play-budget, I was able to buy a few guitars even though I only play occasionally. Even then, I didn't go for anything too pricey or "flagship" (although I might if I was gigging or recording).
Instead, I got a knockoff Les Paul style from a Korean company called Agile. It's not quite as nice as the high end Les Pauls but for under $400? Hell yeah and it sounds/plays better than the Epiphones of similar price.
Also got a Squier Jaguar off Craigslist for $150 because I always wanted a Jag...just not enough to shell out for the really nice ones.
Add in a cheap travel electric for campfire jam sessions, an absolutely crap bass that I only have because it was $10 at Goodwill (seriously the strings I bought for it cost more) and the cheap acoustic I bought for $50 as my first guitar in 1992 and I've got more than I really need for the occasional practice or just because I have a song stuck in my head and want to play along with the album for the hell of it.
Fender Squier guitars start at around $150. They've been a popular first guitar for decades. Fender sell a substantial quantity of "guitar starter packs" through retailers like Wal-Mart and Costco.
Anecdata: I went shopping for a new 5-string bass last month, took my time and had fun playing everything I could find in town (Portland), and even though I'd budgeted a couple grand to treat myself, the one that felt best under my fingers turned out to be a $225 Squier. It was a weird experience having to talk myself into spending less, but man, it's a great instrument.
So true. I'm very happy with my Fender Squier Classic Vibe 50's Tele. Awesome build quality with a great off-the-shelf setup. It's not exactly cheap (~$400), but it was totally worth it.
One of the things I learned growing up and playing some real vintage axes is that the consistency of build quality back then was incredibly hit-or-miss. Hand made not always a good thing, fit and finish. Sure, a lot of character, but from a practical standpoint, the "build quality" of guitars is highly refined in the 2000s!
I wouldn't say that. The classic fender stratocaster is around $400 iirc. It's a great guitar for the price and that is by no means a high end guitar or high end fender. The other "classic" guitar is the Gibson Les Paul which start at $1500. If a beginner got THAT, the gifter would be loaded.
The classic fender stratocaster is around $400 iirc.
It's a great guitar for the price and that is by no
means a high end guitar or high end fender.
"$400 looks a little pricey, what about this $100 guitar? Oh, that one is a Fender? Fender are a good make, right? I don't think they need a Fender just yet, they're only just starting. We'll go with the cheaper one. If they like it, maybe we'll get them a Fender if they stick with the lessons."
The ergonomics of the guitar are the main reason I don't play much anymore. I hit a roadblock where the amount of practice required to improve further wasn't really worth the physical discomfort. For example barre chords just push my fingers past their limits to stretch. No matter how many hours I practice them I can't make the ergonomics work. For other things that I've gotten pretty good at there's still some general ergonomic problems of sitting and repeating the same motions over and over. I fully understand the pain/gain required to improve but for a hobbyist such as myself it's hard to justify it past a certain point.
What I'd really like to see is Fender or some other company develop something like a SmartGuitar. I feel like there's a lot of potential to improve the ergonomics, accessibility and functionality if the strings were replaced with a multi-touch input surface with haptic feedback. Maybe the pick could be replaced with an input device that included an accelerometer, pressure sensitivity, and haptic feedback. On the software side the possibilities are endless. The multi-touch input could be 'auto-corrected' to make the fingering of complex chords more forgiving.
The top HN comment on this article is about how music teachers that focus on form and fundamentals are ruining young musicians' desire to learn. To me, your comment is the ultimate rebuttal of that.
Guitar is quite easy to play wrong; you can go a long way without learning proper form. I imagine having somebody show you proper posture, thumb placement, etc. would have helped you out. Nobody that wants to play rock music is going to learn sitting like this, though http://www.learnclassicalguitar.com/images/Playing-Position-...
Please just no. Part of the charm of the guitar is that its this kind of organic piece of wood and metal that you have to learn to master to make sound good. A lot of the different character and style of different players comes from their different technique and how they learned to play which I think would be lost if you could just easily make perfect notes by basically pressing a button. I guess this is the same reason why I prefer listening to instruments like guitar, piano (real piano, not electronic) and saxophone and synth/electronic music I find all sounds similar and lacks individual character.
Out of curiosity, what kind of guitar do you play? Different guitars have different necks have different characteristics; some thinner, some narrower, some with more curve, some flatter. I could imagine you'd be much more comfortable with a neck more suited to your hands.
A guitar is interesting because you can create different sounds depending on how you touch the strings. You can choose to fret with the tip of your finger, with the flat part of your finger, mute the string below, etc. This wouldn't be possible to do with an electric input device. What you are suggesting is an entirely different instrument, like a Midi / Guitar or something, and I'm sure there would be a market for this.
Barre chords are a large stepping stone for a lot of people, but there are a few techniques to doing them. Why not look at YouTube for guidance here?
Yeah, barre chords suck, no doubt about that. I've been playing for 12 years now and really I just avoid them. There are a lot of work-arounds for most music. I find I only might need one or two for a song. That makes it much more manageable. But for other chord forms, the dexterity takes practice. I haven't found a way around that. If the tips of your fingers are burning, stop and pick it up again tomorrow. Your finger will still probably hurt but after a month of that, you won't feel a thing and you'll be good to go.
I was fortunate to grow up with parents that played various instruments. Mom played the piano. Dad played the guitar and clarinet. Grandparents played the piano and the pipe organ at church. We kids were encouraged to pick an instrument we liked, and even though we didn't have much money, lessons were always something my parents figured out how to pay for. In return, we were expected to take it seriously, and learn both the instrument and the meaning of a commitment to something difficult. I took piano lessons from age 5 until 12, when they agreed that I could stop piano lessons if I took up another instrument, so I played the violin for 5 years with the public school's music & orchestra program. I quit playing altogether about the time I started driving, because having a car meant having a job, and that took the time I was using to practice.
Fast forward many years, through college, and a decade afterwards. I don't have the room for a real piano; keyboards & digital pianos just aren't the same for me. The violin is something I don't really enjoy any longer, especially without an orchestra to play in, and I do not have the time for such an endeavor.
In college, I fell in love with classical and flamenco guitar. Figuring that another instrument wouldn't be terrible to learn, since I already knew how to read music, I picked up a $200-ish classical guitar, some books of chords, and attempted to teach myself. After that miserable failure, I then attempted to find someone who could teach the style of guitar I wanted to learn, and teach it to someone who wasn't a little kid.
That turned out to be a nearly impossible task, and I think that's a big point of failure. The teaching methods out there have a focus on "kid music" to the exclusion of nearly everything else. On top of that, there is the assumption by most teachers that wanting to play guitar means you want to play rock 'n roll or pop-country. Those that don't assume that fall into the trap of thinking that you want to play in a gospel band. None of them were willing to sit down and teach the fundamentals without pushing me into playing extremely simplified versions of music I hate.
So my guitar sits in its case, in the back of the closet, unused. I gave up. Not because it was too much work. Because no one wants to teach what I want to know.
Have you looked at guitar stores that are luthiers as well? I bet they know someone that knows someone at the least. A good luthier has a lot of relationships with the flamenco and classical music community, since their entire living depends on it.
People probably quit electric guitars more than acoustics because you have to plug them in to get a decent sound. Not because of the steel strings (which are generally pretty light and forgiving on an an electric compared to a typical steel-string acoustic guitar). It's the hassle and volume factor rather than a physical hurdle.
Plus, there's possibly nothing more irritating than a novice guitarist hacking away on an electric quitar.
Sure, but there are also practice amps that accept headphones and even "headphone amps" like the thing I was mandated to buy by my parents when I insisted on getting an electric guitar in high school.
Plugged right into the guitar and let you connect headphones for non-obnoxious practice. Even had some overdrive built in (although it sounded like crap). Of course then I just plugged the headphone-out into the aux-in on my boom box and had something approaching an amp. Plus it had a mic-input so I could record one part to tape via the phone-out, then use a walkman or other tape player to play into the mic-in while playing the second part over top and recording out to my amp/boombox.
Fender entry level brand Squier did produce a weird line of Bass Guitars called the Vintage Modified. These go between 200-300 on second hand markets. I can't thank them enough for it, I spent 5 years on what I now call a shovel [1] that is the musical equivalent of a resistor. I never got the Fender craze, but they put just enough of their savoir faire in this VM serie to allow students to tickle beautiful sound and ergonomics [2]. I went from deadended hopeless student to inspired and happy the minute I bought mine. Sometimes the instruments makes the player.
[1] Ibanez SR400, funny enough, I used to love high end brands made by Ibanez designer; smooth like butter in every way
[2] as counterintuitive as it can be, Fender bass are larger, heavier, thicker than others, but you don't feel it while playing. It's not tiring. And you get a pinch of the famous Fender sound, beautiful mediums (even unplugged) and a tiny growl.
Long term, I think guitars (and the four-piece rock setup) will go the way of Glenn Miller. It's just so much easier to make music on a computer. And frankly, electronic music isn't as limited by physics (vibrating strings, reeds, lips, etc.) as conventional instruments.
Another headwind for Fender et al. is the supply of used guitars, from which guitar makers make exactly 0 USD.
And with due respect to current rock acts, the corpus of rock music is so extensive that originality probably doesn't exist - a situation any fan of classical music knows too well.
That said, I have a few guitars and look forward to buying and selling a few more. I use Rocksmith to learn songs and techniques. The other apps probably work as well or better. Still not a great or even good player, but my playing is better now than when I started.
And suffering no illusions of rock stardom. It's closer to meditation.
That, and the mostly true perception that that 'don't make em like they used to' drives most amatuers and pros alike to older equipment. I can buy an american made guitar and tube amp from the late 60s for under 500$ that blows away anything under 3k made today, not to mention having already depreciated and will be worth what I paid for it when I sell. Cars are similar, and even cash for clunkers did not help.
I'll be curious to see what happens to the musical instrument market when the baby boomers start dying off - I'm thinking that a lot of really great used instruments will start flooding the market. Decent quality musical instruments have a long lifetime, and tend to be treated fairly well.
This is true, and I'm sure the internet will play a big role in it now more than ever.
As in, local CraigsList "closet clean outs" will perhaps be the new "Pawnshop Find" because the seller doesn't take the time to research the item and a savvy watcher shows up, does the deal in cash, and moves along. Free-market and all. But, people who choose to go to sites like Reddit and ask "Hey found this how much is it worth?" have a much better chance of receiving market value, whatever that may be. Personally I think a lot of used guitars are woefully over priced and I'd enjoy watching the market change a bit more.
I think this is also an income effect. People are experiencing flat income with slightly inflating prices. Over time, that forces people to demand fewer and fewer luxury goods. To put it another way, if average income increased then demand for guitars should increase to some extent. It's not linear, of course. People also have very little free time with the current job landscape. As an anecdote, another HN thread is about Microsoft's ad campaign for "working 14 hour days, 7 days a week with pervasive Microsoft technology [surface devices, office 365, etc]." All of that will add up to fewer people spending fewer hours on a guitar and many other things.
Then they need to fund a new RockSmith game that is cheaper. Even clueless friends can bang out chords in a few hours. Like most of the worlds problems, education is the answer.
I never once heard someone say that acoustic guitars are easier to play than electrics. It goes without saying that the first thing you do when you buy a guitar and pull off the strings and put on something else. The stock strings are, more often than not, old, out of tune, and feel terrible. I use Elixer, which are soft and easy to play.
Maybe guitar stores should start tossing in a free set of good strings with every new purchase. This would keep the complaints down, I think. Long term, a guitarist will keep going back for the good string as well.
But Fender as a brand is facing a few issues.
First, the death of the rock star, so to speak, but more specifically, the death of the 70s rock star. There are so many brands to choose from that are equally as good, if not far superior, to Fender for the price point. Fender is still riding on the Strat and Tele, looks that haven't been updated for many years, and the quality of the pickups haven't kept up with the times, especially on the lower end models.
When you are talking about the low-end, meaning guitars up to $500 or so, Fender doesn't offer much that is convincing. For $500, you can buy an Epiphone SG or Les Paul + Orange practice amp for about that price point. It's hard to argue here considering this is a professional grade setup that one would keep and use for their entire life, really.
People quit playing music because playing music is really hard. Even if you are only going to strum C-G-E all your life, getting good at strumming those chords takes considerable practice and conviction. If you want to play leads well, that's a huge rabbit hole.
I think that every musician I've met is plain and simple, a music junky. This was much easier to spot in the old days, as this person would carry around a binder of CDs and read liner notes on the bus. Today, it is harder to spot, but the dead giveaway is someone who lives and breathes music naturally. This person listens to Lady Gaga with the same zeal as they listen to Led Zepelin. This person is now interested in discovering who inspired their favorite bands and they leap down a crazy rabbit hole and try to figure out why the heck all of the shredders are covering Bach, Beethoven, and Paganini. After all of this, they are excited to show you a brand new song by the Junior Boys they discovered on YouTube. If you don't "get" why this person has a wide and apparently conflicting taste in music, you have a natural musician on your hands and get that music instrument.
I don't know, I may be overstating the spirit of a musician, but honestly, I've never met one who didn't have some surprising influences and tastes, and I never met one who couldn't appreciate a night of eclectic open mics. The point is, to play music, you have to be willing to suffer, which includes chopping your fingers up on guitar strings or putting ice on your crimped next from holding a violin for 3 hours. It takes an innate drive and desire that is inexplicable to those who left their instruments for the dust.
Unfortunately, Fender can't make a musician, but they can still sell guitars to those who want to try it out, and that's not a bad thing.
> Maybe guitar stores should start tossing in a free set of good strings with every new purchase. This would keep the complaints down, I think. Long term, a guitarist will keep going back for the good string as well.
This is happening because of the death of the 'mom and pop' music stores and the rise of the big chain retailers.
Back when I started playing (>40 years ago) the stores I used to go into used to replace the strings, and setup the guitar for whoever bought it. They even used to offer the first one or two string changes for free (just buy the strings, and they would put it on).
Quite often, they would have a guitar teacher or two working out of a room in the store, so that new buyers could tee up some lessons (or get a free trial lesson). It was a good symbiotic relationship backed up by good old fashioned service.
Unfortunately, the ease of buying good guitars online anonymously has changed the landscape a lot.
Even 10 years ago, it was pretty easy to find mom-and-pop shops in LA. There was even a few that had in-house luthiers, but I don't know of any like that these days.
I now live in Austin and there is a healthy amount of small shops around town who carry a decent selection* of guitars made by local luthiers along with big brands, plus the strings are half-priced.
*I'm assuming they are decent. I play left-handed, so can't speak of the quality.
Given that many other industries use psychological tricks and things to make you "want" the unmentioned product, I like their frankness and candor - "Buy our guitars, learn guitar!"
Anyone know how something like the MI Guitar (https://magicinstruments.com/products/mi-guitar) would compare in terms of functionality to a real guitar? It seems logical that a person should be able to pre-program the chords they want to use into the guitar before playing a song.
Yes. Because a guitar is portable and often used for sing along purposes (see: church youth groups, camping like outings, sitting outside in the Spring) there is nearly an immediate draw once people see one. The second part is the choice of music, in that playing "Wonderwall" by Oasis or maybe a Ryan Adams version of a Taylor Swift "1989" song will be much more interesting than laying down an expert technical rendition of "Classical Gas" - well, probably.
This may be a very problematic study, but I think it's good to laugh at because it tends to reinforce the supposition / superstition / myth about the attractiveness of guitarists:
It's a well worn joke that playing to impress non-musicians is a very lucrative career path - playing to impress other musicians leads to poverty more than likely.
As a second generation player getting on in years, if a bunch of the next generation doesn't pick up the guitar and goes the DAW/laptop/plug-in route I can't blame them. Sure, there are big selling pop or rock-adjacent bands with guitars - Coldplay, Radiohead, Maroon 5, The Strokes - and country stars like Miranda Lambert, Brad Paiseley, and The Dixie Chicks feature it well. It's not going to die out as long as those kind of groups speak to young audiences. Have you taken a look at the local used instrument market in the US? Try not to drown in oversupply.
Maybe not in other markets - actually I see there are lots of complaints about that - import taxes, etc, making it nearly impossible for passionate players to get even reasonable models for prices less than a cheap beater car. That's a genuine problem I think, but not that players don't have enough colors to choose from. Really? Nah...
Also it's strange to me that real, loud & proud rock & roll is still very American and very present with a group like Black Stone Cherry[1], and yet they seem to do best overseas (England, Europe), not in the US. I've seen them several times live and they bring it - like groove rock, thunderous sync of bass, guitar & guitar and then vocal melodies - but I don't see them having any crossover appeal to pop or country, so they go where the audiences are. As a result, the Chris Robinson signature PRS guitar is actually not slated for US market distribution - only England and Europe. Business decisions like this add up. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFmIlJUYXeo
The flip side though is maybe the guitarist market has been oversaturated - "a dime a dozen" was the joke we tossed around. Guitar does have a steep learning curve, a lot more like the decibel scale in how it's logarithmic in many ways. Reaching 80% proficiency is staggeringly different than 95% from what I've seen. That's part of the fun of the frustration with the guitar - hard to play, takes maintenance, pisses off the neighbors, heavy to carry around, and then you get people assuming you are a party-all-night-sleep-all-day rock star wannabe, which hey, may be true.
The web has been wonderful for guitar. Tabs. Easy access to streaming songs. Excellent teachers like www.JustinGuitar.com who are constantly being discovered by new people searching for ways to improve. It's great!!!
Pretty funny an article about Fender starts off referencing the memorable "Sweet Child O' Mine" which was famously crafted by Slash on a Les Paul. I'd gotten wind when John Mayer left in 2015 that changes at Fender were afoot (he since signed with PRS). Something about a Beats executive joining the board and that having an effect on the company's direction (the can be fact checked, the result is simply speculation however). Not having enough guitar heroes go go around might be a valid issue though...I still miss Dimebag Darrell.
I'd guess that a similar 90+% of beginners quit the clarinet, violin, piano, drums, etc.
If the macro trend of hobbyist guitar playing has declined, I think it's correlated with its lack of prominence in current music.
For curiosity's sake, I just clicked through the top songs on Billboard Hot 100 chart[1]. As of today November 22, 2016, the top 20 songs do not have any obvious guitars. It's all synths, electronic beats, and other artificial sound effects. The first song with obvious guitars is the country song "May We All" by Florida Georgia Line sitting at position 30.
In previous decades with higher guitar sales, you had the popularity of 50s Elvis, 60s Beatles, 70s Led Zeppelin, 80s hair metal bands, 90s Nirvana, etc. It's easier for guitar novices to stay motivated when everything on the radio had lots of guitars in it. At the moment, the zeitgeist is electronic music until guitars make a comeback in mainstream pop. However, it's possible guitars will never become fashionable again and will recede further into isolated genres like country and folk music.
[1]http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100