I am also saying that though Aristides or Steinberger or Flaxwood or any other guitar might sound radically different to a guitar player who is searching out nuance, it does not to an audience and most electric guitars are interchangeable other than the fact that the body shapes of some don't fit the expectations of what people expect to see on stage in different genres. I agree guitars made of different materials can sound different. So, to your point, I don't think it matters how a guitar sounds, you don't have to accept that it sounds any certain way or that there are good or bad sounds, the modern or whatever is up to you, not the guitar. I stopped looking at the guitar as a traditional instrument and more of a 'sound creation device' a few years ago and that has been liberating. If you give me a vintage guitar, enough processing will suck the vintage right out of it, and that is not a bad thing IMO. guitar and I think that realization is unavoidable pull a guitar player from 1960 into a Guitar Center and he'd immediately see guitars and amps with which he's familiar, pull a keyboard player form 1960 and drop him in a place like Perfect Circuit and his mind would likely be blown- and that's even before we get into DAW territory, or MIDI, or even CV.Īnyway, ultimately any guitar can sound modern. Compare the evolutionary arc of the keyboard vs. The 1/4" jack and the magnetic pickup are the enemies of the guitar's evolution backwards compatibility at the expense of progress, and the usability of the guitar in modern music a casualty of that- guitar has largely made itself a prisoner of classic rock. Now we have the vibramate which is the opposite in spirit and purpose (preserve collectibility while sticking a vastly inferior vibrato on your guitar). That device required hacking up a guitar to install it, and players did it for those extra sounds. The biggest innovation in guitars that has had mainstream acceptance is the Floyd Rose, which is like 40 years old. Pickups are basically filters in my opinion, and most of the radical changes in the 1980s had more to do with body shape than anything else. But the fact is that guitars have changed very little since the early electric guitars, the majority have Fender or Gibson scale lengths and the woods, at least in name, that buyers expect. I guess you'd start with 'what's a modern sound', and go from there. And yet those two are the only ones I can think of where the guitar as a whole just sounds "different". I've got vintage and modern mounted to all kinds of wood and not wood. I know that there are pickups that sound different from each other, I've got P90s and lap steels and lipsticks and Wide Range and all manner of single coils and humbucker's. I know that's a poor description, but when I pick it up and play it there's no question that it isn't another guitar of similar weight and hardware, just a very different spectrum. A Trussart Steelcaster Deluxe with Arcane Ultratrons-has a sound that isn't really bright, and not at all harsh, but seems to be steely. And not like a piezo, more like the heightened treble and bass of a good Martin overlaid on the electric sound.Ģ. Aristides 02-has a weird, almost acoustic property to the sound. The reason I mention this is because I've gotten two modern guitars lately that don't sound traditional at all:ġ. A Steinberger has a warmth and sustain, but not immediately audible as "that's a Steiny". A Parker Fly is bright because of the frets and rigidity, but it still sounds like a regular guitar. And while some of them have been brighter and some darker, some higher and some lower output, they've sounded fairly similar in the spectrum of things. I've owned a bunch of guitars over the years.
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