Let's post about some things that have (or haven't!) changed over the years in guitars. Whether it be everyone trying imitate this one artist or gear that used be the craze...you get the idea
Posted Jan 10, 2018, 12:49 AM UTC
I stopped paying attention to guitar forums and pretty much stopped playing back in the early 2000s. The old Marshalls people talked about them were plexis. When I started playing again it seemed like people were all about the JTM 45.
They pedal market exploded too! So many pedals.
Yeah when I started about 10 years ago, people were lusting after the JCM800s from the 80s. I think Kerry King had his own signature in the late 2000s too, only fuelling the fire.
Yeah those too, but I was thinking "older". I guess there was enough demand because they did the 800 reissue.
I used to have a 2204. Killer amp but way too loud for my needs.
When I was a kid guitar was a lot more like bass cause I was playing bass :D
Modeling has definitely come far from the POD days and is so widespread now.
Rocksmith is a fantastic way to grind out chops and if I were 16 again I would have been playing that instead of flipping through the tab telephone book or hoping and praying that someone did a halfway to accurate online tab to read on my 800x600 monitor.
You can learn more on youtube in an afternoon than I did from my first bass instructor (the second was better). If you actually take the stuff seriously and are self critical you can be 'web taught' rather than being apprenticed/schooled or locking yourself in a dark room and wearing holes in records. Though I did fall into the trap of picking with my middle finger and thumb, now that I understand hybrid picking I should probably stop it... but it's comfy... at least its an easy one to break. Same is true for guitar maintenance, thanks to watching an ornery Canadian fix guitars on youtube, I know how to do intonation and adjust the truss and such...gonna replace &/or file the nut for these 10s that are sticking next.
Modelling is so good on laptops. I remember always wanting a pod but I kept on reading that they weren't so great. I had a tube amp five years ago, but I sold it and got myself BIAS FX with some speakers - the pain of maintaining a tube amp, waiting for it to warm up, the space (etc) was the tipping point. The cash was a nice bonus.
I use Bias FX with headphones (Audio Technica ATH-M50), and it's great. I like to mess around with different amps and pedals just for fun and to see what kind of sounds I can get. Doing that with real amps and pedals would be ludicrously expensive. I'm probably going to stick with Bias until I can afford something like an Axe-FX, which I'm predicting will last me basically forever, or at least until a modeller that is way better comes out.
Still trying to figure out which speakers to get for modeling... any recommendations? I’ve been using the aux in on my peavy vypyr.
I’ve been using Logitech Z333 for the past two years and it’s going well for me, but I mainly play in my apartment. I know a guy who has spent almost a grand on studio monitors, but he uses his stuff for recording and mixing and used to study music technology at a university
I'll go first. I remember 5-10 years ago when it seemed like EVERY lead guitarist on YouTube had an Ibanez RG370DX or some kind of Schecter.
I remember wanting to buy one of those and then being discouraged by those sharktooth inlays and the poor reviews of the Edge III bridge!
Biggest Changes that slapped me in the face after taking nearly a decade off - twice ;-)
The DAW moving from a large, unwieldy, expensive proposition to great software and I/O being $100 away.
The DAW moving from being a way to record, to being an amp replacement.
Putting the DAW in a box or pedal. I've spent thousands and thousands on amps - and now only use my Kemper.... and it has all the amps - and they sound great.
The PRS Style Carved top and 25" scale - it's become my favorite configuration. The only guitars I love more than my PRS Custom 24s are my Kiesel variants: CT324 / CT624
The stratocaster still reigns supreme - and while a Gibson can still get the job done well, they're no longer mandatory.
Super strats from the eighties evolved the entire guitar universe, and we forget that today, even though 70% of guitars today owe their linage to EVH's Frankenstein.
One weird thing that emerged in the last 20 years was the notion that hand-wiring is superior to printed circuit boards. I had a BOSS BE5M, an OS-2 and a Boss DF-2 and there wasn't much difference between the three. But the BE5M allowed me to switch on and off multiple effects at the same time, and I didn't need a pedal board, or velcro. It's lighter than four individual pedals and came with it's own power supply. Also had an fx loop. Today it's worthless. Whereas my pedals have preserved their value.
After purchasing a GX-700, I really thought I was witnessing the demise of pedals. And yet, the boutique hand-wired analogue pedal market exploded. It still doesn't make much sense to me from a practical standpoint.
And on a related side-note, especially puzzling to me is the pervasive notion that an Englishman is inherently superior at manually wiring an amp than an Asian man. Gotta say, I didn't care if my amp was Japanese or British. I imagine that if you paid $1500 to someone in Indonesia to wire an amp, they'd take it pretty seriously, and they could afford to spend three months on such an endeavour given the average daily wage.
I really hope that the Indonesian worker sees their fair share of that money. I highly doubt it though.
Fair's a tough concept to nail down in capitalism. But yeah, me too. Something tells me that as soon as workers DO start to get a fair share, it usually signals the world it's time to find the next underdeveloped country to open a factory in.