Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Jan. 04 2005, 18:07 |
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Andrés Segovia famously called the electric guitar an abomination. If we go by his reckoning, the guitar's been being raped ever since the early pioneers of the instrument put electric guitars in the hands of the masses. Perhaps he had a point...
Of course, dismissing the electric guitar as an abomination would also be ignoring the skill and beauty in the playing of people like Mike. It can be a hugely offensive sounding instrument, but it can also be an incredibly delicate sounding instrument - it depends whose hands it's in.
As jsamsworth pointed out (paraphrasing Mike) in the first post in this thread, though, rock guitarists can be quite a backward lot sometimes. The majority of players do just bash out chords, or run up and down the same pentatonic scales...that's been going on ever since it became a 'popular' instrument, one which people feel they don't have to sit down and study in order to be able to play, one which doesn't have such a 'serious' atmosphere surrounding it which puts of anyone who doesn't have a view of becoming a virtuoso. It's not wrong...it's fun...
It's not a new thing that such music gets recorded and sold either - the punk music of the late 70s saw a rise of anti-virtuosos. People enjoyed the music because it was loud and had attitude, and expressed things which the listeners could relate to, rather than because they were blown away by the skill and complexity of the playing. Record companies were standing by to cash in on that movement (that was one of Mike's big complaints about Virgin, the fact that they turned so quickly towards punk and away from him), and they continue to do similar with modern groups which are popular with the young. It does become formulaic, but pop music has been for ages - sure the 60s had The Beatles, but it also had a whole shedload of singers, who'd sing numbers written by industry songwriters and played by session musicians (usually the same session musicians - the hits recorded in the UK in the 60s were mostly performed by a very small selection of musicians from off the session circuit)...all done to the same old pop formulae. It may have got worse, become exaggerated, but such phenomenon aren't really anything new.
It is partly just an instinct thing...people follow...some of it's to do with the way people are brought up, though not exclusively. People learning the guitar very often want to learn to play like the artists they listen to, and often they don't progress a lot further, so the same things get passed down from one generation to the next.
It's not exclusive to guitarists though...an awful number of people making music with computers these days seem to end up creating stuff which mostly sounds the same. It's the same with all styles and methods of music creation, I feel - it takes an awful lot of effort to come up with something that doesn't come across as run of the mill.
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, but I'll repeat something I already said somewhere else: I think it's somewhat wrong to judge how good or how bad is Mike as a guitarist, because he's a multi-instrumentalist. To me he's a good guitarist just as much as he's a good mandolinist, bassist, keyboardist, percussionist etc. 
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, back to the debate. Iwould rank Mike up there with Jimi Hendrix, Brian May, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Dave Gilmour, as one of the greatest guitarists. Mike always seems to be overlooked ,when it comes to guitarists 
