Eh. And yet, every single person I know has a ukulele, and can play more songs, more quickly, and more adeptly, than almost everyone I know with a guitar. I'm a bass player. Have been since I was 12. At the peak, I had 15 bass guitars, even custom-made ones, a 7-string monster, fretted, fretless, acoustic, electric, whatever. They were beautiful, and I played them all. Some more frequently than others. People make music with whatever is at hand. The whole Americana-folk revival thing has increased the number of banjo and accordion players 1000-fold, and the marching band thing has made the trombone cool again. If there are fewer people playing guitar for a while... so what? People are still making music, using whatever tools are available to them, and those tools are expanding and far easier to obtain. The fact is that buying shit at Guitar Center or Sam Ash has always been a fucking horrorshow. You had to deal with some whacked-out lead singer metalhead who played on Tuesday at the local rock club with 7 people in the audience, and was bitter that your mom and dad were buying you a guitar. Salespeople would pounce on you the moment you walked into the store. All you wanted to do was try out a bunch of instruments and see if one "talked" to you... and Larry Leather would hover over you, constantly tousling his hair to make sure it stood up high on top. Fuck that. When I was a Ghost Tour Guide in Pike Place Market, working evenings to make a little more money before my own business could support itself, one of the other tour guides was this guy Jim. He'd found a little place to open up a guitar store, but the building needed way more renovations, so he got a job with us to make some more money for renovations. Within 2 years of opening his business, he had purchased the entire building, and is doing pretty fucking well: The Seattle Guitar Store Maybe Sam Ash and the Guitar Center need to learn basic customer service, and stop being subservient to Fender and Gibson. Shit, Georgetown Music is doing great as well, selling used instruments and equipment at rock-bottom prices. I walked in there last month and saw one of my old bases hanging on the wall for sale! Oh. What about the Trading Musician in Seattle, that is packed wall-to-wall with quality used musical equipment at good prices, and a wonderfully knowledgeable staff? "Waaahhhhh! Millennials don't want to be patronized and sold crappy mass-produced generic shit from soulless automatons in sanitized soulless stores next to the malls they don't go to! It's the millennials fault our cynical piece-of-shit business model sucks!" meh.
Holy shit, I almost impulse bought that Monoprice Guitar, but it was out of stock. Monoprice probably best represents my buying habits and values as a consumer, it's like a nerdy secret shop that can pretty much do no wrong. Obviously, I am fully immersed in Monoprice kool-aid, are the guitars actually that shitty in person?
If it holds it's tuning there is no reason not to buy it. People jerk off way too much over their gear. There is no correlation between dick size and how much money was spent on your guitar but it'd be real hard to tell that by listening to people with expendable income talk. Playing a piece of shit guitar that you bought for $70 bucks should be good fun until it breaks (a $70 guitar will break). Buying a used will get you a better guitar for the money. If you don't currently play guitar than you have no idea what you like and it doesn't really matter what you buy right now anyways. My two favorite guitars and the only two I've held on to are far from the most expensive I've ever owned. Gear jerk offs would probably look down on at least one of them, real snobs would look down on both but I love things about how both of them play an they suit my tastes and style. Gear jerk offs would have loved the most expensive guitar I traded but it totally wasn't for me.
(Not advice for cgod, just adding to your point) Never bought a new guitar in my life, and am currently making music with an electric guitar that the music store near me (Trade Up) threw in for free with my $20 amp. My gear apart from that is a $25 banjo, a bass that was given to me, and the same $100 acoustic guitar I've had for 10 years. I've never given a fuck about gear, because "tone" is about a dozen orders of magnitude less important than composition and performance to me. It's a hell of a lot easier to get good tone than to write a decent song or put on a good show. Fuck the cult of tone - unless you make music that is largely textural, like noise rock, it just doesn't matter that much if you aren't doing big shows. Get thee to a pawn shop. Buy a guitar that isn't broken, learn how to solder a shitty pickup, and find the right strings for your guitar and your music. Really can't overemphasize that last point. A set of strings is going to set you back $5 - if you want to sound good and stay in tune, buy a new set every week or two.
That said, you're damn good at capturing sound and mixing your music. That, along with great songwriting is about all you need. But yes, it does all begin and end with good songwriting.t's a hell of a lot easier to get good tone than to write a decent song or put on a good show.
amen.
I'll do some digging. A pawn shop isn't a bad idea at all, plus I love doing my own repairs. Also, there's something really amusing to me that your telling me this while your name is 'flac'.
Oh! Also, whatever guitar you get, take some time just exploring it sonically. Flip around the pickup switch, play the same note on different strings, mess around with where you pluck the strings (closer to the neck, closer to the bridge). Technique and positioning plays a tremendous part in getting the sound you want. Here's a great video of Segovia showing what I'm talking about: Here is, from what I recall of it, a pretty concise soldering tutorial:
Yo, what. There's another melee player on Hubski? I'm pretty bad, but I love keeping up with the scene, I also designed the Alaska PR poster awhile ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/5tvzok/alaska_melee_winter_2016_power_rankings/ I main Marth and my tag is NoUp. If we ever have a Hubski meetup I'll bring a set up.
Please do! I'm a Ganon main, I lived in an apartment with a few other competitive players. Haven't played since I graduated. Marth was the bane of my existence. I used to main Ness, and Mofo (of this legendary match ) actually lived near my school, so I got to learn some cool tricks from him. I've toyed with the idea of having a non fraudulent main, but life is too short to learn multishining.
You linked to the Reign of Kindo video, which tripped me up. I don't play much anymore, but so many of my friends from disparate circles play. Both of my little brothers are also ranked in PM, I can't even come close to touching them.
I main Kirby in PM too! Threefish and Ren, I think they're ranked like 4 and 5 in Alaska for PM. We also just had Umbreon stay here for a summer, he helped developed some of the character movesets in PM. He dominated PM his entire stay here, he knows how to gimp with a lot of characters, but that's kind of expected, haha.
I mean, I've gotten up on stage with a diddley bow made out of 1 string and a plank of wood before, my standards are real fuckin' low. I also make, primarily, folk and lo-fi music. If I made actual real jazz, you bet your ass I'd get myself a decent semi-hollow. If I made metal, I'd get something I could shred with. If I was learning to play again, I would buy the cheapest (playable) guitar I could until I knew what kind of music I wanted to play, and then specialize after. Monoprice may or may not be shit - I'm guessing there's a reason I haven't heard of them.
Wait, this is one of those things where I'm like, wait, it's Monoprice- their whole thing is that they are anti-brand, test it against everything 'we have a $7 dollar headphone that audiophiles love and a $10 knife that America's Test Kitchen keeps raving about" sort of mentality. There's even a Planet Money podcast on them, where they take on some sort of fancy computer monitor and ultimately lose in the end. Thrifty millenials like me eat shit like this up, it's like the consumer dream of the internet age. Ok, I used to have a Squier when I was younger, haven't owned a guitar in a 7 years or so. I kind of have cgod's mentality of "I just need something that works". A $70 dollar guitar in this context feels perfect, but I'm suddenly aware of how weird it is for me to defend a brand on the basis of how much I like it's company philosophy. Will update if I decide to pick up a guitar.