September comes around again. It’s been a couple of years now since I got seriously interested in guitar, and all that that entails. I got my Strat on 12 September 2024, joined Justin Guitar 6 days later, first posted on a lesson on 27 December 2024, posted in the forum proper on 19 June 2025, introduced myself on 8 August 2025 and started this learning log the day after. Progress through the beginner grades was relatively breezy, but I’ve been hovering at about grade 4.5 for a while now.
There are some things I like a lot: my own guitar, playing it, working on it, finding out how others play, learning songs, writing songs, and so on.
But frankly there are several alienating things about guitar that put me off, and which are less about playing the guitar and more about the culture that has accreted around the instrument: the endless fixation on appearance, the apparent competition to own more stuff, the veneration of expensive products, the pretence of superior hearing, the pointless pursuit of speed, and probably a couple of other things I’ve temporarily blocked from memory.
When I first ventured into music (1976) people I knew might decorate their guitars to suit themselves, and no one would be so uncool as to enthuse about the product, let alone its appearance. Instruments were tools to do a job, and the result was all that mattered. As long as a guitar worked, it was fine. Materialism was verboten. Looking back, I think there was something very healthy about that predisposition. Does an artist gush about the wood grain of their paintbrush handle? Of course not. It is only what they do with it that matters.
I don’t find the joke about the right number of guitars being however many you already possess plus one very amusing at all. Of course, no joke repeated endlessly remains funny even if it was in the first place, and this one never stops being repeated. I know that repetition of a cliche or mantra builds communities. But the underlying GAS isn’t just a joke, it is something more, an endless and unsatisfiable craving for stuff. It’s a consumer mentality, not that of a creator. It goes without saying that people are entitled to spend their own money however they want to; they can be as altruistic, selfish, or wasteful as they like, as magnanimous or acquisitive as they wish. It’s up to them. Collect stamps, owl ornaments, guitars - whatever you like if ownership is so important to you. I like the romantic notion that objects can be given a life. Hanging unused on a wall, or interred in a road case - that’s no life for a guitar.
Time and again, in blind testing, the supposed superiority of expensive, rare, or otherwise hallowed musical equipment has been disproved. A quintessential example of this was an Anderton’s video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uxIAYq6k_Y) in which the testee chose the less expensive guitars when blindfolded but then, minutes later, when given the same instruments to test again without a blindfold, chose the more expensive ones, claiming that this vindicated what he’d said before. It wasn’t just that he first got it ‘wrong’, because after all price is not the determinant of quality; the issue is that the second he saw what he was playing, he was swayed against what his ears and hands had been telling him. If only this was an isolated case, but it isn’t.
Smug note: the guitars he preferred sight unseen were Fender Player Plus (like mine!)
Similarly, there are those who insist that there is some ineffably fine quality to the sound produced by this or that piece of equipment, usually expensive, old or well-known, but then fail to identify that very quality when forced to use hearing alone. This failing is repeated so often that you would expect a little humility to creep into attitudes towards inexpensive, new or unknown equipment, but no. Making a mistake is forgivable, unwillingness to accept the fact is foolish.
Who really cares about BPM? Watching someone twiddle about on their fretboard at Mach 2.3 plumbs the depths of tedium, right down there with watching paint dry or grass grow. Some people can solve Rubik’s cube in under four seconds. Some can stack and unstack cups faster than the eye can follow. Bully for them. I just ask for a bit of perspective; these skills don’t make you a hero. Don’t worship them. Don’t copy them. Write a decent song instead.
An unedifying offshoot of this fascination with speed is the prevalence of show-off videos, the ensuing accusations of fakery and dishonesty, hurt or arrogant rebuttals, and rebuttals of the rebuttals. Whatever. It’s all just so tiresome.
Which brings me to social media squabbles. I suppose all fields have them, but guitarists seem to drag them out ad nauseam, and at a sub-literate level. Why? Fender has been aggressive about copyright, D’Addario used AI in an ad, someone said something about tonewood, and off we go! For your own sanity, don’t read the comments!
After all that, I’ve got a guitar, I can play it. I’ll get back to that now.