From Guitar World · · 1m 30s
Your guitar is stuck in 1954, and your pedalboard isn't
Amps and modelers leapt into the future while the electric guitar itself barely budged in 70 years.
In brief
Amps and modelers leapt into the future while the electric guitar itself barely budged in 70 years. The gear you plug into has reinvented itself several times over; the instrument in your hands has mostly stood still, and Guitar World wants to know if that should change. Originally reported by Guitar World.
Players hate new ideas first
Ernie Ball's engineering chief Drew Montell laughed that the company's best sellers get rejected on arrival. Guitarists reward familiarity long before they reward invention.
“Most people hate our best-selling guitars right out of the gate.”
Two designs still rule
The two electrics that define the instrument were both drawn in the early 1950s. Everything since has been small variations on those templates, not a rethink of how they work.
“The two defining electric guitars were both designed in the early 1950s.”
The writer is guilty too
Guitar World's Jackson Maxwell admits both guitars behind his desk are old enough to collect Social Security, unmodified, and would look completely normal to their original 1950s buyers.
“they'd be fully recognizable to anyone who bought them the year they first hit shelves”
Everything else raced ahead
Hand a 1954 Strat buyer a Neural DSP Quad Cortex mini and you'd have to explain touchscreens before you got to the hundred amps and hundred-plus effects inside it.
Amps solved what stopped the Beatles
The Beatles quit touring 60 years ago partly because their amps lost to screaming crowds. Today there are amps with AI doing the tone shaping.
So what do you actually want
Should the instrument itself jump forward like the gear it plugs into? Should new designs join the Strat and Les Paul, replace them, or should nothing change at all?
“Should the Strat and Les Paul be joined on Mount Rushmore by new, more futuristic designs?”
The short version
The gear you plug into has reinvented itself several times over; the instrument in your hands has mostly stood still, and Guitar World wants to know if that should change.
