Reading Log 4

Title: Why My Guitar Gently Weeps: the slow, secret death of the six string electric
Author: Geoff Edgers
Text Type: Article

In this article Geoff Edgers speaks about the slow decline of the popularity of guitar, playing guitar, and guitar sales. He also speaks about how the world now needs more guitar heroes to start a new generation of players. He also claims that the guitar market is not growing and that guitar is slowly declining in popularity.

"What we need is guitar heroes" This is a quote from the article. I don't think the world needs guitar heroes because in my opinion there are already so many new guitar heroes out there and all of the old ones from the old school bands such as Led Zeppelin, AC-DC, Van Halen etc. are still inspiring the new waves of players. Also I think that everyone has someone that they look up to, who inspires them. So whether or not there are internationally recognised guitar heroes I think is irrelevant because there is always going to be people learning to play guitar or any instrument for that matter who are inspired by their favourite players, their music teachers, and even friends and family who play their chosen. For me when I hear an awesome piece of music, I am instantly inspired to grab my guitar and start playing and if I find a new artist I constantly play their songs and it influences my playing style. I think people are always going to have personal guitar heroes, people that they aspire to be like and people they look up to regardless of whether or not the musical community considers them a "Guitar Hero."

I think this article also relates to the social media world everyone is caught up in now and how there are so many new trends that just come and go. This is because in the early 2000s when the video game guitar hero came out, music that had guitar in it became so much more commercially accepted, because there was easier access to it, it was trending. During this time guitar sales were at an all time high and the guitar industry was booming. But all trends die off eventually so as time passed, over the last ten years guitar has gotten a lot less popular according to sales of officially licensed guitar stores. These sale statistics don't from online retailers such as amazon and Ebay, so maybe the trend of playing guitar hasn't died. I think this because there are so many ways to get a guitar now, second hand shops online and even from friends and family. So even though trends die there is always someone keeping them alive, there is always someone who absolutely loves whatever is trending and can't get enough of it. It's like when a song get into the top 40 charts. A lot of the time it will stay there for a few weeks then slowly drop off, and this cycle repeats, constantly circling songs through the top spots on the charts. But this doesn't mean everyone stops listening to them. Someone who really enjoys this song may look at the rest of the artists back catalogue listening to all of their songs, and then that artist becoming a long standing listen for that person. So even if guitar is slowly dying, it will never be non existent and there will be times when the popularity spikes, from my point of view in my chosen genres to listen to, guitar is a long way from dying, it just needs to be used in new, interesting ways to attract more listeners and grow the popularity of the band/genre for more people to listen to and see what they are doing with their guitars and other instruments that makes it so appealing.

I think this article has a lot of good points but doesn't properly address the issues faced by the guitar world today. We don't need guitar heroes, we just need to be able to view the music we like from a different perspective and really appreciate what people are doing with the instrument. Also there are so many similar bands out there but there are also so many bands that experiment with their instrument, exploring new ways to play and perform. I think that the world of guitar may not may be booming like it did in the pre naughties but it is definitely not dying, people just need to realise that there is so much out there to be inspired by and so many great people doing great things, you just got to look at it as a whole rather than just a few facts here and there to really get the full view of what's going on.