Fender Alternate Reality Sixty-Six

[rank]

If you spend any time reading the internet's opinion on Gibson you'll see the same two pillars of angry thought, "They need to just shut up and build 'em like how they used to done do it!" and "Yeah! And make 'em cheaper!"

I agree that they're expensive but my main complaint with Gibson is quality control. I have come across some really crappy Gibson guitars over the past few years. I have also found some that play amazingly well but I just feel like buying a Gibson guitar these days is a bit of a gamble, especially compared to Fender.

[Larry Mal]

Yeah, that's the other line of thought.

I can just say that I have owned at least two dozen Gibsons, probably closer to thirty at this point. I've never noticed any of this bad quality control, or felt that I didn't get the guitar that I assumed I was going to get.

Not saying it's not accurate what they say, but I would order a Gibson sight unseen and have over and over and over. I'll do it again.

I don't have any complaints with Fender, either, but both companies do things to pinch a penny that piss me off.

[rank]

both companies do things to pinch a penny that piss me off.

I agree completely with this. That's why I've been building my own!

[Nevets]

I wonder what "new" and modern features would actually make a difference in the guitar playing experience? Some new pickup? A hideous body shape? Someone should design a modern saxophone that's better than that old design too.

I like the 66, won't buy one but I like them. I will get the 12 string.

[Larry Mal]

My chief complaints about the electric guitar are the high noise, I usually complain about the cheap electronics and parts, and I would like to see a focus on new pickups or at least pushing the design of the ones that exist now. There's a lot of room for improvement in even the best pickups, in my opinion.

[601210]

I don't understand guitarist's obsession with innovation while simultaneously clinging desperately to the past. It's pretty doublethink-esque to me.

I doubt any violinists or cellists are complaining that the design hasn't been updated in centuries save for some carbon fiber bows or something, but I guess the electric guitar market is just so intertwined with consumerism that we always need excuses to buy new stuff.

We're on a forum where the holy grail is a body design that only became cool ironically, with pickups and electronics that were notoriously noisy and inefficient, and a bridge that takes extra care and understanding. And we choose it that way.

To say that no new innovation in the guitar market has happened is untrue. Since the Jazzmaster pickup has come about there have been EMGs, sustainers, Lace sensors, weird shit with piezos, MIDI fucking guitars, and so on. If you want your guitar to sound all hi-fi and crappy you have tons of options. If y'all don't like the new stuff that's up to you (and I don't, either) but to say that nothing new is happening just cause you don't like the new stuff is incorrect.

The thing with guitarists is we want new stuff because we're programmed to want new stuff, but we only want new stuff that sticks closely to the parameters that's been set in the 60s. That new Ron Thorn everyone is raving about? It's awesome, but it's all a throwback in some way.

I'd say Fender over the years and Gibson maybe a bit later have learned the hard way that guitarists don't want anything new. We tend to want the image of the electric guitar as it was first manifested, but with some tweaks and updates to make us feel better about having the urge to buy a new one every 2 years.

If all we wanted was innovation we'd all be playing headless parker flys or something. Or synths.

[Larry Mal]

To say that no new innovation in the guitar market has happened is untrue. Since the Jazzmaster pickup has come about there have been EMGs, sustainers, Lace sensors, weird shit with piezos, MIDI fucking guitars, and so on. If you want your guitar to sound all hi-fi and crappy you have tons of options. If y'all don't like the new stuff that's up to you (and I don't, either) but to say that nothing new is happening just cause you don't like the new stuff is incorrect.

Lace Sensors came out in 1985.
EMG pickups was founded in 1976.
MIDI was standardized in 1983, and is only a protocol, anyway.

Piezo? That's at least thirty years old, right?

This is what you suggest as "new is happening"? This is the "new stuff"?

I think you mention Parker guitars... out of business.

And all those things that you suggest as "new stuff" are not only old, but they also aren't popular, the electric guitar has purged itself of these "new" innovations and reached back to see who can most slavishly copy the designs of the 1950s.

I keep seeing people talk about the violin and the cello and the saxophone. Fine, those instruments are frozen in time. The violin is a wonderful instrument mainly associated with music written centuries ago. Your daughter, when she gets one, will be playing music written by Bach or Beethoven, people that are long dead.

And that is what will happen to the electric guitar... if the electric guitar is lucky.

[Embenny]

Actually, the first piezoelectric acoustic pickups as we know them (UST, undersaddle transducers) came out in the early 70's from prototypes that are literally 50 years old now, so it's even worse than you thought.

I know we've talked about this, and really, very few innovators are left. Bill Lawrence died 5 years ago and was still coming up with new stuff until his very last days like the microcoil. The Lace Alumitone is one of the only other new designs of the last decade, using a low impedance coil with a dual transformer design to amplify the current (inductance) while humcanceling. Both operate on a partly similar concept of a very small, shallow, relatively low impedance coil. Bill chose to increase inductance through manipulating the magnetic side of the equation, and Lace chose to focus on the electrical side of the equation.

This caused the interesting similarity of a very flat response curve with little if any resonant peaks but the difference in Bill's design of giving an extended high end (higher cutoff frequency) in Lace's design, an extended low end (the inductance of an alumitone single is 5H at 1kHz but 25H at 100Hz!).

So, two small coils with low resistance and flat response curves over most of the guitar's range, but one extending higher and the other sort of inflating as it descends to the bottom range of the instrument. Very different tones.

And also very seldomly used pickups, because your pedal and amp settings/presets you set up for your 12 strats and 15 les Pauls don't work with them, which must mean they're bad, at least in guitar land.

[601210]

That's kind of my point, though. These are all things that came out after Jaguars and Jazzmasters, and you can't really blame companies for playing it safe when so many companies have died or almost died by trying to innovate too much.

None of the designs of Millimetric Instruments are for me, but I wouldn't deny that they're trying new stuff. Robot guitars were quite naff, too. It's fine to be set in your ways. It's weird to boo your favourite artist's latest experimental album, and then complain that they're just playing the old hits afterwards.

Everything that's been "innovative" has either been adopted by a very small niche or completely died. Even offsets used to be part of that category. I don't know why we're all so in denial that the designs we prefer peaked in the 50s and 60s, and it's not for lack of trying but because that's where our tastes were fixed.

You're talking about violin music -- I'm sure you know there's plenty of new music being created for it, and I wouldn't blame you for hating most of it but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There's been a lot of talk about rock music being dead and all that, and I don't really see why guitarists are so obsessed with guitars and guitar music staying at the top of the food chain. It probably won't be on top 10 radio but there'll still be guitar music in 50 years.

Maybe it's because it was such a cultural icon, and the people who saw it rise are also witnessing its eroding? Or maybe we're all just worried that when guitars are less popular we'll have less guitars to choose from? But we have more choices now than ever.

[601210]

This caused the interesting similarity of a very flat response curve with little if any resonant peaks but the difference in Bill's design of giving an extended high end (higher cutoff frequency) in Lace's design, an extended low end (the inductance of an alumitone single is 5H at 1kHz but 25H at 100Hz!).

So, two small coils with low resistance and flat response curves over most of the guitar's range, but one extending higher and the other sort of inflating as it descends to the bottom range of the instrument. Very different tones.

And also very seldomly used pickups, because your pedal and amp settings/presets you set up for your 12 strats and 15 les Pauls don't work with them, which must mean they're bad, at least in guitar land.

I mean you could have all the high and low end response you want, but your tube amp from the 60s is just gonna chop most of it off. There are of course tons of amplifier and speaker designs that can reproduce as wide a frequency range as we can hear, and pretty flat too, but they just sound like shit to our ears cause they don't sound like the tube amps from the 60s.

[kgbAttack]

You could try to put a trem at the headstock and tuners at the bridge (maybe someone tried this already, I know the floyd rose has fine tuners at the bridge), but you still need 6 or 7 strings over a fretboard and some pickups, or else you wouldn't be playing a guitar. There isn't too much to innovate that won't be changing the nature of the instrument. Most of the innovation in the guitar world happens to anything that connects to a guitar: pedals, digital emulation, cables, etc.

[Futuron]

To me this guitar (albeit with Strat pickups) looks like a natural evolution of the Strat, I wonder why it didn't happen 50-60 years ago.

I'm keen to grab one of these. I intend to refinish it however, as I want something in a blue, but not a blue that I already have. And swap the neck, as maple looks wrong to me unless it's a white or blonde guitar.

So I went mad in the GIMP with the finish colour and came up with the following for fun. (Some are supposed to have a metallic paint appearance, but they possibly just look a bit grainy instead.) The dark and vivid colours looked too fake so I haven't posted them, but here's some that I found at least somewhat interesting:

[Larry Mal]

That's kind of my point, though. These are all things that came out after Jaguars and Jazzmasters, and you can't really blame companies for playing it safe when so many companies have died or almost died by trying to innovate too much.

I don't blame the companies... I blame the consumers.

You're talking about violin music -- I'm sure you know there's plenty of new music being created for it, and I wouldn't blame you for hating most of it but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There's been a lot of talk about rock music being dead and all that, and I don't really see why guitarists are so obsessed with guitars and guitar music staying at the top of the food chain. It probably won't be on top 10 radio but there'll still be guitar music in 50 years.

Well, that was a poor analogy, I admit, but the fact is that the violin is an acoustic instrument so it is already broadcasting the full frequency range of the vibrations of the string. The electric guitar is not and never has. That's the fundamental difference. The violin underwent centuries of refinement to get to where we are, and all the versions that would have shunted off the higher order harmonics were the evolutionary dead end, the opposite with electric guitars.

Also, I didn't say that newer music wasn't written for the violin, but your daughter isn't going to be learning that stuff.

So, the violin is a very odd situation. I used to know a lot of players in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra very casually (the nation's second oldest orchestra), and I would always ask them about their instruments. I don't think that I ever saw a stringed instrument that was newer than 1920. Most were made in the late 1800s.

But- and here's an important exception- professional string players in orchestras have to buy the most expensive instruments they can that will play the music they are most likely to be playing the best that it can be played. So there is a lot of pressure there, and they respond to that buy buying instruments sourced from all time and places.

They also have to pass an audition during which time their violin's sound is also being judged- and I can tell you that if someone brought a violin that started buzzing and crackling with 60 cycle hum and shunted off all the high end harmonics, that person would not be getting a job.

Maybe it's because it was such a cultural icon, and the people who saw it rise are also witnessing its eroding? Or maybe we're all just worried that when guitars are less popular we'll have less guitars to choose from? But we have more choices now than ever.

Well, that's it, it is such a cultural icon, so it's ruled by nostalgia for the past. I find that really odd that people have chosen to freeze the electric guitar into nostalgia and punish any further development of it. All those examples cited above represent the last period of the guitar's evolution in the 70's and 80's where guitar makers were really pushing the envelope of design, and then what I call in my head The Great Mass Extinction Event happened and the electric guitar bottlenecked.

And those choices you mention are an illusion, right? It would be like if every car designed after 1923 looked different but underneath it had the exact same four cylinder engine as Model T and the same powertrain because if it was good enough for Henry Ford then it's good enough for me.

None of these guitar have anything new... you look at all these small craft guitar makers, and the guitars they make are maybe more steampunk or whatever, but they all use the same technology that's been around since the 1940's and 1950's.

People hate it when I talk about this, but look around you. What other technology that you interact with remains fundamentally unchanged due to nostalgia? We all love our guitars but the electric guitar is the technological outlier here, it's very much the exception- and I do believe that we aren't doing the instrument any favors by forcing companies to keep making the same guitars they did in the 1950s.

[leokula]

, but look around you. What other technology that you interact with remains fundamentally unchanged due to nostalgia?

To expand over your example of how many things haven't evolved in terms of technology around us, I would want to differenciate between purely functional devices or tools and forms of art or expression. When I think about my computer, or my cell phone, or my TV set, what I want out of them is pure function or maybe that it looks beautiful.

When you talk about art, it's entirely different. As much as people want to make art with the 50's guitar, there's people that use paint on canvas as opposed to photoshop, as there's people making sculptures out of clay or stone, using pre-historic tools.

Art defines us, has to do with identity, the choices aren't very rational here or driven by what's easier, or faster or even with more frequency response. And it's not really nostalgia, IMO, nostalgia has to do with feeling safe in something that reminds you of your past, so a telecaster doesn't even mean nostalgia for me, it's just iconic, it's been in many records, it's about music people have made with them.

Innovation (or lack of it) in guitar or anything that is used for art will never be very easy to fully understand. I myself can't see anything unhealthy in a lack of innovation in guitar, I just see it as a proof that maybe the current model is satisfactory, with all it's problems... problems that people might not care to solve.

[Larry Mal]

All of which I might go along with, except for the fact that you do see the guitar makers themselves push the technology forward from time to time. It's not that guitar designers aren't willing to "improve" on the design of the electric guitar, it's just that they can't find a market for it.

So sure, the electric guitar is an instrument that is rooted in nostalgia and the technology of the 1950s is "good enough" for most guitar players- I get that. It doesn't really make all that much difference to me one way or the other, it's just that I periodically get very irritated with the state of the electric guitar (as you can see).

And when I see something like this, I don't think, "Oh, how cool! It's kind of like a guitar that they would have designed in the 1960's if only they had thought about it then so it's kind of like a trip through an alternate reality's nostalgia, that's a fresh take on nostalgia." I think how lame, and if I am going to be trapped in a static technological moment in time then I might as well really be trapped in one, right? If guitar design peaked in 1957 then I might as well get something close to as 1957 of a guitar as possible, you know? I mean why bother with this thing? Why not just get old guitars then?

What's funny is, had you talked to guitar played in the 30's or something none of those guys would have thought that the technology they were using was the best possible, those guys were working tirelessly to improve the guitar and the electric guitar. And up until about 1985 electric guitar makers in general were as well, and it's not a coincidence that all of a sudden this wave of advertising came about that began ruthlessly celebrating the past right when the two biggest guitar makers, Gibson and Fender, needed to show that they could make guitars as good as they used to.

So you have to ask yourself, is this tool really the best it can be? Or have I just been marketed to very successfully?

Regardless we will not have the answer to that in our lifetimes more than likely, all I can tell you is that when I see articles about how the youth of today isn't as interested in the electric guitar as the kids of yesterday, I think, sure, I can see that... it's been boring the shit out of me for some time. Why would a kid be excited about a version of their great grandfather's guitar?

"This guitar is a period accurate representation of the electric guitar that your great-grandfather would have used to play some music you never would want to listen to if only it had existed back then- I present to you, the 'Alternate Reality Sixty-Six.' Now, who wants to sign up for lessons?"

Not everyone wants to work with clay, after all.