Too Long, Didn't Read version: Don't assume an acoustic guitar is the best option just because you're a beginner—it is likely the most difficult option for you.

I've always heard that people recommend acoustic guitars to beginners but that seems counterintuitive to me because all of the young students I have who are just starting guitar have a lot of trouble with how much string tension there is on an acoustic and as soon as I let them try my electric guitar they go "woah that's so much better!" but their parents already spent $200 on the acoustic guitar so they're probably not gonna want to go back and buy another guitar.

It's just a bummer and I bet that's a huge reason why a lot of people find guitar so difficult is because they're starting with the instrument that requires the most hand strength of any of the variations of guitars.  Even the beginning adults I teach have trouble with their acoustic guitars because it really requires a lot of hand and finger strength that just doesn't get developed in any other area of life because it's incredibly specific. People also seem to not have any idea what kind of guitar they need because I have a kid coming in this weekend for the first time who wants to learn metal but his grandpa bought him an acoustic guitar.

The workaround I've found just because of my obsession with alternate tunings is I usually tune their guitar down to D Standard (see my page on tuning a guitar and alternate tunings and have them capo the 2nd fret so then it's playing in E Standard but with the string tension of D Standard. It's enough to make a difference; You can go down to C Standard and capo the 4th fret to get even lower tension but then the math often starts getting to be too complicated for beginners in my experience.

I'm wondering if the prevalence of acoustic guitars has something to do with non-musician's perceptions of what different guitars are used for. Like I can see if someone thinks that electric guitars are used exclusively for shredding and acoustic guitars are used for more accessible songs than they would assume an acoustic guitar is better for a beginner, not understanding that it's not quite that limited.

Basically, if you or someone you know is looking to buy a guitar, for most people I would recommend learning on electric guitar because you can play all the same stuff as you would play on an acoustic but easier, whereas it is very difficult to play lead electric guitar parts on an acoustic guitar.  The clean tone of an electric guitar also performs the same function as an acoustic guitar much better than an acoustic guitar performs the same function as a distorted electric guitar.  Electric guitars are far more versatile and far more accessible in general.

For more info on what to know when buying your first guitar, check out the page Buying An Instrument.

 Just something I think about a lot lately.  I've been in a lot of bands with other people over the last 10 years and collaboration is an inherent part of being in most bands.  I think part of it is out of necessity when you're younger because you only know so much about music so you couldn't write a whole song by yourself if you tried because you just don't understand the roles other instruments play in a band or the techniques developed for those instruments, etc.   I was just watching an interview with David Byrne, lead singer of Talking Heads, and he said it very well, "when it works, you get 1 + 1 = 3--you get something bigger than the sum of the parts."  That's really how I felt playing in 11;45 for a long time, that we were all contributing very uniquely to it and it was something more unique and interesting than any one of us could have come up with on our own, but there were also times where it was very upsetting that I had an idea and people wanted to edit it.  There's a presumption when you tell someone to change something they wrote that you know better than they do and they should change their behavior to suit your desires. 

So, I've had a lot more experiences like that in the past few years where the people I was playing with wanted me to reduce my ideas to fit what they wanted instead of trying something new themselves and continuing to allow me the small space of creativity that I should be allowed in a collaborative project, and it's really turned me off from letting other people edit my ideas so I'm gravitating very hard towards "Write everything myself, record everything myself, pay skilled people to perform it properly."  In small bands, you really have two options the way I see it--you get a certain amount of creative freedom to write what you want to write and you only get paid when some profit is generated, or you play the part of "hired musician" where you are not writing parts, you're just there to play the parts as written and play them well and you may be rotated out with someone else depending on availability and your performance.   I use the term "hired musician" because if you are performing this task, you should be getting paid because this is an area of "doing music but not creating."  To me, that is not the same as being a creative part of a project, so at that point you are providing labor, not creativity, to someone else who needs a person to fill that role, and you should be compensated appropriately based on your time, not on the profits of the project.  When you start getting relegated into the second column but are still being not-paid as if you were in the first column,  it is understandably frustrating and you should consider trying to reconfigure your situation.  

So, as I've been a lot more focused on writing and recording by myself for the last year or so, I've learned a few things about my relationship with music and with collaboration.  One is that, yes, sometimes you do find a really unique group of people and you can collaborate to make something much greater than any one person could have come up with individually, but even in these circumstances you're likely to run into situations where you have to compromise and give up something that you really like and believe in because everyone else is against you.  And that shit sucks.  And if you're anything like me, it can hurt your feelings especially when it happens repeatedly.  And at some point, I realized that I had a very specific idea in my mind of how I wanted things to sound but no one really shared my vision, and I was going to keep sacrificing the vision I had if I kept letting other people mess with it, and that I would never have the time or creative energy to work on it if I was always giving my energy to someone else, so now I've been on my own for about a year.  

Music on your own is much different than my previous experience--my first bands were guys I knew from middle school and high school, and it was very group-oriented and there was the reward and immediacy of coming up with new parts together and getting excited about it and getting excited about getting new parts down when we were practicing and the reward and positive feedback of playing shows.  I haven't played a show in about a year, I haven't played any music with anyone but myself in about 5 months, and the reward that you get from doing that is very very little.  Ian Mackaye said it best, "every song I ever wrote, I wrote it for it to be heard."  So when the songs continue to be unheard and I don't have anyone to play with, it feels very stagnant and monotonous because there isn't even really the feeling of making progress while practicing, it's just tracking guitars when I've finally practiced each song enough and then trying really hard to come up with more parts so it's not boring and the hardest part which has been convincing myself to actually try recording vocals when that's the thing I've wanted to do the most for such a long time.  I just have intense impostor syndrome about my voice especially since I really fucked it up a few years ago by screaming with poor technique.  I probably still shouldn't be singing or yelling 4 years later but I can't control myself to be totally honest, it's something I have to do or life is dissatisfying.

Obviously the monotony of this process is brought on by my intent to do everything on my own now, so it's a trade off.  But I justify my decision to do it myself by comparing music to other art forms--painters get 100% say in what their work looks like.  In film, there's ultimately someone at the top who decides everything.  In music, the default is surrendering 75-80% of your creative freedom to the other people in the group, and they also get a chance to just totally veto your creativity if they all decide to vote against you, which just doesn't make much sense to me as someone who got into music for self-expression.  Painters don't give up 80% of creative control.  Chefs don't give up 80% of creative control.  Film directors don't give up 80% of creative control.  My Self isn't being expressed when 80% of it sounds nothing like my Self, so I'm going to make 100% of it sound like my Self.

I made a goal with my therapist to make more progress on these songs by next week so I'm gonna work on this heavy song I started a while back, if I work too long on the same thing I lose the novelty of it so I have to rotate which songs I'm working on pretty regularly.  I'm a very big fan of metal and hardcore and my last band didn't have any of those vibes in it so I'm kind of going over-the-top on these ones and trying to write the heaviest parts I can come up with.  I really want to jam these songs but I just don't have anyone to play them with right now which makes it a pretty unrewarding and meticulous process of endless writing and recording but I'm hoping if I get the album out then I can attract some people to want to play the songs with me.  This is going to be the best math rock/pop punk/djent/hardcore/midwest emo/chiptune/psych/folk/jazz fusion album anyone's ever heard (high bar /s) and  everyone is gonna want to play my songs the way I wrote them.  Fingers crossed.  

Take care,

Chris

This post isn't so much about guitar, I just wanted to write about this concert I went to last night.  I had the opportunity to go see Islands perform at the Marquis Theater in Denver, Colorado last night (Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023) and it was a fantastic show.  Islands is a super special band to me because they exist in what I've recently started calling the Unicorniverse—the host of bands which sprung up from the ex-members of The Unicorns after they broke up in 2004.  The ex-members of The Unicorns are Alden Penner, Nick Thorburn, and J'amie Tambeur.  

Alden and Nick both set off on separate paths for the most part after the break up, both going through a variety of projects in the nearly two decades since they ended The Unicorns, with J'amie contributing on and off to both Alden and Nick's later projects.  The Unicorns have been one of my all-time favorite bands since I was in 3rd or 4th grade which is now the majority of my life, and the bands which formed afterwards are some of my all-time favorites as well because they maintained so much of their personality from The Unicorns.  Islands feels like a very natural extension of the Nick-written parts of The Unicorns, and Alden's solo work is equally consistent.  It's also interesting because as you listen to their separate projects in the years after the breakup, you can really start to hear which member wrote which parts in the Unicorns songs.

Getting to see Nick play with Islands last night was a great experience, it was kind of surreal being in the same room and looking at him when I've listened to his voice countless times over so many years of my life, going back to when I was such a young kid.  I was also kind of surprised at the kind of people in the audience, I was expecting a lot of strange people because to me it's so interlinked with The Unicorns, but most of the people there struck me as particularly normal looking.  It was also cool that they had a rapper, Fat Tony, on tour with them opening for Islands; I love shows with multiple genres when they're done well, and it was really special because Islands ended up playing the song Where There's a Will, There's a Whalebone which features Bus Driver and Subtitle on the album version of the song, the two of which Nick had originally collaborated with in an experimental group called Th' Corn Gangg which featured Nick and J'amie playing Unicorns and Islands instrumentals behind the two rappers.  Instead of Bus Driver and El-P's verses, Fat Tony came on stage during the song and performed a brand new verse and it was just such a great surprise.  That's the kind of thing I love from live shows, and it was even better because as soon as they started playing the intro to the song I was thinking "is Fat Tony gonna come out and do the rap verses?"  

Another great part of the show was how the band had a Herbie-Hancock-Rockit-style mannequin robot named Andy on stage behind a piano doing banter in between songs in a stiff, robotic voice; it was so creative and such a fun little quirk to the show, I've never seen anything like it.  I enjoyed the Colorado-specific jokes and the criticism of the gentrification of the city and its being overtaken by tech culture, both of which were spoken by the robot Andy to provide a hilariously thin level of distance between the band and the jokes.  I assume Nick wrote the jokes but I'm not sure.

Overall, I'm so glad I had the chance to see a single band in the Unicorniverse and if Islands or any of Nick's other bands ever come back to Denver, I'm absolutely going to see them again.