Back in 2008, I wrote a blog post on my personal blog entitled, “How iTunes Ruined the Music”. Without rehashing my extended rant from nearly 14 years ago, my conclusion at the time was that the ability to buy individual tracks rather than albums had ruined the entire listening experience because people began to build these massive libraries of one-off tracks and had turned listening to music into a passive activity, ie., background noise. Prior to that, purchasing an album was an event and your first listen was very similar to that of watching a movie. You’d drop the needle or push play, then sit back and listen from beginning to end enjoying the different movements within the album. It was magical.
Fast forward to today and I think listening to music has become even more of a passive activity. If I were to update that post, the title would expand to include Spotify and Youtube music among many others. On a semi-promising side note, I read an article over the weekend about how 2021 was the first year CDs saw an increase in sales in 20 years. That, coupled with vinyl sales increasing each year, gives me hope that albums and active listening are seeing a resurgence.
My thesis statement here should be something like, the commoditization of art through mass-digital distribution has devalued the medium in the eyes of the end-user… Does that sound smart enough?
The reason this has been on my mind is because my son was asking me the other day about how I learned to play guitar. Now I realize I had access to more tools than prior generations but when I started playing guitar in the early 90s, online tabs and lessons were non-existent and effects were way out of our price range. I actually remember the day my friend Spencer bought the first effects pedal any of us had ever seen. If I remember correctly, it was a hot pink DOD Thrash Master Distortion and it was AMAZING (at least, we all thought it was).
I didn’t even have an amp when I first started playing. I had a cheap Synthsonic catalog guitar with a built-in speaker. The guitar required a 9v battery to power the speaker and we found out that if we used an almost dead battery, my guitar would get distorted too. When we wanted to get really loud, I’d plug my guitar into the mic input on my parent’s 1980s stereo amplifier. I mean, how else was I going to compete with Spencer’s amp? And no, I don’t know how the speakers in the stereo were blown…
I remember jamming in Spencer’s basement one day, we were probably in the 8th grade. We were comparing chords that we knew and combining them together in an attempt to write a song. By sheer dumb luck, we figured out the progression to Tom Petty’s “Last Dance With Mary Jane”. That was a great day!
Maybe a year later, Greg moved into the neighborhood and he had a Tascam 4-track cassette tape recorder. It was the coolest thing we’d ever seen and we were quickly working on writing and recording a compilation of covers and our own songs to put out a demo. I remember after one particularly great take, I excitedly swung my newly-purchased, still on loan from dad until I paid it off, Gibson Les Paul, and put a huge gouge in the headstock. Being raised in a very religious and conservative environment, the last thing I wanted was the stream of expletives that followed to be recorded on tape… To this day, when I run into Greg’s mom, she still gives me crap about the inappropriate language I used in her basement. And the gouge in my Les Paul headstock, it still makes me smile when I notice it. I should text Greg and see if he still has those tapes.
Around the 10th grade, Greg and I got jobs mowing lawns and we used every dollar we made to buy more gear. My first real amp was a Fender Roc Pro 1000 combo. It had 3 foot-switchable channels: clean, crappy drive, and more crappy drive. It was amazing! Suddenly, I could jump from clean to distortion without having to bend over to push a button on my amp. It was life-changing and took our songwriting to a whole new level. Greg was very much into bright happy pop. I was more into the 90s moody distorted sound. With multiple channels, I could almost instantly jump from bright to dark and gritty. We had so much fun with that!
I’ve mentioned writing songs a few times because we attempted to do a lot of that. It had less to do with us wanting to be songwriters and more to do with the fact that learning other people’s songs was hard. We didn’t have online lessons or good online tabs to guide our efforts. Olga.net, the original tab site, came around when I was in high school but most of the tabs were garbage and good tab books were expensive. Our options were generally, figure how to play a song, have someone show us how to play a song, or write our own song. When we were bored of playing what we already knew, the default became, let’s make up something new.
Fast forward to today. Kids who are learning to play have a plethora of tools at their disposal. Amazing apps, online lessons, accurate tab sites, the list goes on and on. I have watched my son pick up portions of Van Halen’s “Eruption” from tutorials, and truthfully, he can play it better than I ever could. When I was his age, there was a short attempt to learn “Eruption” but the terrible tab and zero insight on how to properly tap didn’t get me very far and I didn’t have anyone to show me how to tap or where to tap. For the fun of it, I searched “Van Halen Eruption Tutorial” on Youtube and instantly had hundreds of high-quality tutorials.
Going back to effects. I had probably played for four of five years before I ever touched a phaser, flanger, delay, wah, etc. From Day One, my son has had access to virtually every effect you could ever imagine via phone apps, free plugins, stompbox modelers, and so on. There are hundreds of good free options or great inexpensive options at his disposal. When he learns to play a song, he’ll spend hours trying to dial in the perfect album tone before playing… I was happy to just have distortion from a nearly dead 9v battery.
On Instagram, there are hundreds of thousands of clips of people nailing classic solos and riffs… but sometimes I have to ask myself, how many times did they film that before they got it right? And more importantly, could they repeat the performance in front of an actual audience night after night? And while I’m sure some of them can do those things, my guess is that many of them are more focused on making a video that will get likes than they are at being a proficient performing artist. I watch my own son and his friends recording clips on their phones that they can send to each other… There have been some my son has sent where he’s made mistakes or his singing was off-key. Honestly, those clips make me much more proud than the 50th attempt where everything was perfect.
My friend Brent and I played in several bands together over the years. We had dozens of songs we could play with zero notice. Hand us two acoustic guitars and we’d put on a show. If you had two electrics and a drummer, things got really fun. While the songs we were playing may not have been technically complex, they did sound good, and we could repeat the performance without even thinking about it. We got that way by practicing a lot and playing in front of people a lot. We weren’t focused on nailing the intro or the solo so we could post it online. We weren’t even focused on getting the effects right. We were focused on putting together a great representation of a song from beginning to end that we could repeat at will.
While I realize my ramblings very much come across as an old man remembering the good ol’ days, I think there was a lot of value in the way I learned to play, in the way I became a musician. The lack of lessons and effects forced us to get creative. Our cover songs were never perfect, they were our interpretation of the original song based on what was available to us and on what we were capable of as musicians. Much like the access to literally every album ever recorded has taken away the whole album experience for many listeners, I feel like the unlimited access to lessons, tutorials, effects, recording technology, etc. has taken away the joy of learning. The joy of experimenting. The joy of being creative with limited resources. Has it completely stifled the creative process that made so many of the greatest musicians of all time? That is yet to be seen. If I were a betting man, I’d say that the next guitar hero isn’t the kid who’s trying to make a 30-second clip for social media. Instead, it’s the kid sitting in their bedroom, trying to figure out how to play all of the parts on their favorite album from front to back