Re: Fluence Fishman - how SD is going to meet the challenge?
From my standpoint, there are a few business issues with pushing a radically new design:
- If the sound is radically different, people have a hard time accepting it
- If the sound isn't radically different, it's hard to differentiate the new tech from old (and presumably cheaper) stuff
- Guitarist are a pretty retro group. The most popular (by far) guitar designs are 55-65 years old. Amp designs dating back a half century are still cloned. "Modern" amp designs are mostly adding more tubes to the designs of years ago.
With all the promise of digital amplification in creating new tones and textures, a lot of emphasis is put on aping amps from decades past. With the bar for "modern" so low and the market so unaccepting of real innovation, what's a creative company to do?
All that is kind of summed up with a statement I saw today on another board: If the fuzz was invented today, people would complain about the way it sounded.
The age of exploration and discovery regarding amps and guitars reached its peak in the 60s and 70s, and those original designs only need minor changes these days - a little more gain, EQ that cuts or boosts depending on which way you turn the knob, etc. It's a fairly unique industry in that respect. Space exploration is in its infancy, as is underwater exploration. We actually know more about space than we do what lives in the waters of our planet. Or at least, we think we do. In truth, we know jack and squat about space since the furthest we've actually been is the Moon. When we have boots on Mars, then we can say we know something.
Even our own bodies are still more of a mystery than anyone ever imagined, and new relevant discoveries are made every week.
But with amps, it's all been done. There's a solid foundation that was established long ago. The world's greatest music from days long past were made with those original designs, and new music is merely another layer on top of that foundation, so yes, there's going to be what looks like stagnation. As long as people want Hendrix' or EVH's or Page's tones, they will want those old-fashioned guitars, pickups, and amps, because that's the audible portion of it. Technique can be learned, but you cannot make a TripleRec sound like a Dumble. The equipment cannot change its technique, and cannot learn how to sound like something else.
As for modelers, that fills the desire to have all those classic tones - Stones, Beatles, Hendrix, Van Halen, Zeppelin, Sabbath, Metallica, Queen, Montgomery, Benson, Santana, etc - without actually having 20+ different amps and a nuclear power facility to run them. With guitar-based modeling tech, such as the Variax system, you can have one guitar that sounds like a dozen different guitars, from steel and nylon acoustics to hollow, semi-hollow, and solid-body, and many variants of each. Modeling is the new frontier, and makes great strides with each iteration.
However, there's a prevailing mindset of "it's not a real 1959 Les Paul or a real 60s Marshall Plexi, ergo, it cannot sound like them" that spreads through the populace, but doesn't stifle the growth of technology that replicates those tones.
New technology doesn't have to sound like old technology to be acceptable, the people who use new technology have to not limit themselves or what they do with it or the sounds they get from it to those of days gone by. It's time for the artists to move forward to catch up to the tools that are available, else the art cannot advance.
