Brandon7s
Groupie
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- 39
Great post, thank you for sharing your insight. It's not common to find people who have switched to P4ths and stuck with it after having used standard turning for so long. If I could go back in time and re-learn guitar, I would go with 4ths tuning except for the fact that Chord Melody is basically my holy grail of guitar playing styles.
I'm pretty certain I'm never going to change my tuning at this point, but I really want to experiment with Major 3rds tuning. I have a Linnstrument and it's super easy to customize the tunings on that, and one of my favorites on that thing is the tritone tuning, which has a lot of similarities to the 3rd tuning. What I'd really like is a tuning that is completely symmetrical and is suitable for playing chords. The Major 3rds tuning seems to be an improvement over 4ths for chords. I'll give it a shot one of these days just to see what its like, but I would imagine that learning the 3rds tuning would be a heck of a lot harder than learning the 4ths tuning for someone who has been playing for 20+ years in standard.
I'm in a similar boat. I don't even have guitar heroes since I don't particularly care for the music that a lot of guitar players make or record. The closest thing to a guitar hero I have is Ted Greene and Tim Lerch, just for their ability to make the guitar a complete instrument on its own. I generally don't care for guitar-isms/cliches. They can be fun to play but I when I sit down and listen to music, that is NOT what I want to hear. I want to hear a song and I don't want to constantly be reminded that the song is being played on a guitar. I just want to hear the song, not the guitar.
That's why I started learning to use synthesizers years ago. I wanted to have more access to texture and timbre, and harmony, so I ended up trying out learning the keys and synths. After 6 years or so of exploring that world, I'm back to almost exclusively guitar again. I still have a couple hardware synths (and tons of VSTs), but I'm no longer putting any work into learning keyboard. I've got a Linnstrument to act as my MIDI controller and have it tuned to mirror the guitar, so all of my fretboard and harmonic knowledge from guitar transfer over 100%. I don't use it often, but it's nice to have it when I want to create some quick practice backing track pieces or loops for practicing guitar that aren't the sound of the guitar.
That said, the sheer expressiveness that a guitar can be played with simply can't be matched by any digital instrument, including the Linnstrument which is already MUCH more expressive than any MIDI keyboard. The dynamic range, the bending, sliding, hammer-on, pull-offs, and the millions of different ways one can attack a note on guitar... that just can't be replicated with any MIDI interfaces yet.
The amount of fine control and expressiveness we have over the guitar is what keeps me sticking with it. That, and the fact that I am already physically comfortable with the instrument and switching to another is a huge, painful process of being horrible at music for a while again. The sound of the guitar is honestly pretty boring to me, no matter how many effects are layered on top. It gets the job done, but honestly I'd rather listen to most brass and woodwind, piano, a classic analog polysynth, or cello when it comes to timbre and texture.
However boring the sound of guitars is to me though, the sound of good music played on a guitar is still something I love, so I stick with it in the hopes being able to do just that. I've practically given up on chasing tone on guitar and have decided to embrace the simple sound of a guitar plugged into a clean (or near clean) amp, or just an acoustic guitar on its own. That limits my options, but that also means that the only thing that matters is the notes that I play and the rhythm play them in, and how I touch the strings. That's been liberating!
It doesn't take a lot of variety and complexity in timbre and dynamic envelope to make a song that people want to listen to, you just need a good melody and good rhythm. Throw in some good harmony and then you're really cooking.
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