Don’t Listen to Guitar Discourse
I play the guitar. I began playing in the spring of 2020, right as the COVID-19 pandemic began to put a stop to life as it was.
I bought the cheapest Squier Stratocaster that was being sold at the time, in Olympic White specifically. The rhythm guitarist of The Strokes played a white strat and I thought the guitar looked awesome so, of course, I wanted to follow suit. I started as a lot of people who picked up guitar during the pandemic did. I would sit in my bedroom with my phone on my knee, trying to wrap my head around how anyone could make their fingers move like the tablature I found online suggested and strum out some horrid-sounding noises until I felt sufficiently satisfied with myself.
Importantly, I spent more time thinking about guitars than I did actually playing mine. I would browse online stores, play around with digital guitar-builders, and brainstorm exactly what type of guitar I would own one day as my dream guitar.
On my lockdown journey to accrue as much specific knowledge about body-woods and pickup vintages as possible, I fell down the rabbit hole of online guitar discourse. Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, nowhere was without multitudes of people shouting their imperative truths. The rights and wrongs when it came to guitars.
What I ended up finding was a wide, weird world of people who had dedicated their lives to the instrument.
Older players who grew up idolizing the old guitar heroes shaking their fists at the kids who strum out 4-chord hits.
Purists who insist on only using the finest vintage equipment, proclaiming that it has more “warmth,” or “roundness,” or whatever other adjective they can use to set their darlings apart from the silicon chips and software suites.
Gearheads who will play with any guitar or gear they can get their hands on, provided they haven’t used it before.
What did I take away from this? What did seeing all of these disparate voices clashing with each other actually teach me about the guitar? How much did it inform how I see and play the Instrument?
Not much, honestly.
When I upgraded from my dinky starter Strat, I bought a Squier Contemporary Jaguar. A new model of guitar that I had heard nobody talk about and had no reviews as it had just been released.
I love that guitar. It plays and sounds great, and has luxury features like a sculpted neck heel and coil-tapping pickups that you would have to pay thousands for if the headstock didn’t say “Squier” on it. And I’ve heard essentially nothing about this guitar since it was released. Despite being an incredible instrument. Just looking at it makes me want to pick it up and practice with it, but nobody cares to talk about it. Like barely anybody cares about this thing but me it seems.
And I bought it because I thought it looked cool, the same reason I bought my first guitar.
The best lesson I can give anyone who is looking to get into the instrument: Buy what you think looks cool.
All of the minutia: solid-state vs valve amplifiers, hand-wound vs machine wound pickups, none of it really matters. Don’t get lost in the voices of others.
Get your hands on something you like the idea of playing and play it.
