Innovation Week: In a recent interview with Guitar World, Ernie Ball’s Director of Engineering and Product Development, Drew Montell, said with a laugh, “Most people hate our best-selling guitars right out of the gate.”
The two defining electric guitars were both designed in the early 1950s. We pore over minute variations on the templates, but their inner workings have – to be honest – not changed all that much.
Full disclaimer, if I’m coming across as a bit high and mighty, the designs of the two guitars that sit behind me as I write this are both old enough to collect Social Security payments. I’ve not, say, installed fuzz circuits in either of them – they’d be fully recognizable to anyone who bought them the year they first hit shelves.
Now, if you move away from the instruments themselves, you’ll find that our little universe has been quite amenable to leaps and bounds in technology. Marty McFly yourself into 1954 or 1961, and show the people buying a brand-new Stratocaster or Epiphone Casino a Neural DSP Quad Cortex mini – “yeah – you just use this touchscreen and there are almost a hundred amps, over a hundred effects, and... oh, right, so, a touchscreen is something where you...”
Elsewhere, one of the main reasons the Beatles quit touring 60 years ago was the inability of their amps to compete with the howls of tens of thousands of screaming fans – now, there are amps fitted with tone-shaping AI tech.
So, what would you like to see from the future of guitars? Do you want to see the instruments themselves leap forward technologically like the devices you plug them into? Should the Strat and Les Paul be joined on Mount Rushmore by new, more futuristic designs? Would you like to see the old giants knocked off their pedestal entirely? None of the above?
Let us know in the comments below.
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