I strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created.
All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.
With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.
There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup).
Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre.
Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.
The reverse example of this is musicians who play techno with analog instruments, like Pipe Guy, Basstong, and Meute[0][1][2].
There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.
EDIT: having said that, I don't think I would agree with your premise, because it is colored by a subtle form of survivor bias. None of us remember what it's like to not know electronic guitars or what they sound like, so claiming "the audience intuitively understands what Jimmy Hendrix is doing" is like saying everyone "intuitively understands" their native language. On top of that there's nothing about the workings of an electronic guitar that wouldn't in principle work for something like an electronic violin or whatever.
The whole thing about people being defensive is interesting. I love techno, but anyone who has learned other styles of music recognizes the repetitiveness and quirks of a lot of techno and some other electronic genres.
They do a great job with changing their timbre and tones but often ignore a bunch of other factors that make music interesting. Whether that is the rarity of time signatures other than 4/4, the way certain rhythms are locked into certain genres, the choices of keys used, the limited or missing chords, etc.. at some point you start hearing two electronic songs that sound totally different at a superficial level and you realize they're incredibly derivative of each other.
You might also enjoy Beardyman, if you haven't run across him yet. Does techno and other genres with nothing but his own voice and a shedload of ipads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYVUlx7BhhI
Nathan Flutebox Lee and Beardyman @ Google, London [1] is one of my favs. At the time it was available on 'Google Video' before they acquired YouTube. So I don't have a link to the orig. post. SPOILER: especially that theme with the Godfather when he says Google is just epic and balls.
> There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.
I guess the part people don't like hearing is the implication techno is somehow not expressive. I'm not sure that it lacks expressiveness, but it is certainly more "controlled" than traditional music. When I first heard techno as a teenager in the 90s, my mind was blown. I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard Underworld [1], Photek [2], and Autechre [3]. I think I was attracted to these sounds _because_ they were so different. I think it's hard for electronic music fans like myself to accept the idea that it isn't expressive _because_ it is so different. Isn't it just a different kind of expression?
Still, people like what they like. I'm glad you found a version of dance music that works for you. I've long since moved on being judgmental about people's musical tastes. I think it's just wonderful that music exists at all!
> I guess the part people don't like hearing is the implication techno is somehow not expressive.
I think of it more like a painter's palette: every instrument and tool involved in creating music has a different set of colors to choose from, and can also filter some "colors" out if we think of things like audio processing filters.
The tools and techniques typically used to produce techno filter out "colors" that feel essential to me to connect with a song, and yeah, that "controlled" aspect of it is probably a large part of that. That doesn't mean it's not expressive, it's just expressive in a way that I struggle to connect with.
EDIT: funny enough I actually have protanomaly, so my choice of analogy is slightly ironic there. Some visual art and design out there objectively looks terrible from my subjective experience, since the colors look completely off. But that doesn't mean I'm saying the art is objectively bad.
Legends Never Die - Leagueoflegends + Ethnic Instruments by Belle Sisoski [1]. And no, I've never played LoL, I probably never will, and I haven't seen that series based on it (Arcana or something?) either.
Also, I haven't checked what Juno Reactor do these days, but their old work is phantastic. My fav show of them is Juno Reactor – Shango Tour 2001 Tokyo [2].
For electric violin, I love Ed Alleyne-Johnson [3]. Never seen him live (I'm not from UK) but I own a couple of his earlier works. It reminds me of that time when my dad was in his final years of his lives, and when he finally passed away. Makes me cry every time.
Nice addition! First time I heard of them and I'm liking what I'm hearing so far.
And just to clarify: I don't dislike electronic instruments. I just think that on some subconscious level the human brain can detect other humans playing a live instrument. Like there's something "embodied" in the sound that is likely missing from a pure electronic instrument. And I needed that element to "unlock" access to techno.
Yep, there's a reason we have the industry term "humanization" in sound design, composition and arrangement.
Tons of work has been done on various modes of humanization by trying to parameterize and modulate these aspects over time. Timing accuracy, velocity variance, chance, etc.
A well-played instrument certainly feels like someone speaking and expressing themselves to you. There are attempts to capture this with MPE instruments such as the Osmose, or Imogen Heap's MiMU gloves.
> have a fundamental problem with human expression.
How up to date is this opinion of yours? Expression on guitar is pretty intuitive, but modern electronic instrument manufacturers have been working on this problem and created modes of expression that definitely solve this problem.
For example, EWIs allow you to use breath control for expression with many of the same techniques available on actual wind instruments. Also many synths now have features like polyphonic aftertouch, pitch/mod wheels, which allow you to add expression to a note while it is playing. Apps and hardware exist which allow you to use novel methods of capturing motion or other forms of expression. And most modern synths/midi controllers allow you to decide what parameters are affected.
> Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical
That's an affectation. I can stand on my tiptoes and close my eyes when bending up a note on the synth the same as I can on the guitar. Neither affects the sound, and both are a conscious decision to project an appearance of "I'm really shredding"
> With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.
That can apply to any instrument once you "electrify" it. What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect processing? I play guitar, keys and trumpet, and while I agree that a casio keyboard has limited expression options, your opinion doesn't sound researched.
> What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect
The difference lies in the pickup! On those other instruments you will be using a contact mic (piezo-transducer) wheras the solid body guitar is using an inductive coil.
The contact mic is going to pickup only physical resonance whereas the the coil is measuring an electromagnetic field. Plucking the steel string induces a change in voltage in the coil. This means that the coil can pickup all sorts of interesting electromagnetic interference from the tube amplifier that is all frequency dependent and involve that in whatever feedback loops are occuring.
Hmmm, I disagree, having played electric and acoustic guitars for over two decades and begun learning piano and synths for the first time in 2025.
For one, you can’t easily play two melodies simultaneously across several octaves, using both of your hands, with an electric guitar.
Stringed electronic instruments do have their advantages, but so do the others. Each music making thing has its place in the spectrum.
Two books that have helped me greatly in my musical life, in case people haven’t heard of them, are The Listening Book, and Bridge of Waves, by W.A. Mathieu.
There are certainly guitarists who can play simultaneous melodies.
If you're limiting to a 6 string guitar the distance between the two melodies would be limited compared to a piano but guitars don't have to be limited to 6 strings.
Classical guitar is full of this kind of thing.
Having taken piano lessons but being more into guitar I think the thing is almost all people who play piano are introduced to this and it is a core concept in far more piano music than guitar music. But it is not impossible on guitar, and many works for piano that get adapted to guitar require the player to do so.
E.x. there are plenty of players who have studied and played the Well Tempered Clavier on guitar.
You can play with both hands on a Chapman stick, right hand can do the bass, the left the melody/chords or vice-versa (Chapman stick is played tapping the strings with both hands)
Guitars certainly have a more intimate connection between the touch of fingers and the sound, including the bending of the tone, one of Hendrix’s virtuosities.
Keyboards can approach that with polyphonic touch keys like the Hydrasynth (lean into keys, pressing them harder, for bending the tone in a configured patch), sustain pedals, and pitch bend/modulation controls, but not the nuanced touch of skin on a vibrating string.
I think synth guitars exist, too, but don’t know anything about them. The pedalboards are enough, maybe :)
> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience
Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.
Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.
They're talking about electronic instruments there. The comment is about how electronic instruments don't generally match the physical expressiveness of acoustic instruments (like the Cello).
I'm talking about electronic instruments how they are deficient in expressiveness compared to your cello example.
> Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects.
The story is not quite so simple. Your synthesizer is going to have a buffered output so it wont have the complex impedance loading interactions with the amplifier as the guitar pickup.
This is actually critical to how early distortion effects such as the classic Fuzzface work and imo is essential for the kind of complex timbres you can produce with a guitar + tube amp.
In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.
I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups.
The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.
A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound.
If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects.
There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered).
E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.
That is going to be something like a transformer to step down your line level signal and some series resistance to match the load to help drive the amp.
An actual coil pickup has reactive impedance that is frequency dependent and will result in a more complex interaction between the devices.
> The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature
Sure if you think like an engineer, but everything you are complaining about is what allows someone like Jimi Hendrix to do what he did with a guitar.
they're comparing an electric guitar to electronic instruments, like midi keyboards. An electric cello would be the same thing as an electric guitar in this context.
Great argument -- but I'd also counter that "the turntable" (i.e. in the hands of experts like Q-Bert, Craze, Rob Swift, Jazzy Jeff and others) fits this quite well -- especially re your "have the audience understand what he is doing argument"
Haha that is a great highly expressive counter example! However, as far as versatility of sound I still think the guitar+tube amp wins as you have access to all of western music theory and techniques as its still a traditional string instrument.
There have been some interesting keyboard input devices coming out which allow for more expression than normal piano keys, using a sort of hack to the MIDI system called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression. For example the Seaboard Rise or the Osmose. Depending on the instrument it's possible to do per-note pitch bends, change pressure while holding notes, perform vibrato etc. Visually the physical movement is not as interesting as electric guitar though, so yours probably still wins.
> All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.
Electric bass? Heck, even in synthesizers, you have the EWI or the Haken Continuum.
Guitar (and bass) are obviously and far and away the most successful, but it does a disservice to a number of wonderful inventions to say they're the only ones. Just look at what the Japanese band T-SQUARE does with the EWI to see people innovating at the edges.
Similar to the Theremin is the ondes Martenot. Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) describes it as a "very accurate Theremin".
You can hear it particularly on "Where I End and You Begin" from Hail to the Thief. Ed O'Brien compliments its sound using an EBow (back before he had the sustainer) in that song.
Yes! I always think first of How to Disappear Completely, which I think was the first song he used it on. I remember watching some concert in college from the Kid A days, and he would have like 3 Ondes Martenot players on stage with them, crazy stuff from the band that wrote Creep like 5 years earlier.
This video might be the best explanation for Creep, which while they never wanted to record it; they do acknowledge it set them up to be able to do everything since. But a lot of Pablo Honey is mediocre.
This is also cool; live version of How to Disappear Completely at the start and one of the few Jonny interviews where he speaks. From a documentary on the Ondes Martinot.
I feel like the synthesizer--CMI Fairlight, Moog anything, Synclavier, PPG Wave, and just the general concept of modular synthesis--are pretty staunch competitors. Yours is certainly a fun and fair take, and arguably the electric guitar+tube amps birthed so many genres (blues, soul, funk, rock, punk, metal, etc) where as synthesizers remained pretty niche with their contribution to experimental music and pop music, mixing in with rock funk and disco, and the titan of EDM that grew out of that.
No two trumpet players sound the same. I know who is playing just by the tone. Listen to Herb Alpert / Al Hirt / Maurice Andre, all playing the same instrument, but wildly different.
You could argue that it's one of the most versatile instruments, sure. "Greatest" is completely subjective.
But is it one of the most versatile instruments? You can do signal transforms with any kind of audio input, although it's done more with the electric guitar than any other instruments.
I would say it in practice, it has the most versatile sonic profile.
A modular synth is more versatile in terms of enumerated signal transformations. Its the ability to be expressive with those signal transformations that makes the guitar+tube amp what it is.
With the right interface, I think the synth can be more expressive. Look at the Haken Continuum or ExpressiveE Osmose - both can be used with something like the Expert Sleepers FH-2 to get MPE data to the modular.
I do see your point, and agree the amount of articulation you can do with guitar is hard to beat, but I do think a synth can win, if the setup is built for it.
Synths with mod wheels are the bomb, I used to have a roland that had a pitch wheel for bends and then push it for tremolos, vibratos and such, and way more voices, envelopes etc and that was a few decades ago and I'm sure that nowadays guitars are not going to compete except at one thing, making guitar sounding noises, you can get guitary sounds but somehow they come off to me to be too clean and lack the slop that various fingerings produce lol
This comment is a love letter to electric guitar. I adore it. Consider reading “Desolation Road” by Ian McDonald. I don’t want to spoil any of it, and perhaps science fiction isn’t your cup of tea, but at one point there is a character on Mars with a 700-year-old strat, and you can tell Ian McDonald loves the guitar as much as you do.
I watched Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips do something similar with some kind of "I don't know what" controller, it was some kind of input in his microphone stand. As he moved it around, the sound and projection changed.
I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.
Imogen Heap created a set of gloves that transform finger flexing and wrist movement into midi signals you can use in whatever way your performance software allows.
I generally reserve the word electronic to mean something with a microcontroller or discreet logic components. Electronic guitars exist, but they're basically differently shaped keyboards.
I often lament the lack of other electric instruments.
I have come around to the idea of guitars being electronic instruments. Strings are the original oscillators. Once they become electrical signals it isn't clear to me how they differ categorically from any other electric instrument. There are an almost infinite number of pedals, many of which offer things like filters, LFOs, and other synthesis stalwarts. You could even make the guitar a controller for more traditional synthesis work.
>"All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience."
Look at Roli Seaboard, it has insane amount degrees of freedom / expression
Synth music elevated electric bound tones to anything ever heard.
I remidn you that most of the rock and roll and rock music was about speed and mimicking the sound of a rumbling car engine, as it was a symbol of the freedom in America, being able to run away from your toxic communities to find yourself better anywhere else.
That was the message for the young with rock and roll: a speedy engine for your ears.
Electronic music was like replacing a car with UFO evoking you a space travel.
With the progressive subgenre of techno music you got the same feeling, but with no subtle hints. Heck, one of the most known songs in Spain ever, "Flying Free", literally remixes the sounds of drifting cars between the melodies, making the listener really happy in a very direct way as tons of youngs in the 90's got into the outskirt night clubs... by car. So they felt as driving an infinite highway rave with no end for days.
The amusing thing (to me at least) is that while the DX7 gave users almost infinite options as to how they could create and shape sounds, if you know what to listen for you'll hear the E PIANO 1 and BASS 1 presets an about half of all mid 80s hits. Turns out when they gave musicians a tool with immense flexibility, many of them still chose to use two of the (admittedly great) preset sounds.
Apparently this happens every time. A sample disk included with tracker software was used in hundreds if not thousands of modules and pretty much defined the sound of the Amiga.
Yup. FM Synthesis is challenging enough to implement, but doing so on the DX7's interface is a whole other level of frustrating. It's far from the hands-on interfaces of most subtractive or modular synthesizers.
The DX-7 FM synthesis opened the door to a pretty narrow but interesting range of sounds, bells and brass, which people loved and it was a ripsnorting success for a time, but it didn't displace subtractive analog synths and people aren't exactly playing FM synthesizers any more, while they are now heavily back into analog subtractive. of course there are also romplers and samplers etc. and those can achieve sounds that FM did, but it's hard to call the DX-7 any type of be-all end-all.
All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.
See: https://www.scribd.com/document/55134776/48787070-Bob-Ostert...
With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.
There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup).
Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre.
Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.