Are the younger generations less interested in playing guitar?

[redir]

That article made a lot of good points about the guitars decline though it also pointed out that the industry has seen this before. I like seeing acoustic guitars being more popular but I also love the electric guitar. IT used to be that the acoustic guitar was sort of the gateway drug to the electric guitar.

Anecdotally speaking a good friend and local guitar teacher has pretty much lost his livelihood as his student enrollment had dropped off so severely in the last 5 years. And this is in a town that once had 3 thriving music stores, all closed down, and a large university with 30k + students three blocks away.

So something is going on. It could just be a normal industry curve but I would not be buying stock in Guitar Center anytime soon

[Judson]

I see it mainly as a matter of motivation.

Most kids are motivated to emulate their heros and to impress their peers.

My heros were The Beatles ... and my peers (the girls) loved them ... so I tried hard to emulate The Beatles as best I could ... so that I could impress my peers.

In the future, if guitarists are not seen as heros and playing a guitar is not considered a path toward impressing one's peers, then learning to play a guitar will have little appeal.

Call me naive, but I really do think it's just that simple.


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[Woodstock School Of Music]

Originally Posted by Judson

I see it mainly as a matter of motivation.

Most kids are motivated to emulate their heros and to impress their peers.

My heros were The Beatles ... and my peers (the girls) loved them ... so I tried hard to emulate The Beatles as best I could ... so that I could impress my peers.

In the future, if guitarists are not seen as heros and playing a guitar is not considered a path toward impressing one's peers, then learning to play a guitar will have little appeal.

Call me naive, but I really do think it's just that simple.


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Good post I agree and I think it is mostly that simple. Most of my teenage students are influenced by what's popular now and could care less about 40 years ago just like my generation was.

[nedray]

Schools don't normally include guitar in their music instruction because it's really not a serious musical instrument in the artistic or academic sense. We all love the guitar and guitar music, and there certainly is a catalogue of "serious" guitar music, but most of us don't read music or truly understand music theory and we don't immerse ourselves in the works of the great composers. Nor do we want to dive into any of that. Guitars are not included in orchestras or marching bands, which form the basis for most formal instrumental music instruction. Most serious music students don't graduate with a concentration on guitar performance, like they would piano or vocal or French horn performance. On the other hand, most school band students don't continue their music education and at some point most abandon their clarinets and trombones, never to play again. That's why parents tend to rent the student models of those instruments. Why should the guitar be different? But, at this point anyway, it probably is.

Guitars are basically novelty instruments that occupied a countercultural artistic niche and gained undue popularity with the social groundswell that grew out of a generational rebellion. The music and the musical influences that grew out of that groundswell will continue, but to varying degrees, and will never attain the level of influence that the great composers exert over our artistic endeavor. And, as simple as blues and folk and rock music are to play, there are ample resources available to support the guitar as a diversion. People will use guitars as a vocal accompaniment and even a solo instrument, but the days of Led Zeppelin and Dave van Ronk are behind us. Life goes on. Our parents were right: That stuff will never last.

[Toby Walker]

Originally Posted by J-Doug

Both my 11 year old son and 15 year old daughter play the guitar, quite well actually. I'm not too worried about the future of the guitar, at least around my house.

My daughter actually goes to an arts high school. My son plans to go too. It's a wonderful place, almost magical in this day and age. They have to audition and maintain high marks to stay in the program but the kids love it there. They offer music, dance, vocal music, visual art, musical theater, drama, writing, etc. and the kids just eat it up.

God bless 'em Doug! Sure wish they had that sort of stuff when I went to school. The budget in my old school district went towards two things... sports and security guards. High crime rate area.

[AHill]

Just my observation in Southern California... Acoustic (and electric) guitar is alive and well among the younger generation. More than half the guitar players in the church worship bands I see are in their 20's. The kid across the street is a pretty decent electric guitar player. I go to GC, and it's not old Boomers like me, it's teens and 20's. I think a lot of what drives kids to play an instrument is what they listen to. I was going to say "on the radio", but kids these days really don't listen to the radio. It's Spotify and YouTube and iTunes. There seems to be a resurgence in Bluegrass, and it's mostly among the younger generation. Just look at some of the new artists, like Molly Tuttle and the Avett Brothers.

Originally Posted by Toby Walker

God bless 'em Doug! Sure wish they had that sort of stuff when I went to school. The budget in my old school district went towards two things... sports and security guards. High crime rate area.

Yikes! Unfortunately there's only one public arts high school in all of Ottawa (pop. ~1,000,000) so it's tough to get in. My daughter needed a high GPA, had to write 5 essays, had to provide a resume of artistic training and accomplishments and had to audition twice to even be considered.

[Mr. Jelly]

Originally Posted by Willie Voltaire

As a public school teacher for 22 years, I am continually amazed by the energy and talent with which teenagers today pursue their passions in art, music, film, theater, and dance. The tools and the styles may change, but the spirit and enthusiasm remains as lively as it's ever been -- perhaps even more so. The technology that many here decry has opened doors for a lot of kids who otherwise might not be exposed to nearly as wide a range of influence, and it allows them to create and publish in ways that simply weren't available even 15 years ago.

From my vantage point, I'm happy to report that the kids are all right!

With a little motivation kids can learn enough guitar for what they want to do from U tube.
My grandson is in show choir and if you think guitar is hard try to sing in tune while dancing choreographed dance steps.
Kids seem to be into everything now days. I was a slug compared to todays kids.
Days past a person was lucky to dig up a guitar to try and learn on. Now allot of members here have at least three guitars.

[tonyo]

Originally Posted by The Bard Rocks

Good comments. I am not in a position to observe trends and had no idea. Things normally wax and wane, so it is not something to worry too much about, unless of course you sell guitars professionally. If guitars re not popular right now, they will be again some time in the future.

Yeah, just look at how popular the ukulele has become recently.

[Luckymud]

Originally Posted by Willie Voltaire

I completely agree. As a public school teacher for 22 years, I am continually amazed by the energy and talent with which teenagers today pursue their passions in art, music, film, theater, and dance. The tools and the styles may change, but the spirit and enthusiasm remains as lively as it's ever been -- perhaps even moreso. The technology that many here decry has opened doors for a lot of kids who otherwise might not be exposed to nearly as wide a range of influence, and it allows them to create and publish in ways that simply weren't available even 15 years ago.

From my vantage point, I'm happy to report that the kids are all right!

I agree with this 100%.

While kids might not be taking traditional lessons, that doesn't mean that they're not interested in guitar.

There are a TON of youtube tutorials for guitar and ukulele for almost any song you can think of. And kids of all ages showing off their cover versions of popular songs.

[BluesyRob]

Originally Posted by Toby Walker

God bless 'em Doug! Sure wish they had that sort of stuff when I went to school. The budget in my old school district went towards two things... sports and security guards. High crime rate area.

Fortunately, my town cut sports funding to support more music. We are the only city in CT to have our high school play in Washington DC at one of the big parades. The name of the parade escapes me at the moment. The high school plays at a college level and​ the middle school plays at a high school level. My daughter plays the trumpet and she's very excited about entering middle school this fall. She practices a lot. She also has a guitar, and she strums along with me sometimes but then she gets bored and puts it away for a while.
My 4 year old son loves music an already has a great sense of rhythm, so I'm sure he'll be starting something soon. He sits in the room when I practice. We also have a ukulele, which he carried around for a when year when he was age 2 and never let anyone else play it.
Hopefully there's more guitar in their future...

[devellis]

People -- and especially young people -- don't derive a great deal of pleasure from things that they're not good at. So activities that have a fairly short path to mastery will always have a strong appeal. Things that have a short path to mastery and that can be mastered jointly with others will appeal even more.

Video games (as one example) is a realm in which noticeable progress is pretty fast, even if "mastery" comes much later. But a group of kids can get a new video game and, in an afternoon, get a lot better at it than where they started. In a week, they're better still. A month? More noticeable progress. And they can do this together, competing directly or playing solo and then comparing how they did. And during play, the activity is very absorbing and attention rarely wanes. Again, video games are just a dramatic example of an activity that has characteristics that will encourage persistent and sustained engagement. But there are others.

Compare that to learning guitar. It's hard. It takes a very long time. It sounds like crap while you're learning. It may be hard to find anyone else who wants to do it along with you. Sure, skateboarding is also hard and even more painful during the learning stages. But at least if you're interested in it, it's easy to find other kids who share that interest. Tougher than it used to be to find someone else at your level who wants to learn guitar.

Of course, there are still young people who have the desire and commitment to learn guitar and who love doing it. There are those who will do what it takes to find other people with the same interest. But I think there are a lot fewer of them and there are a lot more competing activities. Just in the area of sports (another arena with a long hard path to mastery), there are far more offerings than there used to be. In the 60s, my high school was unusual in that it offered a soccer program. Now, there's soccer everywhere. And sports like lacrosse, tennis, diving, and others have a lot more community support (such as the construction of appropriate facilities) than they did a half-century ago when many of us were kids taking up guitar. And there are many more art programs of various types in many communities. I've known two or three families in which young girls have pursued serious operatic singing. That really wasn't a realistic option for my peers when I was a kid. And there are also lots more academic pursuits for kids. No "space camp" or "math camp" or "marine biology camp" or "foreign language camp" opportunities that I was ever aware of when I was a kid (of course, considering that they didn't land on the moon until I was finishing up college, it's little wonder that we didn't have space camps when I was younger). So, even for the motivated, persistent, talented kids who want to engage in something meaningful and worthwhile and have the patience to ride a long learning curve, there are many attractive alternatives to learning guitar. And the payoff for the effort may be a lot higher for acquiring some of those other skills than for learning to play guitar.

In the grand scheme of things, I really don't see this as all that bad. I guess it's not good news if you want to teach guitar. But in the broader picture, there are more things for kids to pursue and there are still kids who are interested in doing hard things with a long path to mastery, including learning guitar. While I encounter fewer young people that have as much interest in guitar as my peers and I had at their age, I have to say that, overall, they're often (though not always) more well-rounded than we were and have a wider array of interests. Seems my friends had music (playing and listening), sports (playing and following), and cars (working on and reading about) as their primary options when I was in my middle teens. Many more options now. And often, the young people of this era have gotten pretty darn good at the things they pursue. It may not be guitar that has captured all their hearts but they're still devoting themselves in many cases to very worthwhile endeavors.

[TBman]

I think there is so much stuff on Youtube and the rest of the internet that a lot of the kids that can dedicate themselves to learning are also smart enough to learn from these sources. The only problem is that a kid will just learn what they are interested in and bypass any learning of written notation which can help them be more rounded and open doors to more learning in the future.

[Skip Ellis]

Interesting thread for sure. I heard that our local GC has quit renting rehearsal space recently because they needed the studio space for teaching - they seem to have more students than they know what to do with, plus they have a very good teacher as head of the program. When I try out acoustic guitars, even if I'm just doodling some Merle Travis stuff, it seems to generate some interest and generate a few questions. However, if I mention Merle Travis or Doc Watson or John Fahey or anyone of that ilk, I just get blank stares or questions like " who does he play with?". It seems nobody (with the exception of the blues genre with people like Toby) has bothered to learn or even think about the history or where this stuff came from. I miss the days when a singer (Josh White was stellar example) would come on stage with an acoustic guitar and not only sing his rear end off but blow you away with his playing. Mississippi John Hurt was another one, as was Blind Blake and Doc Watson. Nowadays, you have to have 25 backup dancers to take the audience's attention away from the fact you can't sing - just like a magician uses misdirection to pull off his illusions - he wants you to think it's real. I was in the local SA store a couple weeks ago just checking out what they had, and I started playing Merle's "I'll See You In My Dreams" and the young kid that hooked up the amp for me just stood there dumbfounded and in a minute or so the guy from the band instrument department came in and said "I know that song - I've played it many times on clarinet. I didn't know you could play that music on guitar." Maybe people are just aren't getting a wide enough education anymore - there's a lot of history out there.

[Shadowfox]

So as a Millennial I thought I'd put my opinion out there.

My high school offered guitar class (which was awesome!). However, I really wanted to play guitar just as a kid who got into rock, then Heavy Metal.

Most of my friends picked up guitar because of metal. We all love Video games too. I think for us love of heavy rock, and being involved in church gave us reasons to buy guitars, and avenues to be on stage and reason to practice.

I think the other issue is the over arching job issues, of not a lot of well paying jobs for the Millennials to take, so staying at home. This is good and bad. Not having to pay rent meant that making $9 bucks an hr at Starbucks I was about to buy a $1400 Martin, and friends of mine were able to buy nicer other guitars.

I think as people start to retire, you will see love for acoustic still going strong, but money start to shift to the younger generation. What will be interesting is if they still have brand "loyalty". For instance, one of the most popular cars for Millennials is a Mazda3, which most people don't want to buy for some reason, although it destroys a Corolla lol.