Some have said this. Here’s my response:
It bothers me to see how far the guitar was able to leapfrog over the backs of the other instruments that came before it.
Before Andrés Segovia started playing transcriptions of the Bach cello suites, the guitar was not seen as a legitimate instrument by the mainstream.
(Up until the mid-20th century, “mainstream” meant concert music or classical music.)
People have heard me play Bach suites and then commented on my version of that “guitar piece”. Really.
The guitar had no stature in that world. It was a peasant’s instrument, played only at pubs or on farms and used only for folk music. It never showed up in a concert hall outside of Spain.
The guitar had a small dynamic range. (It didn’t get very loud.) This limited the expressive possibilities of the instrument.
The guitar had frets to show you where the notes were, and also tune them for you.
Its boxy body lacked resonance, and thus lacked melodic potential. It lent itself to unskilled players who wanted to pick out simple chords or licks… but not much else.
It was the poor man’s lute.
Concert society scoffed at the guitar for its lack of grace and left it to the masses, but when Segovia started getting famous in the 1920s things started changing.
Enterprising guitarists played mostly arrangements of classical pieces written for other instruments, like the Bach cello suites, and this inspired modern composers like Villa Lobos and Rodrigo to build the guitar rep with their own compositions.
People started getting excited about it, and with the advent of amps and guitar pioneers in blues, jazz and rock, things really took off.
The rest is history, and look at the mess we’re in now: the guitar and its devotees rule the music business, but they’re also bitching now that they’re getting overshadowed by nerds with computers.
I love the guitar as much as you do (really, I do!)
I like playing it but its inherent limitations present some problems. A reliance on frets and amps has taken the place of touch and technique, and a lot of us think that our tone is something we can dial up in the gear that we buy. It’s not.
I’m not here to say that everybody should reject guitars and only play cello music.
Not at all. My point is that by relying on our frets, on our knobs, on our synths and drum machines – by using tools to make music production easier – we essentially buy our way out of the very journey we set out on. We don’t connect with the physical sound.
Ask any drummer or wind player or string player. They work their whole lives to get closer to their sound, molding their very bodies to it.
This is where the cello comes back in. It’s not as easy to play as a guitar. Of course, some things work better on the guitar and some on the cello, but easier isn’t necessarily better. Playing a classical instrument forces you to learn tone, phrasing and how to play in tune.
You have to connect with the sound more intimately than you ever could on a guitar, even an amplified one. And if you can groove, better still :)
If people want to say that I play cello like it’s a guitar, fine.
All I’m doing is reversing what began a hundred years ago when Segovia propelled himself to fame playing the cello suites: I’m taking the dominant music of the day (which right now is guitar music) and adapting it to my instrument.
It’s my thinly-disguised attempt to steal back some of the relevance the cello lost when it remained stuck in the classical scene.
Classical music started to sound dated and bourgie and people forgot about how much fun you can have on a cello. The guitar won more dominance with every hit record, and after a while the cello was left on the sidelines, only getting called in to warm up a mix or provide gravitas.
I play cello, but in my heart I’m a pop songwriter. I can do both at once, right?
That’s what I’m trying to do. And I’m having too much fun to care what anybody thinks.