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Originally posted by ScottA
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It really seems to be fashionable these days to completely dismiss an understanding of instruments themselves, of musicians, and the music they make. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Some folks who "poorly understand" guitars and pickups make some incredible gear. I've known some brilliant engineers who have sat down and decided to design a guitar amp, deciding to discard all current conventional wisdom of what makes a good guitar amp, (because it was all of laughable scientific basis) and do what makes sense purely from a scientific stand point. They didn't rely on subjective "this sounds good" or "this is warm" data, because "good" and "warm" can't be measured empirically, and thus impossible to manipulate in an electronic environment which is quantitative through and through. They used hard data from their scopes, detailed recordings, and other careful measurements.
Those amps sounded like crap.
My point isn't that ANY type of research should be discarded, but precisely that NO type or research should be discarded. The whole luthierie trade has done really well for hundreds of years and made some amazing pieces with their methods, and these pickup and amp makers that seem to infuriate everyone really are a continuation of those traditions I believe, moreso than of the academic communities. Each method brings its own pedagogical advantages to the table, and so often on this board it is just a matter of the people on each side trying to club each other. It just doesn't make sense, and resorting to such harsh dogmatism rarely seems to yield good results.
I do agree with Alan on that last part. The electric guitar is too young of an instrument to really feel like we've peaked in terms of design. While I think it is a mistake to assume that added science and/or technology will necessarily improve on instrument design (there don't seem to be any obvious ways to improve on a stradivarius, for example), we needn't assume that we've exhausted all possible iterations of the instrument. I think a big problem is that instrument design and praxis (that is, musicians making music) go hand in hand. The Les Paul wasn't designed to be played high gain through a Marshall, it was designed for clean jazz. People hearing those Les Paul/Marshall sounds inspired a whole other generation of instruments. Neither the builders nor the musicians are 100% in control of the form of instrumentation at any given time, and it is important to always keep that in mind. That was some of Leo Fender's genius - he had a handful of local musicians that he kept very close tabs on. These days musicians seek out older sounds ("I'm trying to nail that (insert classic album here) tone") instead of being willing to grab something off the wall and just see how it works.
To Alan's other point, I agree that obsolescence rarely occurs in the music industry. Though, it seems to me that Alan sees it as a bad thing, while I don't. We're in a world where we love our Apple products so much and rush to get the new ones simply on principle that they're new, we do sometimes forget that some things still are useful after the new one has come out. We've gotten so used to things getting better with progressing technology, that we forget that there are many things in the world where this principle just doesn't apply. It is an interesting phenomenon and a topic all to itself, though. I've ranted enough for one post.
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