Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

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PaulDavisThe1st

> This deeply saddens me, the pool of people I admire is draining faster than it’s replenished

Then you need to stop wading in the shallows of the people you admire and get out in the insane expanse that is the rest of the creative world.

In terms of just music alone, there's more talent out there now than there ever was before. Two generations or more of musical education where none really existed before, plus an entire generation that saw making a living as a musician as a possibility (whether or not that was true) has led to a situation where almost every town of 50k people or more has musicians in it who are as almost as good or better than any who ever lived.

I am fairly confident that the same thing is true of writing, painting, photography, dance: the pool of talent is out there. If you're as old as you semi-suggest, it gets harder and harder to encounter it. I'm 57 and I have to work quite hard to ensure that I keep exposing myself to new artists and creatives - the natural tendency is to just look back on all the people I discovered between 17 and 27 and then lament them dying. Don't do it! YouTube is a miracle in this respect. There's so much incredible talent and invention out there. Every generation has people in it for you to respect, and they too will die and become the "legends of old".

[* edited "wallowing" => "wading"; did not mean to sound so harsh ]

Then you need to stop wallowing in the shallows of the people you admire and get out in the insane expanse that is the rest of the creative world.

Don't be a jerk. A guy is dead. He's mourning the loss. Let him.

I changed the wording slightly. Wasn't trying to be harsh or a jerk.

I didn't see your exact wording before but just the same to me what you said is ok.

HN (or really any forum) shouldn't be a place where people have to fear saying what they really think. I want to know what someone really thinks not what they think they have to say so that others don't jump on top of them and get them into line with what you are supposed to say.

Maybe someone should draw a line if a close relative of friend died but not a public figure celebrity etc. I read your comment more like 'get a life if this is what upsets you in some way'.

What I think? Didn't like his music (not a fan) but even if it was someone who I liked it wouldn't matter to me. For one thing (not the only thing one thing) none of these artists are typically making any good music anymore and even if they did the entertainment they provided can be easily replaced by another of thousands of artists.

By the way I would feel the same way about the worship by people about some tech figure dying or getting sick. It's not because it's music.

Harsh? Point is I don't think people should assume that everyone cares about this nor should people be afraid that they won't say the right or sensitive thing.

I got the same feeling as brtkdotse when Chris Cornell of Soundgarden died. "They aren't making them like that anymore". And if they are, I haven't found any.

Can you give us an example (like a YouTube link) of a modern guitarist (from the past 15 or so years) that approaches Eddie Van Halen's level of talent or innovation? An uplifting thought is that, like Cornell, although we have lost him, we still have his music.

Another "hacker's guitarist" is Tom Sholz of Boston. If the younger generation has never heard of him, his story is amazing too (an MIT trained engineer; rock star; built his own gear; wrote, played, recorded and produced his own work):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Scholz

While his style is a little different than EVH, he has a similar innovative spirit.

My impression is that rock and roll is...well, dead. Genres wax and wane in popularity, and so does the talent in that genre, as talent becomes attracted to other genres (you ask who the modern day Van Halen is: who is the modern day B.B. King? Or Frank Sinatra? Or Mozart? On some level, it's a silly question, because those genres have become somewhat passé).

A few years ago, garage band rock n' roll was topping the charts: The Black Keys, The White Stripes, The Arctic Monkeys, etc. Now, not so much - or at all. But as much as my soul is warmed by a tasty guitar lick, I'm okay with that, because the seasons change and all we can do is watch as they do.

finding new (to me) bands that sound like the old bands I like is much easier given tools like everynoise.com, which I highly recommend (though it works best if you also have a Spotify account because of the playlists).

my current heavy rotation playlist of EVH-style guitar shredding is here, if anyone is interested:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6iCImsdr0rrYHStbFpOi2h?si=...

vastly different sound but the technical mastery is apparent.

Allow me to chip in my guitar riff playlist as well

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5q2zcb4xCWviTlAPfk0M8z?si=...

great playlist, it was largely Satriani/Vai/Johnson who were responsible for my love of guitar wankery :)

I would encourage listening to Joe Satriani's answer to this question from Rick Beato:

https://youtu.be/AYdmelm9ADM?t=2143

Both Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes from Animals as Leaders are amazing guitarists who are pushing the boundaries while making really kickass music.

My immediate go-to answer for that question would be Guthrie Govan. He can shred with anyone, but also can do incredibly delicate picking work, and can play in the context of almost any genre you could name - blues, folk, jazz. His blending of techniques goes way beyond EVH (but undoubtedly bears some debt too). This is probably Govan's most famous single-take solo, but he has oodles of other work at this level (though not necessarily in this style);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaH2C2Qe97Y

Before him, Shawn Lane (RIP) was technically far beyond EVH, but ditched the southern speed metal he came up playing and got interested in indian classical music. Lane died young in 2003, but leaves behind an interesting legacy of work for those us interested in something far outside of "rock", but ultimately strongly indebted to it.

You can find old videos of him shredding in the late 1990s when he was often said to be the fastest ever. This is from his work with Jonas Hellborg and two indian percussionists. The first link is to one of his more melodic sections, the second is more virtuosic and microtonal:

https://youtu.be/8gTSCXur8rA?t=68

https://youtu.be/8gTSCXur8rA?t=377

Also, shout out to Tosin Abasi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTi9y2-VnNY

he's definitely more directly indebted to EVH, but more modern and arguably more technique, technology and maybe just a shade more jazz.

Further, or maybe differently, outside the of "rock" scope, and on acoustic guitar, people like Kaki King have taken the "extended technique" approach of Michael Hedges and run with it. She is off-the scale talented, although to be fair a lot of her music doesn't connect with me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os6-0_uYAq8

Shawn Lane is my absolute favorite. No one has mastered melody, phrasing, tone, and humbleness as much as Shawn Lane.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VzrzREBYbao

Apart from the solo you suggested, I always suggest the Drive Home (also with Steven Wilson) solo. Easily one of the best solos I've ever heard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycYewhiaVBk

Also +1 Tosin Abasi. The new generation of guitar heroes is here, although traditional rock n roll isn't as popular anymore.

This is absolutely insane. Modern metal has been pushing so many boundaries since its such a hard genre to get into. Some obscenely amazing guitarists have emerged in the last decade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y275DyRjfjE&list=PLThcv0otcW...

And 15 years? Dream Theater has been around for 20 years (with modern lineup), and nobody in their right minds would not put John Petrucci at the top of any guitarist list

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGFuOFenVbk

> This is absolutely insane.

So you counter with utter inanity. Touche!

My opinion has not changed a whit, of modern people or their music. Eddie Van Halen 4eva!

So your response to the guitarists who are known for being obscenely technical, and for DT currently owns the world record for most time signature changes in a song is "inanity". A person who has been lead guitarist, main producer, writer and singer for multiple bands and current/longest lasting member of G3?

Modern metal has become insanely competitive with young bands competing against each other to be sky high technical, since that's the main differentiation these days.

What does a modern guitarist need to do? Be the literal re-incarnation?

> "They aren't making them like that anymore"

You should check out Muse and Matthew Bellamy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nefBNhrKl8k

Tosin Abasi of Animals as Leaders

Plini

Aaron Marshall of Intervals

Misha Mansoor of Periphery

One of the most innovative guitarrists of the current era is (for me at least) Tim Henson of Polyphia. Modern, innovative guitar playing has changed a lot in the last few decades. You probably won't find the most innovative players in classic Hard Rock or Metal Bands. You can find them instead in different sub-genres which have a deep focus on the "newer" style of playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkHD4OVjS4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_gkpYORQLU

That fellow from Animals as Leaders is pretty insane and cutting edge. I’m not really a fan of the music but he is undeniably a beast. And thoughtful. See his interview on Rick Beato

There is a lot more talent out there today but I think it's the combination of the talent combined with the fame and recognition that makes the hero. Eddie was very good, as are many other folks, but he was also a guitar hero and most really good players are not. The world of "guitar heroes" got one smaller and I don't know who is filling it up going forward. It was the CEO of Fender that not long ago lamented that John Mayer (maybe one of the best contemporary guitar players around, he is very talented) doesn't sell guitars the same way as youth aren't trying to emulate him like they did some of those other guys like Van Halen. That and someone had to sort of do that stuff "first." It's going to be hard to reinvent tapping or impress the world by touching a drill to the strings again, I don't see it happening any time soon.

Maybe I'm wrong and a whole new world of of guitar techniques will be discovered running it though a DJ turntable and scratching and cutting or something. I don't know. Maybe it's also just a quality of our time, hardcore blues fans have sort of lamented the dying off of the greats for a long time.

> hardcore blues fans have sort of lamented the dying off of the greats for a long time.

i'd wager that's because hardcore blues fans are mostly of a certain age too, like the GP here, and can only focus clearly on the death of people they discovered in their late teens and early 20s.

you're right about the "guitar hero" thing, but for me personally, i just can't care about that. i'm into the music, not the personality. i don't sell guitars, so i don't have to care if the undoubtedly talented mayer isn't causing sales to rise.

"there's more talent out there now than there ever was before. "

No there isn't really - totally the opposite.

The number of professional musicians has dropped dramatically over the decades.

In the 1920s-1950s 'musician' was a 'job'. Then the phonograph became big, the number dropped by 90% then over a few more decades another 90%.

It's no longer an occupation, it's just a hobby.

There are tons of people who take 'fine arts' at Uni etc. but they're not necessarily that good, and very few of them will be able to work in the field and develop careers.

'Orchestral' even on big albums is all fake, it's just to easy to do and too expensive otherwise.

'Creative' yes, a lot of that, but have a look at the Billboard 100. It's 'audible creativity' but all made by algorithms, it's more 'art' than it is 'music' in some sense.

The other issue is that the bar to entry is lower as well, so for every 'extra genius' we get out of that 'open process' there are also 1000x more posers, fakers, people just making arbitrary sounds and it's harder to wade the the noise. 'The system' used to do that for us i.e. the musical community would 'find' the talent generally. There is no 'system' now, just YouTube.

Thanks for they Polyphia link though.

> The number of professional musicians has dropped dramatically over the decades.

This is completely orthogonal to the question how much talent there is. The fact that less people can make a living doing something that doesn't require any capital investment, just time and skill, doesn't have any real direct impact on how many people get really good at it.

"It's just a hobby" is a weak put-down, and really doesn't apply to thousands of people who play instruments at incredibly high levels of skill, even though they do not do so for a living. Certainly, it's going to help development if you play more (for whatever reason). But I don't think that you can claim that only way to get to be "that good" is to be a paid professional. There are many musicians whose early work as a "professional musician" was just a side gig anyway, and they didn't play significantly more than dedicated "hobbyists".

The spread of music education (public and private) and the dramatic drop in the real cost of musical instruments has exposed way more people to the possibility of playing music. Sure, most of them will be in the middle of the bell curve, but this process has (1) lifted the absolute height of the bell curve (more people) which (2) means more people over at the right-hand end of the curve.

Not orthogonal. Being a pro means you can practice all day, you get to work with other working musicians, you grind away doing gig stuff which really expands your chops.

I agree music is accessible in a different way today, but kids used to grow up in musical families, and there were a lot of them.

My entire, large, family plays music. And played together. Tons of people used to play piano, guitar, fiddle, it was not inaccessible or elite. Instruments have been cheaply available for decades.

Also - time. People are constantly busy these days and hugely distracted. Eddie Van Halen literally got good by spending years and years alone, isolated in his room practising. So while that has nothing to do with pro/not-pro, it's definitely a cultural artifact.

You and everybody replying to you are making the same baffling mistake, i.e., assuming that technical/song writing ability/education = star. If you want technical ability, there are 8 year olds on YouTube with better chops than EVH. Possibly every 8 year old has better chops than Kurt Cobain. But technical ability does NOT make you a rock star. Same applies to the other fields you mention, painting etc.

I'm sure young rock stars (in the same vein as EVH, Axl, Hendrix, Cobain, Morrison) would still exist as the personalities and talent are still there, but rock is not mainstream anymore, so they can't exist. The closest thing to real rock stars now are the likes of Justin Bieber.

You should re-listen to the Beato/Satriani clip you told someone else to listen to, because he essentially says this. The artists you suggest are irrelevant and can not be compared to EVH in any way whatsoever. Guthrie Govan?! Van Halen drove mainstream culture. Nobody outside of guitar forums know Guthrie Govan. The other suggestions in this thread of comparators to EVH and Chris Cornell (Tosin Abasi, Petrucci, Belamy) are just embarrassing.

and as I said separately, I'm not interested in the "rock star-y-ness" of any of the people you've mentioned (or all the other ones you could name). I'm interested in the music. EVH did, in fact, push this along with his technique and compositional ideas. I don't give a damn about his personality, or who becomes a "star". Almost none of my favorite musicians are stars, despite levels of creativity and technical ability that are hard to measure or even imagine for most of us.

I wasn't suggesting that technique is everything. Great musicians have imagination and strong connections to existing cultures (even when they ignore them). But so many people talked about EVH in terms of his technique ("OMFG, did you see that Eruption solo?" etc. etc).

And for reference, the "mainstream culture" I grew up in (London, 70s-early 80s) was unimpressed by EVH and american rock in general.

But yes, rock is not mainstream anymore, and thus "rock stars" are not a thing. Bieber is not even close to being a "rock star" - we had "pop stars" all through the 60s and 70s and they were entirely distinct from the "rock stars" of those same eras.

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