Having up the idea of becoming a performance maestro on the acoustic, I am now using my guitar mainly to compose chord or note progressions, in the vague hope they may be commercial or taken up by someone.
I started by using my top notch Collings(now sold). The issue is it made every chord sound interestingly complex or deep ( particularly when the chord notes were arpeggiated ). This kind of distracted from being able to judge wether the selected chords sounded good or shit when played next to each other.
So now I am using a much cheaper( though still quality) Yamaha, which applies a somewhat more rigorous judgement on the quality of the note progressions.
The question now should I give up all my expensive kit for a £ 100 Harley Benton acoustic- on the basis that if my compositions sound vaguely good on it, that means they have passed the ultimate test?
I am not comparing myself, but the renowned music producer Quincy Jones used to, as a rule, play all his recordings through a really, really cheap and nasty sound system, using that sound as the ultimate arbiter of the quality of his work.
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just because you do, doesn't mean you should.
When I did my audio engineering course way back in the dark ages (we took our class notes using slates and lit the studio with candles) I was taught to monitor recordings on a selection of speakers, always including one very crappy set intended to more-or-less reproduce the tonal and dynamic range of a pocket transistor radio. Seems like a good rule to me (after adjusting to allow for improved playback devices these days).
Writing a song is about the harmonic content. I would want the best instrument possible for that.
Also, a beautiful sounding and playing instrument is more inspiring to pick up and play.
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As much as I enjoy and respect your posts @Tannin, when you dismiss the Harley Benton and talk about the intonation and unmemorable tone, are you talking from first hand experience? As I'd beg to differ.
It's not that you can't compose on a guitar - you certainly can - it's the fact that it can be difficult to come up with a something interesting when doing so, for a couple of reasons. First up, there is the fact that we typicaly use chord shapes and scale patterns, and a lot of the time this makes us go to familiar and comfortable places on an instrument we play regularly, so we can end up with derivative and not very interesting melodies and progressions because we don't go outside our comfort zone. Second, is that even if we do go somewhere unusual on the fretboard and come up with something different, we get limited by our typical favourite strumming and picking patterns too. It's far too easy to fall into that trap and get stuck creatively.
This is why I rarely write tunes on a guitar, or a keyboard. I come up with interesting melodies in my head, because there is no instrument's structure limiting where that can go. Then I keep the melody and rhythm going in my head for a few days to play around with it and develop it, and having done that, then I might pick up an instrument and figure out what the chords for that melody would, or could be.
As far as coming up with melodies goes, quite often I will spot a sign on a truck or a poster or some such, as I'm driving about, and I will immediately try to sing what I see is written. What that does, is force you to not use convenient 'moon and june' rhyming meters, because most posters and signs you see do not have a convenient number of syllables and stanzas, so instantly trying to sing what is written forces you to come up with interesting intervals and rhythms to get something reasonably decent with the amount of syllables you see presented. This is why if you try this, it has to be absolutely spontaneous, don't think about what would fit nicely, just start singing whatever is written; you'll find it will send you in some really unusual melodic and rhythmic directions. It doesn't work one hundred percent of the time, but I can guarantee it will get you an interesting melody and rhythm which you would never have come up with just sat there with a guitar, and quite often it can trigger an idea for a lyric or song subject too. It also makes long boring drives much more fun and often productive.
I then recommend parking up your car full of components made in a Chinese sweatshop, going in your house and playing what you have come up with, on a Harley Benton, then posting it on here, using your computer or smartphone/tablet which was made in a Chinese sweatshop. :-)
PS: Three cars in this household, none of them made in China, nor using Chinese-made components. It's very nearly impossible to buy a non-Chinese computer these days, though the motherboard is from Taiwan, the hard drives are from Thailand, and the SSDs from South Korea.
Getting philosophical for a minute, imposing constraints, such as poor quality instruments or no instrument at all, increases the probability of producing something out of the ordinary. From this might come something extraordinary.
Then, when it comes to orchestrating around those core components, a decent instrument is useful. There are a few pieces where the tone of the instrument is itself the novelty, such as the Celeste in the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, but these are inevitably few.
You need a half-decent tone to know what your stuff sounds like.
Also, the playback systems are more sophisticated these days (even mobiles have EQ settings for music).
Do you really want to regress to a mono cassette recorder from Woolworths of 1968 or so?
(If the answer to this is yes, I have one attached to a Sinclair ZX Spectrum you could have...)
That said, he's songwriting royalty in my book and I'm pretty sure he'd get something of interest out of any noise making device.
There are bad guitars in existence. But I would stick my neck and say most of them are going to be old. The standard of most new cheap acoustics now is acceptable. And some are very good. If you’re lucky you’ll trip over a brilliant one. All part of the journey!
Good starting point? Yamaha.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
I agree that it is probably not great to spend a lot of time with a really horrible guitar. But I think there is an issue with very fine luthier or custom made instruments for song writing , because they are made to sound distinctive or unique, and this may mask the reality of how good or otherwise a composition is/ but maybe that’s overstating.