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I have heard we all love the music of our youth forever. I remember growing up with SRV and Pearl Jam and then getting into nu-metal, then eventually losing interest in new music around the time of screamo. So that's like a 15 year window I guess. My dad still loves the Beatles to this day and Pink Floyd too.
It was starting to seem like young people these days will forget the guitar, as the mainly listen to rap music and are more interested in programming beats on pro-tools, reason, logic, etc. There's always a few hipsters that remember the past as a novelty, but I didn't think there would ever be a new game-changing guitar player. Well I was wrong, kids these days are creating a new style of guitar.
I know some teenagers at my day job and they are not forgetting the guitar. There's a new style of guitar and this generation has it's own Eddie Van Halen. The guy's name is Tim Henson, he plays in the band Polyphia. He plays a semi hollow nylon string guitar and all the kids want one. These kids are raw beginners and they are watch youtube tutorials trying to play some of the Polyphia songs, which are incredibly difficult. It's quite a phenomenon.
I am seeing a clear break in the generations. Guitar enthusiasts 25 and over love strats and Marshall stacks and are interested in vintage gear. They have high respect for Clapton and SRV and all the blues and classic rock guys. Under 25 they like this new style that Polyphia plays. They are aware of all the classic rock and blues stuff but they don't listen to it much or aspire to it.
If you check this stuff out, it's really interesting. The music sounds like video game music mixed with EDM and hip hop styles. No lyrics or singing, just digital swooshes, 808 bass drops, shredding, and robot-farts. There's no blues element to it at all. It's heavily edited in pro-tools. I'm sure the guy can actually play it, but it sounds like something you could cut together with digital editing. You wouldn't really be required to play it to put this music out, it's that heavily edited. Tim Henson does live demos of the songs just to prove he can play it. It's pretty amazing to see. I think they cut together the song first in pro-tools, then go back later and learn to play it once the song is done. I think that is fine as musicians have been doing that for years, but it's more rare for a guitar player. Guitarists tend to be purists and traditionalists.
It's also pretty wild that teenage kids would just start working on these songs on day without learning any basic stuff first. No C chord, D chord, barre chord, pentatonic scale...they just jump right into Polyphia songs. These songs are ultra hard to play, like Segovia would be scratching his head for a few minutes learning them. It's nothing like jazz, I'd say closer to classical technique. And it's not like they are gonna gig with this stuff, I don't imagine they would even attempt to put together a band and get bookings. The dream is to master the song and post a YouTube video playing it, that's the modern day equivalent of gigging.
Never thought I'd see the day where 16 year old kids are lusting after a nylon string semi hollow guitar!
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06-27-2023 02:52 PM
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there it is, Ibanez nylon string.
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Sorry but i don't see anything groundbreaking about Polyphia.It's just the old 80's shred how many notes can i play/tap to impress people.If it gets young people into guitar than i am all for it and wish them well.
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Info: Tim Henson of Polyphia - Playing God
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Musicianship is carrying on. We thought it was going to die for a minute there but some of the younger generation is into it. I don't like the spaz shred style of Polyphia, but think it's obviously high level playing. They could probably play more tasteful stuff if they wanted. Have you checked out the smalls jazz club cam? Don't kill yourself trying to force feed yourself polyphia, there are a bunch of 20 somethings playing at a high level there every night. I do like some of the new stuff tho. I make an effort to see which of it I like and not just write it off being 37.
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Acoustic metal is boring and stupid. Get off my lawn.
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Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Polyphia can’t carry dream theater’s jock.
The only young guns I have any love for are lage, Matteo mancuso, Pasquale grosso and Joe Robinson (Chet stuff). I like mark letteri because we were at north texas at the same time. Lotta “all hat no cattle” in the new generation tho.
meanwhile I could rattle off a half dozen kids on keys that are already monsters.
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I like your list Spencer, but 'lage' isn't exactly a young gun. Julian Lage is 35, with something like 30 years under his belt, and Lage Lund is mid 40's. (though that does seem young to me now :-)
Polyphia is odd. Something I haven't really heard before. I though it was interesting for a bit: like... what is this? Why are they playing that? Sounds oddly Spanish... or something? And... 'jass chords' !!!
The kids are alright. Does my heart good to see youngsters working that hard to play guitar. Whatever will they be playing 10 years on?
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I'm not saying Polyphia is good or Polyphia is bad. I haven't listened to it much cause I am mainly listening to Wes Montgomery right now.
What I'm saying is that the phenomenon of teenage kids emulating a guitar player from their own generation is back. It seems like it had been gone a while.
We are all pretty old here. I'm sure all of us will find this music strange. I do think it's a good thing that the kids have their own guitar hero.
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Good skills! And I can see why youngsters wanna emulate this kid, he looks cool. Think that's a stupid comment? Let's explore this a bit.... OK, so we've all seen Originally Posted by GuyBoden
teenage monster prodigies displaying superhuman skills on the instrument, but they're usually dorky looking, right? Kids like having someone to look up to that looks cool as well as sounds good. All the guitar "Gods" of the past looked cool, from Page, Hendrix, through to Van Halen, Malmsteen and onto the modern shredders. Monsters like McGlaughlin or Holdsworth didn't get the same kind of traction with the kids because they just didn't look cool.
If Tim Henson was a pudgy, pimply kid with bad hair, there is no way the kids would connect. The revival (or emergence) of any instrumental approach, or style of music totally has always depended on the Champions that emerge who have the right vibe for the times and have a "package" - a look, sound and attitude that excites young people.
And it's the reason why Jazz (including Jazz guitar) remains unpopular. I've been saying it for years, that if the right "champion" could come along with a new twist and the whole package (incl look, attitude etc), then people would get turned on to it. Jazz needs the new Miles, or Muhammad Ali to claw back some of the swagger that moved into Hiphop decades ago... Or a cute looking white kid with the right tattoos...
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Reminds me of how weird, wild and wonderful an instrument is our beloved guitar.
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Please do include Antoine Boyer here. His playing is incredible, emotionally and technically as well!
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He plays very well with great lightness and I like that. Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Ibanez already makes guitars with his name...business is business.
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'Unplugged' is a strange adjective for that. It's obviously not acoustic, none of it, obviously plugged into something. Not a Marshall stack, but still plugged in.
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Originally Posted by sgosnell
He seems to play it the same every time. No improv, but I think I'm becoming a fan.
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Someone under 40 has a signature guitar! Hallelujah! The fact that he looks like a K Pop girl is my problem, not a problem with “kids today”.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
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I'm right in the middle of the millennial generation - I'm a little older than Tim Henson, and a little younger than Julian Lage, and I have a lot of love for this generation's players - Lage, Pasquale, Antoine Boyer, Olli Soikelli, and yes, even folks like Tim Henson and Yvette Young. I appreciate that we have a crop of people who are really pushing things technically and compositionally, and who are legit players - not instagram guitarists, but people who put the time in gigging and touring. There are a lot of lesser imitators who primarily exist online, and you can tell. I definitely don't listen to Polyphia anywhere near as much as I do Julian's records, but I get what they are doing, and I get it as someone who like a lot of my peers spent about as much time beatmaking as playing guitar during those formative teen years. And I say this as a person who basically only plays swing these days!
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"Tight" music like that is very popular. It's also very much not my bag, but it's inspiring kids to pick up guitars, so that's a good thing.
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I remember a day back in the early eighties listening to the radio while driving. They played the latest song from ZZ Top, then the latest song from the Moody Blues... I realized the sound of both bands had honed in on the same sound; I knew in that moment that everyone had run out of musical ideas - that every "new" idea would be a horror heralding the end of new music, the end time for music was near.
I was right. Only a few years later a new kind of music appeared that featured major seventh chords, without jazz, without soul, without blues, lame stuff that sounded as if composed straight out of a chord book by someone who had never listened to music, but holding a contract to compose for elevators, waiting rooms, and health club locker rooms. It got even worse, how much I don't know because I quit listening to any new stuff out of self preservation.
Fortunately, I have a musical time machine comprised in part of a few hundred records from the 50s through 70s, some dozens of which I have yet to hear for the first time. My new music is old new music.
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I don’t know. Whenever I go to Southby or see live music out and about I see a lot of young cats (20s) playing plenty of traditional or whatever you wanna call it music. Everything from western swing to Chicago blues to old school country to rockabilly to soul to punk to surf. So while guys and gals are playing new styles of music, they aren’t replacing the older stuff.
Certain kinds of music just sound really good live. Other stuff sounds good on YouTube.
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There is a lot to be said for not singing. If Polyfilla encourages young men to concentrate on music and stop writing bad lyrics full of teen angst, the world will be a better place.
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I could never connect to all the YouTube stuff. I feel sorry for the newest generations that look at music instead of listening to it, and think that all these guitar gear advertisers, podcast presenters and video makers are the most interesting musicians out there. While at the same time there are tons of recording and touring artists that are awesome, and they never get to hear them or know their music..
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Agree Originally Posted by himself
much more interesting than henson to me
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Maybe they'll move on to a few Jerry Reed tunes.
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