Don't Give Up on the Guitar, Fender Is Begging You
I never once heard someone say that acoustic guitars are easier to play than electrics. It goes without saying that the first thing you do when you buy a guitar and pull off the strings and put on something else. The stock strings are, more often than not, old, out of tune, and feel terrible. I use Elixer, which are soft and easy to play.<p>Maybe guitar stores should start tossing in a free set of good strings with every new purchase. This would keep the complaints down, I think. Long term, a guitarist will keep going back for the good string as well.<p>But Fender as a brand is facing a few issues.<p>First, the death of the rock star, so to speak, but more specifically, the death of the 70s rock star. There are so many brands to choose from that are equally as good, if not far superior, to Fender for the price point. Fender is still riding on the Strat and Tele, looks that haven&#x27;t been updated for many years, and the quality of the pickups haven&#x27;t kept up with the times, especially on the lower end models.<p>When you are talking about the low-end, meaning guitars up to $500 or so, Fender doesn&#x27;t offer much that is convincing. For $500, you can buy an Epiphone SG or Les Paul + Orange practice amp for about that price point. It&#x27;s hard to argue here considering this is a professional grade setup that one would keep and use for their entire life, really.<p>People quit playing music because playing music is really hard. Even if you are only going to strum C-G-E all your life, getting good at strumming those chords takes considerable practice and conviction. If you want to play leads well, that&#x27;s a huge rabbit hole.<p>I think that every musician I&#x27;ve met is plain and simple, a music junky. This was much easier to spot in the old days, as this person would carry around a binder of CDs and read liner notes on the bus. Today, it is harder to spot, but the dead giveaway is someone who lives and breathes music naturally. This person listens to Lady Gaga with the same zeal as they listen to Led Zepelin. This person is now interested in discovering who inspired their favorite bands and they leap down a crazy rabbit hole and try to figure out why the heck all of the shredders are covering Bach, Beethoven, and Paganini. After all of this, they are excited to show you a brand new song by the Junior Boys they discovered on YouTube. If you don&#x27;t &quot;get&quot; why this person has a wide and apparently conflicting taste in music, you have a natural musician on your hands and get that music instrument.<p>I don&#x27;t know, I may be overstating the spirit of a musician, but honestly, I&#x27;ve never met one who didn&#x27;t have some surprising influences and tastes, and I never met one who couldn&#x27;t appreciate a night of eclectic open mics. The point is, to play music, you have to be willing to suffer, which includes chopping your fingers up on guitar strings or putting ice on your crimped next from holding a violin for 3 hours. It takes an innate drive and desire that is inexplicable to those who left their instruments for the dust.<p>Unfortunately, Fender can&#x27;t make a musician, but they can still sell guitars to those who want to try it out, and that&#x27;s not a bad thing.