Playing Guitar in the Semantic Apocalypse
April 16, 2025
I
Many years ago I used to play guitar. It was quite a serious endeavour in the sense that I would spend hours and hours every day practising, and it went like that for a few years. Yet, despite being able to move up and down the fretboard at high speed and even convincing a then friend to buy a set of drums and form a band, nothing tangible came out of it. At some point I simply lost interest (and, in doing so, let down the friend who had invested those summers alongside me).
After a decade-long hiatus, I bought a guitar. Only now have I realised that I never really played guitar so much as drilled exercises and tried to imitate other artists’ styles—without ever thinking of my own. I also became obsessed with gear: pedals, sound, tube amps, coils, the best strap-lock system, and so on. At one point, I knew more about adjusting string height than I did about where to play the same chord on different parts of the fretboard.
While my behaviour in my teens could be explained by documented cognitive biases such as the Overjustification Effect or Goal Displacement—denoting a shift from intrinsic motivation (playing) to extrinsic motivation (social validation, making a career out of it)—I can’t help wondering whether I’m exhibiting similar patterns in other endeavours today. Perhaps I’ll only recognise it a decade from now.
II
I visited a friend recently which happened to have a guitar and saw that while years passed technology moved forward - and now there's things which make playing more accessible than ever. It seems to be that it became a lot more acceptable to play through headphones via something like a Fender Mustang Micro Amp and just enjoy the act of playing. There were no analogue pedals. There was no sight of a tube amplifier in that apartment either. The sound wasn't quite my sound, but one could emulate a far more effects than I ever could have out of my old setup.
There was only one (favourite) guitar pick (which sometimes got lost) and a guy playing guitar.
That reminded me of Scott Alexander's "The colors of her coat" which in turn was written as a response to "Welcome to the semantic apocalypse". There Scott concurs that before synthetic ultramarine was discovered in the 19th century the "Perfect Platonic Blue" could only be glimpsed in a church - so rare was the pigment. An ordinary man's (Joe) single sight of this true blue not available anywhere else but the church would be a highlight of his life.
I asked myself then, is playing guitar through a headphone amplifier with old strings and so-so headphones a betrayal of the vision that Fender or Les Paul had when they designed the "modern" electric guitar? Was the tube amp for me what ultramarine blue was for Joe? Weren't these things designed to blast sound across stadiums? What if in the future all concerts are virtual? What about LLMs being able to generate a full song? Is there less meaning to be drawn?
My only hope is that we will not.