Comment by kazinator

> I'm kind of surprised guitars have stayed monophonic for as long as they have, and I feel like the next advance might be a cultural shift of guitars to a true polyphonic output path.

Guitars are now instruments mainly for backwards looking musicians. New players who want to use distortion want to reproduce the sounds of yesteryear, whether it be 70's hard rock or 90's metal.

It will not sound right without those intermodulation products. Even a simple double-stop blues bend with the G and B strings won't be right with separately distorted strings; you need to hear that beating warble arising from the difference of the frequencies, and how that beat frequency changes with the amount of bend. Intermodulation distortion in chords adds "grit", and that's an inseparable part of the attitude of the music.

Separately from that, guitarists can easily get their polyphonic jolies from playing cleanly.

There is also the whole world of guitars as MIDI controllers for synthesizers. The technology there is mature by now. You can get any sound you want, cleanly polyphonic.

In guitar, there this this bizarre movement of longing for vintage stuff and looking for authenticity in connection with the past. It's getting surreal and almost eerie when 20-somethings are making videos about guitars from 1950-something and pedals from 1979 and whatever. Kids are excited about stuff I thought was old and uncool in 1987. (Telecaster, WTF? Do I look like f'ing Bruce Springsteen?)

Probably the greatest development in guitar in recent years or decades is digital modeling. But what does that do? It is mainly backwards-looking. You have "amp models" which reference specific units or their archetypes. There is a lot of fuss about whether the tube sound is reproduced.