Week 15: Interview with guitar players

In order to address some of the concerns I have had in previous weeks I went out and interviewed a small group of guitar players, asking about the instruments they owned and what was important to them when looking for a guitar. This endeavour was incredibly useful and I gained a number of interesting insights, one of the most prominent being that casual guitar players do not concern themselves much with the tone of their instruments. In this area they are largely happy enough to put their faith in the guitar maker to make something which sounds good and they are confident that they will know what they like once they hear it.

What seemed far more important to these musicians was how their instruments felt to play: elements such as action, intonation and neck width came up very frequently in the interview as things they liked or would change about their guitars. They also expressed that they had almost never attempted to maintain or repair their own guitars, especially their acoustics, due to concerns that they would ruin an instrument which both cost a lot of money and which they have a strong emotional connection to.

This provides an interesting new direction for my work: my project has always partially been about giving guitar players a much deeper connection to their instruments and encouraging them to maintain their instruments for themselves could achieve this. The research has also shown that this method would be much more meaningful to guitar players than helping them to hear differences in tone. Over the coming week I will have to delve further into the research I gathered and determine how I am going to achieve this.