Steven Wells, R.I.P. -- Swells on redesigning the guitar

From the Guardian Blog, January 2009...

Last year, for the first time ever, computer and video game sales might have outstripped music and DVD sales combined, helped in large part by games like Guitar Hero: World Tour, Rock Band 2, Wii Music, Rock Revolution, Boogie Star, Pop Star Guitar and Ultimate Band.
This has made some in the horny-handed "proper" musician community squeal like stuck pigs. Real rockers who can actually play guitar, like Nickelback's Chad Kroeger, have complained that games like Guitar Hero are rubbish because they're not real. And because hitting buttons on a Guitar Hero guitar is a lot easier than learning to play a real guitar. Which is, apparently, really hard.
As American rocker you've never heard of (and boyfriend of Jennifer Aniston) John Mayer explains: "Guitar Hero was devised to bring the guitar-playing experience to the masses without them having to put anything into it … it makes it easy for untalented people to pretend they are good."
In other words "real" guitarists like Mayer want to keep rock stardom like a sort of medieval guild, where entrance is only granted to those willing to suffer the tedium, frustration and savagely blistered fingers of an arduous apprenticeship – years that could surely be better spent miming songs, dressing up in your mum's clothes and practising some really cool moves in the mirror.
Rather than making Guitar Hero guitars harder or more "realistic", surely the success of Guitar Hero means that the onus is now on the manufacturers of "real" guitars to make them easier (in other words, more like the ones in Guitar Hero).
Why are they still making guitars with "real" strings that are difficult and boring to learn how to play and really make your fingers hurt? What is the point? Do we still slaughter our own cows? Dig our own wells? Work in the turnip fields for 18 hours a day, six days a week? No. Buttons have proven themselves to be much easier and more efficient. Plus, with the button guitar you can still use the instrument for its main purpose – pretending that it's a penis or a machine gun.
This is important because, despite the fact that it is old, smelly and too hard, the guitar has never been successfully replaced as pop's coolest instrument, mainly because the synthesiser makes a poor penis/machine gun substitute.
Richey Edwards killed the grubby, sweaty, stinking hippy shibboleth of musicianship (that allowed boring nerds like Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler to become rock stars) stone cold dead when he became the sexiest and the greatest guitarist in the world with Manic Street Preachers – because (not despite) the fact that he wasn't plugged in.
But pre-Richey, God only knows how many beautiful creative geniuses had given up on rock'n'roll simply because they couldn't be arsed learning to play a ridiculously archaic instrument that hasn't had a major redesign since the middle ages.
And God only knows how much damage has been done to pop music by the sad fact that the vast majority of people who can actually be arsed to learn to play guitar are, by definition, tedious dullards.
Guitar manufacturers – how the hell are we supposed to make the music of the 21st century with the instruments of the 15th?
We demand piece-of-piss-to-play button guitars now. And pre-programmed "hurdy gurdy" guitars that actually play both louder and faster the harder you crank the handle. And living guitars made out of pain-sensitive clone flesh with screaming Jagger-lipped mouths at the end of the necks that vomit a milk-like substance over the first five rows of the baying crowd at the end of each particularly impressive guitar solo.
Oh yeah, baby. That's what I'm talking about. Let's make it happen.