I’m not a musician but I have a couple of thoughts. First, I had to Google to figure out what a Classical Guitar even was. I’m still not entirely clear on how different they from the common modern acoustic ones are aside from the steel strings versus nylon/animal ones. This fact is going to be true of most people I think. That doesn’t bode well for it’s popularity.
Secondly, after listening to a bunch of clip on YouTube I found that the classical guitar samples all have a very twangy quality to them which is a result of the string type I think. That twangy quality is not something I enjoy and it’s not something you’ll see much of in any popular music.
Steel strung and nylon strung guitars are more different than you might think. You can’t really casually strum a classical guitar (you can but it sounds crap). Most people who pick up a guitar - electric or accoustic - will mostly be using it for accompanyment, some folkies use fingerpicking but most people will be strumming*. Music written for classical guitar is more like piano music than anything most rockers or folkies do.
I’m stretching strumming a bit to include the sort of think that Pete Townshend gets up to, or System of a Down.
Edit. I know flamenco players strum but they flail their fingers around, they don’t use picks.
Steel-string player here, acoustic and electric. To me, nylon strings sound subdued and lifeless. A good steel string acoustic sounds brighter and richer to me. An electric guitar can make so many varieties of sound compared to any acoustic instrument that to me it’s not even the same instrument.
I think my preferences were influenced early because the music that first got my attention featured steel string guitars, not classical guitars.
Yeah, it’s a different construction on the soundboard. A classical is engineered to reverberate so that individual notes have a long, mellow sustain. A flamenco is engineered to have that percussive, rhythmic sound. A steel string is set up to project the energy of all six strings strummed at once and balance between sustaining that sound and still being able to fulfill the function of rhythm - guitars are still considered part of the rhythm section. Vigorous strumming on a classical just overwhelms the top, and you get a very muddy sound - that’s why flamenco guitars (which look pretty much the same) are different. Single note playing on a steel-string requires a little more energy pumped into the string; hence, the pick. To play fingerstyle on a steel string requires incredibly strong nails or powerful, efficient strokes from nail-less fingers.
A classical is also much quieter than a steel-string acoustic. There are musicians who play a classical guitar in a different context - Willie Nelson is the first one who comes to mind, but by and large, a classical is used for classical music and jazz; not the most popular forms for the young aspiring guitarist.
Omniscient I’m not sure I would have described the sound of a classical as ‘twangy’, I’d have used that word for the steel string. To my ear, a classical sounds mellow unless it is played or recorded badly, when the sound becomes brittle. I’ll use the contrast between a clarinet and a saxophone - the classical has that mellowness of the clarinet, while the steel-string has the brashness of a sax. And just as there are more sax players in rock music, there are more steel string players in the styles that are most popular.
Classical music on a steel string is really hard to make pretty - jazz guitarist Johnny Smith is the only one who comes to mind who was able to pull it off.
Me too but a lot of the charm of electrics is the electronics - they do a lot of the work for you. The actions are low, string tensions are lighter, you barely have to fret the strings really to get a reasonable sound. In fact lots of raucous guitar noise passes for playing with an electric. You can almost get away with treating it like a percussion instrument - power chords for example. So they are a lot easier to play.
Try playing heavy metal on a classical guitar, even a really expensive classical guitar, and you soon see how much help cheesy guitarists like me are getting from pickups and amps.
Yes, depending on the settings an electric can be far more forgiving.
Without in anyway trying to be cute or condescending, the OP obviously comes from someone who hasn’t banged an open A chord on a Les Paul through a cranked Marshall stack. Seriously - it’s really that simple; the rush is so immediate and cool that it has instant appeal - compare that to appreciating the subtleties of a Segovia performance. One is the new Spiderman movie; the other is There Will Be Blood…
An electric guitar can jack straight into your fantasy center with very little effort.
I am at the wee baby steps stage of learning to play guitar. So is my boyfriend. I have a classical (3/4 size), he has an acoustic. I have exactly zero interest in learning how to play an electric guitar. I haven’t learned anything that’s strumming yet. Everything I’m doing is single string picking. Strumming is good for stuff like folks songs that you’re going to sing along to, but it’s the intricate single-note-at-a-time stuff that is the whole reason I wanted to learn in the first place.
I’ve tried to play his a couple of times but holding down the chords feels like pressing my fingers against razor blades. I like my nylon strings better. They’re not as hurty.
There is another aspect to nylon stringed instruments, if you are going to really play classical it about doubles the work to actually learn. When playing electric you have to learn to fret with (normally) your left hand and pick with your right hand. Learning how to pick isn’t easy but it is no where near as hard as learning proper finger picking.
Paco, the guy on the left, is a hell of a Flamenco guitarist. Watch his right hand.
I can teach someone a simple electric riff in about 5 minutes. With a little practice they can bang out ‘Smoke on the Water’ and impress their girlfriend (or boyfriend). If I were to teach them one of the Etudes by Sor it would take a lot longer. I knew one classical teacher who would start people off with one of the Sor Etudes. Surprisingly, he kept a lot of students.
Then there is the whole banging out a chord through a cranked amp aspect which Wordman brings up. Making your house shake by hitting a chord is quite a nice feeling. In fact I’m gonna go piss off my cats right now. They don’t like it when I record, too much noise
The classical guitar repertoire is not very popular, with good reason, IMO. Tarrega and Sor are not exactly in the same class as Mozart or Chopin. A lot of classical guitar players use the instrument to play lute music, which does have first-class composers, or music adapted from compositions for other instruments (including guitar predecessors like the vihuela). Were it not for this, I’m not sure the classical guitar would get much attention at all.
I took classical guitar lessons for a while, and thought it was a lot more fun to play than a steel-string guitar. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t kick ass.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the fact that classical guitars have much wider necks/string spacing than steel string guitars. This is the result of the fact that the classical guitar is meant to be played with the fingers (wider string spacing accommodates the plucking fingers) while steel string guitars are meant to be played in a completely different manner - with a pick.
Since I’m primarily a bass player, I can use the bass to illustrate this idea in more dramatic fashion, since the string spacing is much wider than even a classical guitar’s. The bass is clearly designed with finger plucking in mind, one note at a time. The very wide string spacing allows this technique, giving the player enough space to “dig in” (get a lot of finger into each plucked note) while avoiding inadvertent plucking of adjacent strings.
Using a pick is relatively uncommon on the bass. While there are exceptions (Paul McCartney being a good example), the pick is mostly used by bassists who typically play a single note very quickly as is common in a lot of heavy metal, where the bass line is often very fast but not particularly complex. The bass player sits on one note at a time, going buddabuddabuddabuddabuddabudda…, and that’s a lot easier to do with a pick than with the fingers.
But bassists who play more complex parts that require a lot of movement from string to string — for example, Geddy Lee (Rush) or Steve Harris (Iron Maiden) — almost universally play fingerstyle, and use different fingers to pluck different notes. I’ve attempted to play Rush and Iron Maiden bass lines with a pick, and it quickly became an exercise in frustration because it’s nearly impossible to jump from string to string to string quickly enough due to the distance between the strings. But it’s easy to do it fingerstyle.
Back to the classical guitar, it’s also worth noting another difference relative to the “coolness factor”: it’s much “cooler” to play standing than to play seated, and the classical guitar is really intended to be played seated. This is easily proven by the fact that your standard classical guitar does not have strap pins. Due to the way a classical guitar is built, installing strap pins would compromise the physical integrity of the instrument. Oh, there are straps available for classical guitars that allow you to play standing up, but they resemble a saxophone strap that you wear around your neck. The strap goes under the body of the guitar and then back up to hook onto the bottom lip of the sound hole. Sure, you can play standing up with this strap, but don’t let go of the guitar — you’ll drop it.
