Also, super-lightweight electric single strings are
less damaging to pre-existing bad cartilage in
arthritic fingers, less likely to aggravate existing
carpal-tunnel or other conditions, etc. Electric instruments are an all-around god-send for people with hand problems due to the person's age or whatever. That is, for practicing at home anyway. The disadvantage comes with lugging around a bunch of gear if you need to take your gear to someplace else to play... although right now I have just as much difficulty carting around an
acoustic instrument's heavy case + instrument, as I do my electric gear... wheeled/roller stuff helps.
And
electric instruments help to
stave off MAS (Mandolin Acquisition Syndrome), because if you want a
new sound, just
turn some knobs (or, I guess you could add some pedals although I haven't got that far with electric music yet) and use a different sound-modeling setting... thinking specificially of my cheap Roland Micro Cube amplifier which I've had tons of fun with (I guess there are other types of acoustic-emulators,
pedals or something,
but I haven't tried them) ... the Roland 'COSM' thing lets me dial in a quasi-"Acoustic" sound for when I want a
sweet sound, or on occasions when I want something with some edge/distortion I can dial in one of the rock-type sounds just for fun for a few minutes - fun for playing bagpipe tunes although I probably wouldn't do so publicly
- then I go back to the sweeter sound.
As others have mentioned, the
headphone/silent option is particularly nice,
I do nearly all my practicing through headphones and I can make whatever horrible racket
I want when learning tunes, for as
many hours as I want,
without disturbing anyone.
But - here's the downside - you'd probably
also (eventually) need an acoustic instrument for certain types of performances, as someone pointed out there is still a lot of non-acceptance of electric instruments (like in jams, Irish sessions etc), which I find really really weird considering that electric instruments have been around since the
1930s (my dad had a 1930s electric Rickenbacker lap steel, it
looked like this but without the red knob) and popular since the 1950s (the Sears mail-order catalog had solid-body electric guitars in the 1950s, see
Danelectro info and
Harmony catalog info) ... although I personally know of musicians who still can't seem to get past the electric-instrument-stereotype of y'know some pharmaceutical-enhanced 'degenerate' rock-n-roller
or whatever, in fact that's how *I* thought for a long time, but I got over it.
Sometimes I think musicians stubbornly act against their own best interests when it comes to bias towards/against certain types of instruments,
if their decisions as to what they like/accept are based purely on
principle rather than
practicality/playability.
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