the synthesiser market is something else. it's tech, but brand new products often use old tech, and they do that on purpose. they would have looked at you funny in the 1980s if you had tried that back then.
@lore Apart from enthusiast hardware, it's very underwhelming. The last cool synth thing I saw was the pad that Muse used in Madness. Aside from that pad thing, nothing really significant in big brand innovations.
Meanwhile enthusiasts made kits to recreate the legendary synths and much more. It just seems like a stagnant market in many ways. MIDI has seemingly changed more than synthesizers have.
@lore Excluding for the Floyd Rose Locking System and some other one that people don't care about. Active pickups were a big development that enabled essentially all guitars to sound the same. That might seem dumb but it allows an Audio Engineer to quickly and reliably set up a new guitar.
There has been a lot of work on guitars over the years. At the end of the day it's a stringed instrument and there's always something wrong with it. Metal and wood have different expansion points and Steel rusts. The knife edge bridge was introduced around 70 and I've performed with one of those. A super strat from 40 years later performs better and more reliably.
If you can't tell, guitars would have to be included with Keyboards. Small changes make a big difference. I've run soundboards for performances. I think I had 48 channels on one, 12 channels on another...knobs and sliders. Having to manage Analog and Digital instruments during a performance is really fun. By fun I mean having to cut volume on the speakers near the bass guitar so it wasn't picking up the vibrations from the other instruments and managing the intricacies of each instrument while maintaining sound quality for recording. Two recording systems running at the same time along with around 24 different microphones.
I should probably start putting some of this stuff down so I can use it in my CV. I've done a fair amount of audio work in years. It's just that there were systems from the 70s, 80s and 90s that were being used. Needless to say, there were two ABC fire extinguishers within reach with a shutdown procedure in case of a fire.
The only fires were due to an old Roland amp, a keyboard that was destroyed and the thing that a Hammond B3 uses. None of those were my problem.
@AmpBenzScientist with the exception of some experimental instruments, it resembles the general market for musical instruments. nothing wild has happened with electric guitars since the 1950s.
> A market is mature when it has reached a state of equilibrium. A market is considered to be in a state of equilibrium when there is an absence of significant growth or a lack of innovation.