“Guitar thinking” and “Genre thinking” among an Online Community of Guitarists

Researchers and performers of popular music have long intuited that popular music’s organizational features are linked to the physical-tonal properties of the electric guitar. But despite emerging research, Doll’s (2018) criticism still stands: current evidence is either too broad or too specific to support generalizations about how fretboard affordances shaped popular music’s development. Popular-music corpus studies offer remarkable explanatory power in clarifying stylistic trends and paradigms, but research thus far has focused on structural and perceptual aspects of the music rather than kinaesthetic ones that address aspects of guitar performance. In this article I employ statistical methods of corpus analysis to explore how popular-music guitarists engage in ‘guitar thinking’ (De Souza 2021) and ‘genre thinking’ (Johnson 2018)—that is, I use a database generated by an online community of guitarists to capture basic paradigms on how guitarists move about the fretboard, and then explore how those movements might clarify how these guitarists conceptualize genre through these physical gestures.