Would he still play Stratocasters and burn them on stage or would he be live-looping on a Neural DSP Quad Cortex, blending trap beats with fuzzed-out octave riffs? Would his tone still come from a cranked Marshall, or from a DAW preset called "Electric Voodoo Child v7"? Would he be the GOAT of TikTok guitar or too weird to go viral? Would he collab with Billie Eilish? JPEGMAFIA? Yungblud? Or still be a lone wolf? Would the raw chaos of his sound even survive today's polished algorithms and taste-policing comment sections? Would Gen Z even care? Or would he be buried under the content avalanche, seen as "just another guy who plays guitar"? Drop your hottest takes.

We spend years chasing "the perfect tone". We debate pickups, wood, cables, string gauges, vintage vs. modern, analog vs. digital. But here's a question: What if tone is just a smokescreen for insecurity? What if it’s easier to tweak your EQ for 4 hours than to write 4 bars of music that actually matter? What if most tone debates are just musicians avoiding the terrifying truth that no one cares how good your tone is if you have nothing worth saying. We worship tone gods who barely write. We buy gear to sound like players who weren’t chasing tone, they were chasing meaning. Tone is real. But maybe tone obsession is just creative procrastination. So I’ll ask again: What if tone doesn’t matter?

You didn’t pick up a guitar because it was cute. You picked it up because nothing else made sense. Because you needed a weapon. Because screaming wasn’t loud enough. Now you pick it up to chase algorithms. You rehearse your lighting before your riffs. You post one clean take and delete the rest Not because they sucked, but because your face looked weird. Used to be: you played because you had to. Now? You play because you think you should. It used to be about danger, about mess, about something raw and half-wrong. Now it’s soft filters and “vibe.” You used to bleed into the fretboard. Now you color-match your pedalboard to your bedroom. This isn’t bitterness. This is mourning. The guitar isn’t dead. But it sure as hell doesn’t smell like sweat anymore.