> I seem to have unwittingly upset Charles MacFarlane. I apologise Charles for any distress I may have caused you.

Of course you haven't upset me, so there was no need to apologise whether for real or in jest. I just disagree with you, that's all. As I say, I'm not really an electric player, though I do have an under-the-bridge pick-up on my accoustic which I sometimes plug-in and play with.

To remind ourselves of your original quote:

> So electric players, by and large - like to use blocked off notes and chords where they can control and form the sustain with their fingers.

I don't get the impression that electric players have a aural preference or otherwise for open or stopped notes, or open or standard tunings. I think most stick to standard because that's how they learnt and it requires a conscious effort of will to learn something different. That said, some players, mostly those who also played accoustic, such as John Martyn and Stephen Stills, did experiment with such alternative tunings.

>But can you really not see that Hank Marvin, Andy Summers, Carlos Santana - achieve their guitar sound by manipulation rather than merely letting the open guitar strings ring?

You yourself quoted John Williams' point that electric guitar is all about sustain! The relevance of his point here is that without the very long sustain that is acheivable with electric, you'd have little to manipulate, it would be much like playing an accoustic guitar. The sustain has been available for longer than the, predominantly electronic, wizardry that allows the manipulation of which you speak - the latter is mostly a fairly new thing, dating from as recently as the 60s, made possible by the advent of cheap electronics - and my guess is that without that sustain, most of the wizardry would never have been invented, because there would have been little point to it.

50s groups like The Shadows based their sound around Hank Marvin's wonderfully clean playing in numbers like Wonderful Land and The Quartermaster's Stores, though there is also a good example of the 'choppy' chord style of playing in Apache. And by the way they also used accoustic guitars in their numbers. Only later by the end of the 60s and start of the 70s do you start to hear radical manipulation, for example the earliest use of a fuzzed sound that I can recall was on Think For Yourself on The Beatles' Rubber Soul album.

So I think to equate electric playing with manipulation is to miss a fundamental point. Playing any instrument is primarily all about musicality. Particularly, to be a good electric player, you first have to be a clean player, because the guitar will pick up every fumble you make, whereas with an accoustic, you can get away with the odd dead note. Then, just as with any instrument, you have to be able to phrase your playing expressively, etc, etc - in other words, to play musically. No amount of electronic gadgetry can substitute for that. I don't deny that an important part of modern electric playing is learning to use the electronics, but it's definitely of distantly secondary importance to learning to play the basic instrument in a musical fashion.

> Perhaps you need to give Hendrix's version of Red House a re-listen.

I can just about remember it, but it's not one of the Hendrix tracks I kept when throwing out my vinyls. Perhaps you need to re-listen to All Along The Watchtower? Or Samba Pa Ti? There's what you'd call manipulation in both of these, but it's of secondary importance to the basic musicality of the playing.