There's too much choice in music and this is A Bad Thing, especially for guitarists. Too many types of amp, too many guitar manufacturers, too many choices of effects pedals, too many controls on amps, too many useless fucking gadgets that you just don't fucking need.

"But Frank", I hear you cry, "surely choice is a good thing?"

Well no it's fucking not and here's why.

1. Gadgets are the enemy of individuality.

Here's the truth about modern guitarists - they all sound the fucking same because they have learnt to play through high-gain amps. If I hear a Clapton guitar part or a Richard Thompson line or a Jeff Beck riff then I recognise the player instantly, as surely as I recognise the sound of Frank Sinatra's voice. Why? Because the tone comes from their fingers. Because they learned to play on shitty equipment and the only way to make it sound "nice" was to work like fuck on vibrato and phrasing and tone. If you learn to play on "good" amps with over the fucking top wig-out distortion then your playing will just blend in with every other Ibanez idiot who ever plugged into a Tube Screamer.

Solution: Learn to play with a CLEAN amp setting. Learn vibrato. Play the shittiest guitar through a terrible amp and make it sound as good as you can. Because when a player can make a crappy guitar sound good, that player will sound incredible on good equipment.

2. Gadgets are used to disguise bad musicianship.

Oh man, I can't think of a song, I'll just turn the distortion up full and wank myself off through a phaser.

Purr-lease. Stop being so fucking shit.

All you really need is a Fender Twin and a Telecaster. Effects are a nice icing on the cake - but if your cake is made of 90% dogshit then it's never going to taste good.

When someone asks you what kind of music you play, what do you tell them? I hate being asked that question and I've never found a standard two- or three-word answer that covers it. Here's a few really BAD answers:

• "Heavy metal"
• "Blues"

Suppose you asked Frank Zappa what kind of music he played, what do you suppose he'd say? Certainly not heavy metal or blues. If your music is so hopelessly trapped in a single genre that you can summarise it quickly and easily like that then you are doing something wrong. Or you're 14 years old. Which is pretty much the same thing.

Even worse, you may choose to say something like "speed metal" or "screamo".

Well newsflash motherfucker, those are not styles, those are names invented by advertising monkeys and PR men in suits who get jobs in record companies because they're too fucking talentless to play an instrument. Many self-proclaimed "musicians" seem to have swallowed this horseshit, mainly the ones who care more about their hairstyles than their lyrics and spend longer choosing an exfoliating skin product than they do choosing a guitar.

Cloverfield the hamster 2006 - 2009

It is with deep regret that we note the passing of Cloverfield the hamster who died in her sleep last night at the age of 3 years.

Cloverfield will be buried in the back garden tomorrow morning. Three days of national mourning will follow.

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It's good but could you add a guitar solo after the middle eight?

Do you ever stop and think, shit, why am I doing this? I do it a lot, drives chicks crazy. And it's sometimes useful to apply this philosophy to music as it raises some interesting questions about why we do what we do. Like why do we even have music? What purpose does it serve? You can't eat it, it doesn't keep you warm in winter and it's not good to rub your crotch against so that's the three primary evolutionary driving forces ruled out straight away. You can't look at it and say aha, this is a picture of a smiling nun with no eyebrows and you can't run your hands along it and conclude that it's a misshapen woman with a hole through her abdomen.

Needs more finger tapping and whammy bar divebombs

In short, modern music serves no practical purpose beyond evoking an emotional reaction and, well, just making us feel good for reasons that we don't fully understand and in a way that we can't fully explain, both as a personal experience and as a shared experience. It is utterly abstract and unless you're unbelievably pretentious, it doesn't represent anything.

So this all begs the question, where is music going wrong these days? I can't really speak with much authority on this as I gave up on Top of the Pops at the age of eleven. But I do know where guitarists are going wrong. So I'm going to rant about that for a while. Stop me if I start frothing at the mouth.

First off, here's a list of some guitarists I can't fucking stand to listen to: Eric Johnson, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Steve Vai, Brian May ... oh wait, did I mention your favourite guitarist in that list? If I didn't then email me and I'll add their names. Why don't I like these players? Because they are dreadful musicians. Yes, you are reading that right. Dreadful. Brilliant instrumentalists perhaps - but for the most part they're all dreadful songwriters who have disappeared up their musicianly arseholes and prefer to do a 20 minute guitar solo rather than write a decent fucking song.

Now I'm not saying we should all sell our strats and turn into X Factor contestants here. But for fuck's sake write a song, not a guitar solo. In fact try writing a song that doesn't have a guitar solo, that'd be nice once in a while maybe. Go really mad and write a song that doesn't have any guitar part in it at all, just for shits and giggles.