A guitar is a very versatile instrument. It lends itself to any genre of music. Guitars also come in many varieties, as do guitar players. These guitar players may play their guitars in different ways to get different sounds for different reasons, but something about them all is the same. When these guitarists play guitars, they all push their chins out.
It’s called guitar chin (aka gitchin, the gitch) and it will afflict anyone who straps on a six-string shred stick. Some may be better at fighting the gitch than others, but they will eventually succumb. Watch closely the next time you see someone play a really complicated part and you will see their mandible creeping forward. Men, women, children…it’s all the same.
Now that you know what is happening, it’s time to ask why. Surely, it’s just a sign of concentration, right? That explains why everyone’s chins pop out when they get to the hard bits; but, by that reasoning, shouldn’t a more seasoned player stick his/her chin out less?
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Guitar greats from Jimmy Page to Jimi Hendrix have all been caught in photos or on film, gitchin out. Also, if gitchin is a sign of concentration, why don’t we do it in other contexts? I’m not rockin’ a gitch while I write this. Players on a basketball court aren’t running jaw first.
Maybe guitar players are just biting their lower lips to make them feel the music more. There are people out there who enjoy being bitten for freaky-deeky reasons, or because experiencing pain makes them feel more alive, but that can’t account for everyone. For the rest of us, lip-biting during a song is usually kept to a minimum. Maybe we let it out after an epic solo, but we generally feel the music through the vibration of the sound waves themselves and not through a pain in our lips.
While it may not be the result of pain, Gitchin could be a way of showing how tough a guitar player is. The guitar chin face, with its jutting chin, furrowed brow and squinty eyes, could be viewed as a slightly aggressive face. That would seem to support this theory, but the reasoning unravels when we remember that singers, not guitar players, are the drama queens in any band. If someone is starting fights, it’s undoubtedly the singer. Besides, guitarists don’t want to punch people; it could mess up their picking hand.
If it’s not physical, perhaps it is a matter of history. Guitar playing is passed down from teacher to student. That teacher may be an actual guitar teacher or just a guitar hero whose licks you try to copy, but everyone learns from someone. Those teachers themselves learned from someone else before them and so on and so forth. Each one studied the moves of his predecessor, mimicking the techniques and styles on their own road to finding their sound. If that were the case, then we should be able to trace back to the very first guitar player and find a gitchin. Some claim that an Italian named Gaetano Vinaccia invented the modern acoustic guitar, but after months of exhaustive research, I was unable to locate any photos of him playing the guitar, let alone showing his gitchin. However, he does have a rather prominent beard in some of the photos I found. While that may be enticing evidence, it is still not enough to serve as proof.
As Winston Churchill once said, “[Gitchin] is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Psychology, science, the code of the street and history all fail to explain why the gitchin exists. Is the gitch a leftover of evolution from a time when we held strings made of animal guts between our teeth and toes to pluck away at while we killed time between hunting and gathering? The cave paintings depicting this haven’t been found yet, so we just don’t know.
Seeing the guitar chin often makes us feel better as it means someone is playing music. Perhaps then, gitchin is the answer to all that ails us. That’s how it worked in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, anyway, and that might be proof enough for me.
-Bocephus Chigger
bocephus@submergemag.com
Comments