> Sometimes one of those modifications invents a new instrument that captures the heart of millions

Absolutely — the pedal steel is the obvious example. The entire notion of the upward country pedal steel guitar bend is actually a side-effect of the continuous behaviour of a pitch shifting mechanism that the original designer did not design it for, which has now evolved to create an entire genre.

Disagree. It's not a one-way trip, where the musician has inspiration, and the musical instrument is the vehicle. For most musicians, the musical instrument is itself a source of inspiration. That can be either expansive (look what this thing can do! wow!) or constraining (i guess i have only one option).

This is one reason why some musicians (guitarists cough) collect multiple instruments. A telecaster makes you play differently than a les paul.

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Players do usually draw a line, individually. Because you have to develop technique and composition around these things and that has time/flexibility/practicality costs in various ways.

For example it's not difficult to see with this thing how you can end up with arrangements that can only be played on this one modified instrument (which means as a gigging musician you probably need two of them!)

But also you have to spend the time developing the technique to use this thing, which might have impacts on your technique elsewhere.

The Duesenberg Multibender is a great example of this. It's a configurable bridge where separate levers can be configured to bend (usually bend up but with a hefty return spring they can be made to bend down) individual strings by differing amounts, which lets you can achieve voicings that sound like pedal steel instruments. (It's really cool.)

So that is possibly good if you are a pedal steel player but you want a portable lap instrument that has some of those bends for the only couple of pieces where they are needed, or you are a guitarist who has to play a couple of pieces that have pedal-steel bends in them and you don't want to buy a pedal steel.

But it has a cost: configuring the multibender takes time and the levers can only be used with the intervals they were configured for — indeed, if you configure the levers to bend strings down, you are possibly stuck in a single tuning.

It also changes the way musicians play; it's clear that compositions get written around the multibender. So it is, at that point, a somewhat different instrument to learn to really use, which takes time.

There are other ways to approximate some of the bends these levers can do — you can bend the string behind the bar with your finger, you can combine that with sliding the bar up a fret for a shifted pair of notes that match the typical bends (albeit without easy access to unshifted strings), or you can slant the bar, which has its own classic tone. These also need learning, and they have their own limitations (there's kind of only one lap steel capo that can survive string bends and return to tuning)

So for a player, the decision to use, or not use, these extra facilities is a meaningful decision in terms of how they want to sound, how much time they want to spend learning one technique over another, whether they want to compose around those facilities, etc.

(FWIW I would love one and could build a lap steel around one, but I have deliberately chosen to focus my learning attention and playing style on other techniques first)

It's pretty much the same with guitars — a lot of players decide early on that they are going to be fixed-bridge players or whammy bar players. They become quite different instrumentalists as a result.

> Isn't music better for the fact that every artist can draw their own line?

I am not at all making the argument that it isn't.

Rather I am trying to get at the idea that the "revolutionises the guitar" coverage framing that accompanies developments like this usually elides questions about musicality.

> Counterargument: does someone play the Linnstrument? Do they make good music with it?

I have never actually heard such a player myself.

No, I can't see how. I'm very glad that Yuja Wang stuck to piano instead of creating some ridiculous new device. Techniques would never develop over time if every musician had to start completely from scratch on a brand new instrument.

Right. It's kind of a deeply personal thing. But that is exactly why the commonplace media/marketing framing about the way these things "revolutionise the guitar" is so often misplaced.

Not GP, but if you're looking for a list that skews towards rock, some googling found this:

https://www.musicindustryhowto.com/steel-guitar-songs/

This is not a bad analogy.