At 15, Chapman Welch was living a musical double life, practicing classical music while playing electric guitar for pay in bars. Those two worlds met Oct. 8-9 at the Adventurous Electric Guitar Festival, which brought guitarists, composers, technologists and students to Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music for two days of concerts, talks and workshops before closing at Dan Electro’s Guitar Bar in the Heights.
Welch, lecturer in music and electroacoustic music specialist at the Shepherd School, co-founded the festival with composer and guitarist Christopher Trapani, assistant professor of experimental music and digital media at Louisiana State University.
“Every year, a consortium of schools from Texas and Louisiana holds a student event, and as the students gather, so do the professors,” Welch said. “We started talking about a guitar festival, and because I have a lot of contacts in the guitar community, we said, ‘Let’s do an adventurous electric guitar festival.’”
LSU hosted the inaugural edition in March 2025. This year, every lecture and concert took place in Houston with support from Rice’s Creative Ventures Fund and Rice Electroacoustic Music Labs, known as REMLABS.
Erik Broess, assistant professor of musicology, opened the festival with a keynote address on the instrument’s reputation. Broess, who studies the culture of guitar tone and gear, grew up idolizing Peter Frampton, Iron Maiden and Rush, and he admitted he once felt like an outsider at a festival with “adventurous” in its name.
“Six strings on an electric guitar serve as the basis for near-infinite variation and creative reinvention,” Broess said in his keynote. “Yet the guitar is also deeply haunted by its past. Outside festivals like this one, the guitar still symbolizes 1960s and 1970s classic rock culture for many people.”
Broess traced how the instrument got its reputation. A symbol of teenage rebellion in the 1950s, Broess said the electric guitar began a long corporate slide in 1965 when CBS bought Fender for $13 million. Vintage guitars once coveted by baby boomers now sell for more than $500,000, and by the 1990s, the instrument had become background music for car and beer commercials. In the 2023 film “Barbie,” a crowd of Kens serenades uninterested Barbies with acoustic guitars around a campfire.
“No longer an object of rebellious youth culture or a proud symbol of Americana, the guitar is perhaps now most associated with mediocre men, who occupy an increasingly problematic place in U.S. popular culture,” Broess said.
He also sees signs of a turn. Rolling Stone’s 2023 ranking of the greatest guitarists added nearly 50 women to a list that had included two in 2003, and it favored risk-takers over technicians. His case study, the Quebec duo Angine de Poitrine, found a viral audience in February 2026 through a performance video on Seattle radio station KEXP’s YouTube channel. Masked in papier-mache and dressed in polka dots, the band’s guitarist plays a custom double-neck guitar and bass with twice the usual number of frets, composing 24-tone melodies while working loop pedals with his bare feet.
“After years of pontification over the guitar’s future, the instrument sounds new,” Broess said. “I wonder whether it’s on its way to being cool again.”
The opening concert that followed supplied plenty of evidence. Sandy Ewen, who draws sound from the guitar with physical objects and no effects beyond a pan pedal, shared the bill with LSU’s DOUBLEMONO, which pairs electric guitar with live electronics, and Houston guitarist Kelly Doyle. Day 2 brought a panel on artificial intelligence and music, talks on a collaborative music production app and on finding interesting sounds on a budget and a session with Peter McCulloch of Eventide on the engineering behind guitar effects. Students from the Shepherd School and Rice took part on both days, performing on the opening program and joining Friday’s panels alongside visiting artists.
Welch’s own route to the electric guitar ran through his family.
“My brother is about 18 years older than me, and he’s a musician who had great success, including on Billboard,” Welch said. “I grew up seeing that, so alongside classical music, I had another world of practicing electric guitar.”
The guitar world kept its hold. Welch toured with his band Law of Nature, recorded with Allman Brothers producer Johnny Sandlin and won the 2019 Texas Flatpicking Championship. He calls the electric guitar an instrument of inclusivity, open to anyone who wants to play it, in whatever way they want to play it.
“In classical music, you find your unique voice through interpretation. With the electric guitar, you find it through exploration,” Welch said. “I want people to take away that exploration, in all its forms, is a beautiful thing to promote and encourage.”
The festival’s two nights traced his career. Thursday’s opening concert, where Welch performed with Houston bassist Thomas Helton, took place in the Shepherd School’s home, Alice Pratt Brown Hall. Friday’s finale was in a bar.
“I had these two divergent paths, and now they’ve come back together,” Welch said.