Some have said this.

Some fail to see how the guitar leapfrogged over the backs of other instruments that came before it.

Before Andrés Segovia started playing transcriptions of the Bach cello suites, the guitar was not seen as a legitimate instrument by the mainstream.

(Up until the mid-20th century, "mainstream" meant concert music or classical music.)

(Up until the early 21st century, we had a "mainstream".)

People hear me play Bach suites and then comment on my version of that "guitar piece". Really.

The guitar was a peasant's instrument, played only at pubs or on farms and used only for folk music. It never showed up in a concert hall outside of Spain.

The guitar doesn't get very loud.  The guitar has frets to show you where the notes are, and also tune them for you.

Concert society scoffed at the guitar for its lack of grace and left it to the masses, but when Segovia started getting famous in the 1920s things started changing.

Enterprising guitarists played mostly transcriptions of classical pieces written for other instruments, like the Bach cello suites, and this inspired modern composers like Villa Lobos and Rodrigo to build the guitar rep with their own compositions.

People started getting excited about it, and with the advent of amps and guitar pioneers in blues, jazz and rock, things really took off.

The rest is history, and now the guitar and its devotees rule the music business.  Interestingly, they bitch now that they're getting overshadowed by nerds with computers.

I love the guitar as much as you do (really, I do!)

I like playing it but its inherent limitations present some problems. And the reliance on frets and amps has taken a toll on touch and technique. 

A lot of us think that tone is something we can dial up in the gear that we buy.  It's not.  You still have to learn how to play the thing. 

Frets are the original auto-tune.

I don't mean that guitars are bad.  I'm just saying that by relying on our frets, on our knobs, on our synths and drum machines – using tools to make music production easier – we try to buy our way out of the very journey we set out on.

We still have to connect with the physical sound.

Ask any drummer or wind player or string player. They work their whole lives to get closer to their sound, molding their very bodies to it.

I dig the cello. It's not as easy to play as a guitar. Of course, some things work better on guitar, but easier isn't necessarily better. Playing a classical instrument forces you to learn tone, phrasing and how to play in tune.

You'll have to connect with the sound more intimately than you ever could on a guitar, even an amplified one. And if you can groove, better still :)

If people say that I play cello like a guitar, fine.

I'm just mirroring what began a hundred years ago when Segovia propelled himself to fame playing the cello suites: I'm taking the dominant sound of the day (which right now is guitar music) and adapting it to my instrument.

It's my attempt to steal back some of the relevance the cello lost as it remained stuck in the classical scene.

Classical music sounds dated and bourgie now.  People forgot how much fun you can have on a cello. The guitar scored hit after hit, and after a while the cello was left on the sidelines, only used to "warm up" the track.

I play cello, but I'm a songwriter. I can do both.  And I'm having too much fun to care what anybody thinks.