Who plays music?

[BengalsRocker]

(05-28-2021, 10:46 PM)MileHighGrowler Wrote: I was completely self-taught and while I was pretty decent and spent time in bands, I ended up going back a few years ago and diving into re-learning things and trying to get to the next level.  The online resources have been great, and there are a lot of guys I watch regularly just for inspiration, new ideas or things I can use to improve. 

I'm pretty much self taught.  Early lessons did not help me very much.  That Mel Bay approach to guitar was not appealing as a young player.

I had a teacher once give me some basic scale charts and later on I worked on some of those.

At that point I had been playing for a couple of years picking up chords and such from other guitar players.

After playing in bands for years, I finally started taking lessons from a legit highly talented player.

He asked me to show him how much I knew how to play.

Amazingly enough there was quite a lot I had already known, but didn't know what it was called or how it related in music theory.

I learned some things but I got lazy, didn't want to pay for lessons anymore, and eventually quit.

Playing in bands and being able to do most typical things with little effort makes it too easy to be complacent.

It's when I watch someone fingerpick, use a slide(I suck at it), or other techniques that I lack at that make me want to get better.

Learning different scales and approaches to phrasing is appealing as well.

I recently was playing in a band with an excellent sax player and his approach to solos was much different than mine.

The realization from watching him play and how the audience reacted was his hold out notes and anticipation spacing.

It's not all about blazing solos and technical gymnastics.

With Youtube you see a ton of great technical guitarists that play like robots and have little to no feel in their leads.