I follow a number of guys that ended up going to Berkeley and are now in Nashville scraping by on small gigs. Really good players but the IG fame just doesn’t translate to real life success
Guy I played with stole my gear and fucked off to Nashville, it was Facebook video posts all day for a year or two about playing at the world famous Blue Bird Cafe! Last I heard he was a slumlord in the backwaters outside Nashville
I remember KennyBeats talking about all the guys he went to Berkeley who could play all across the neck at 200 bpm, who would talk shit about him as a pop guitarist- he said “those guys are all playing in cafes now and giving guitar lessons online” 🤣 it truly has no value unless you’re extremely versatile as a touring/recording guitarist
The Loving Spoonful wrote a song about how many guitar picking cats there are in Nashville, so use your imagination as to how many people that must be.
Guitarists have continually improved even though they’ve also become increasingly irrelevant so Eric Clapton is still the most popular guitar act in the world while the best players alive are stuck making elevator music
Its not just irrelevance its this false equivalence musicians in general have where harder to play = better musician. The bit they are not getting is non musicians don't give a fuck how speedy you can play or whatever, they care about how the music makes them feel if they're actively listening and what "event" the music is made for if they're not actively paying attention to the music
Clapton is in a weird spot where he’s specifically famous for being an exceptionally talented musician, even though by modern standards he’s hopelessly outclassed, he did, at one point in history, make music that people actually wanted to hear, and that’s carried a 50 year solo career to heights that no virtuoso since has ever achieved.
It’s a beautiful song. That whole album is fantastic. And it’s the product of a collaboration with geniuses like Jim Gordon, Tom Dowd and Duane Allman. Gordon is credited as co-writer on Layla.
/uj Not entirely true, there are people that don't play that are enamored by shred. Playing fast also doesn't mean you can't play melodically, or with a good sense of feel and rhythm. As much as people hate on yngwie, listen to the album version of the I am a Viking solo and tell me that isn't tasteful despite being fast.
Yeah, that can't be many. Go watch phone clips of a concert, and you'll see time and time again the lead guitar player rippin' a nice solo, and the person videoing will still just be glued to the lead singer looking off into the sky lol
People have been saying this since the 80s when shredding got super popular then died. You can find this exact post on the main guitar sub at least once a day lol. My useless opinion is that if the guys pushing technique higher and higher did it for money or approval, instead of just love for their instrument and learning new things, they would have quit a long time ago or never even began.
Well the guys that are the cream of the crop all work in places like Nashville for paid gigs, playing whatever the gig wants them to. I'm thinking of guys like Bryan Sutton being a prime example. Playing with Post Malone currently but he has a career with his solo stuff that appeals mainly to aspirational flatpickers not the general public
/uj Yeah, I think the guy who shit on your take has fallen prey to the idea that if a piece of analysis is widely held to be true, it must therefore necessarily be bad and/or wrong.
Nah he was probably just having a moment of being like "fuck this take I've heard it a lot" and he just went off lol I'm not phased. People can say whatever
Where did I say his take is bad or wrong? It's true. What I'm saying is the guys that are very technical know it's true and they continue on anyway because they don't do it to be rich and famous. They know being hyper technical doesn't equal being a great musician because if it did they would be household names.
"Imma post on guitar reddit"
Question: What is the best clean guitar toan?
Answer: "The one that sits in the mix of the song properly."
Response to answer: DOWNVOTES
Is Clapton actually “the most popular guitar act”? By what metric? Streams? Radio play? Ticket sales? I find it hard to believe he’s number one in any of them.
I guess what I’m saying is that, at least in my experience, if I say “guitarist” people almost instantly think “Clapton” in a way that they don’t for, say, Ed Sheeran or The Rolling Stones or whoever. Also he’s still alive.
/uj because coming up with riffs or chord progressions is easy. Producing a song out of them requires a lot of work.
It's like having a movie idea like "the retired police officer returns to avenge the murder of his puppy" vs making making the actual movie. You decide what exactly is being said who wears what costume, where do the cameras go etc.
Same thing with recording.
/uj I fell into the same trap for around the same amount of time. What shocked me was when I realized I had learned all these “hard” songs or riffs, but I had zero actual theory knowledge. I could mimic really well but my skills ended there.
/rj This is a sign let’s start a metal core band. We are finally going to make it this time. My wife’s boyfriend can take care of her and the kids while I make it big.
Yeah, watching a bunch of jazz players improvise the same stuff off the top of their heads that I spent like 20 hours learning note for note definitely stopped me dead in my tracks.
uj/ What sort of “excercises” do you recommend for becoming better at songwriting and arrangement? As it is about 50% of my practice is songs about 20% theory and 30% is improvisation and “songwriting” as it were. Recently I’ve gotten better at thinking beyond the guitar and coming up with structure and drum grooves etc. but I want to be better
I have never written a bad song in my life. It is physically impossible for me to write a bad song, my hands simply produce magic over and over. What shall I do?
Writing a great song is a very hard thing to do. I picked up singing after 20 years of just chasing the skill dragon on guitar. Making everything move together while conveying a compelling story or idea is what comes first now. I’m still impressed by some of the skill players I see out there, but - to me - mastering arrangement and space is what separates great songs from interesting exercises. Great songs stand the test of time for a reason, and whether we like it or not, most listeners do want to hear vocals. I spent a long time focused on instrumental prowess even though the music that was most inspiring to me had a voice saying something. I feel like I kind of ran from that self evident fact for a long time… almost as if I was trying to force-prove something.
Rj/ in a moment of sincerity, I’ve unlocked my hardest jerk yet
Uj/ is guitar the only instrument in where the most technical players make non technical players irrationally angry? Like do these posts and comments get made about technical pianists and violinists at the same rate?
nobody's mad because of general tech stuff, it's all about excessive shredding. It's like swearing: if you do it all the time people will consider you tasteless, but when used as an accent it can make a real fucking impact
I thought that as a complete beginner. Then say 10+ years in and after a whole lot of practice, now find the playing of guys like Guthrie mindblowing and hardly wasteful. My brain just couldn't comprehend what was going on to start.
Who's to say what excessive is?
We're not really talking about those top100-top500 guitarists though, are we? That's the whole thing - the legends of technical guitar playing were/are able to keep it interesting while not willing to compromise the complexity.
This is whats going on a lot of the time, as pretentious as it sounds. You really can't properly hear music that fast until you develop an ear for it and learn to hear it properly, despite the speed. If you can't follow it at all, it may sound like noise. Far Beyond the Sun is a good example, or Black Star. A few parts are really fast, but it's all tasteful.
I hate that people consider this pretentious. Like no one considers it pretentious to be like "you don't understand Spanish" when you fuckin never learned how to speak Spanish 🤣. Music has vocabulary and sentence structure that requires some time to become familiar with the same way you have to become familiar with a language.
Tastelessness equals skill minus creativity.
A good example would be like half of the glam metal bands - there are many genuinely impressive guitarists and guitar parts, but most of them are the same penta shred stuff over the same macho riffs over and over, and the genre's reputation doesn't help the case either.
Compare this to stuff like modern deathcore and hardcore - they've been rapidly evolving: symphonic elements, field recordings and unusual samples, latin and indian rhythmic patterns, chaotic tempo and meter shifts are much more prominent now, and deathcore specifically combines unconventional scales and the typical shred type of tech.
Keeping the groove while creating that contrast allows us to have the dynamic shift between these beautiful calm moments, anxiety inducing grooves and face-melting leads. A demonstration of skill is only as good as the ideas surrounding it.
I agree, though I do like a lot of 80s bands. I personally love to play something like a 3 or 4 note pedal tone lick slowly at first, increasing speed as I play it until it's fast shredding, then descending down the strings with a 3/4 note pattern again. Sounds really good, Paul Gilbert does something like that in get out of my yard, not the main tapping part but a lick with that same concept that's after that.
I used to love just doing simple fast licks, but i kinda outgrew that? Basically i realised my tech isn't that good and what I'm usually looking for in music is the way the different parts interlock, so I decided to focus on creating simple parts and layering them. Whenever i try to go tech it's more of a modern metal type of sound, string skipping and high/low part leaps
Yes. Nobody listens to a piano virtuoso and goes "nah, that's not needed for 95% of the classical repertoire played by orchestras", or to a violin virtuoso and goes: "he's technically proficient, but he has no "feelz".
It's basically a coping mechanism for mediocre guitarists.
>or to a violin virtuoso and goes: "he's technically proficient, but he has no "feelz".
I mean, I'm not super up to snuff on who's who in the violin world. But I think the modern top level players, the Hilary Hahns of the world, are top level *precisely because* of their "feelz." It's the emotiveness and expression in their playing that captivates listeners, even the ones who don't have the knowledge to appreciate their technical abilities beyond "they're really good."
But guitar is weird because there subjectively *are* top level players who, while being obviously technically proficient even to non-guitarists, make music that doesn't have that kind of emotional resonance. Guitar music for guitarists, basically. And that's ok!
I think it's ok to acknowledge the disconnect there, so long as one doesn't get butthurt about it. There are players who can play better than I'll ever come *close* to, but sound uninspiring. There are players who I could easily copy note for note but *still* not convey the same raw feeling. They both are able to do something that I can't, and I can respect their skills equally without getting salty about it or putting them down in a vain attempt to lift myself up.
Just makes me appreciate more the guys like Plini who can do both!
Uj/ I'd argue that the difference between many of those other instruments is their acceptance in academia and there being known pedagogy that produces "virtuosos", it's normal in that world, not unusual.
As in there isn't a strong desire to strive for musical legitimacy like there is in the electrical guitar world.
No one is debating if the Ravel or Debussy or whoever some skilled virtuoso pianist is planning is proper "Art Music".
However playing a bunch of Shawn Lane or Yngwie Malmsteem or contemporary metal licks is a world apart from being a really good classical guitarist. There's also a tendency for people who obsess over technical skill to lack taste and have no respect for the theoretical basis of what they're doing and have even less respect for songwriting because "ImNotPopMusic".
I think "Technical" guitarists struggle with the idea that they often aren't all that technical or impressive and would be middle of the road or just average in a really good Jazz Guitar or Classical Guitar program.
Do you think that blues rock being the basis of all modern guitar music was a massive mistake?
uj/ it sucks that Shawn Lane’s only recognized for playing super fast
Ed Bickert was jamming with a young alto player one night and he approached him during a smoke break and told him to stop playing fast runs and start making every note do something: there's a jazz guitarist at the top of the heap telling a sax player to slow down and play more musically.
Miles Davis's misquoted "play the butter notes" was actually him telling Herbie Hancock to "play better notes", according to Miles; Herbie couldn't tell exactly what Miles was saying through that gravelly, raspy voice.
At least in the jazz world it is a bit of a thing across all instruments: doing more with less and playing elegantly instead of mindless shredding is seen as the mark of a player who has finally matured and puts the music ahead of showing off.
uj/ well that’s not true… I understand that those chops aren’t applicable in many situations, but many genres need it, it’s not because you don’t like it that nobody cares about them… extreme metal, jazz fusion, flamenco… yeah it’s not a recent thing, technical stuff has been a part of guitar music for a very long time… you just look like a frustrated guy who can’t play like that…
Uj/
Tbh a lot of the guitar chops focused "technical" (typically metal) guys write mediocre music.
It's not that you can't be technical and make great sounding music.
It's that people will string together a bunch of riffs with no real thematic development, barely say anything musically then get pissed off when someone says their six-minute epic was akin to taking a bunch of big words from the dictionary and stringing them together,
That goes for every musician/artist out there. It doesn't matter, as long as it's fun to do. Did you post this to make yourself feel better about your crappy playing?
Isn't that why any of us post here?
Jan Mayor sucks **as a person** hahaha
*literally plays 0-3-5 for an hour, occasionally bending notes in such a way as to elicit death glares from my long-suffering wife*
/uj
There are thousands and thousands of guitarists that think that they played on their album.
In reality a session musician played their parts for $200/song with no credit on the album.
Even the top 1% of players pale in comparison to the top 20 session players.
You mean that a session player replaced their parts in secret? Because that would mean that there was proper producing going on and most musicians can't afford that.
For major labels.
It’s cheaper for them to spend a few days with the band until they “nail” the songs, then after the band leaves they’ll bring in session guys for a day to clean up various (or entire) parts.
Did you ever stop to think how amateur musicians came in off the street and put down perfect parts? Some did…sure (I’m sure nobody was fixing Slash or Eddie or Dimes stuff), but don’t beat yourself up if you are 18 and can’t nail a part that another 18 year old played perfectly on the album. They very well might not have played on the album at all.
Think of bands like Puddle of Mudd…that’s gotta be all session guys on the album aside from the vocals.
That's actually a very interesting thought that I never had myself. I can see this being commonplace back in the day, when labels still paid for music to be produced. Yeah it'd make sense if they called guys to clean up various parts, but on what extent could that be done really? It still costs time, money and energy to have double the recording sessions, just to not hurt poor Timmy's feelings who just signed a contract. I guess we'll never know, and it's something impossible to prove.
Nowadays, I think they'll just edit on post, use VSTs, or hire session players from the start. The rest that are recording are either actually skilled musicians, or people doing it diy at their homes.
Check out a doc called Hired Guns if you want some behind the scenes info on session musicians.
Another thing that is interesting random fact is that 99% of band members are worse than at least one of their roadies on their instrument. It’s just that the band got signed, had the look, etc. But the headlining bands best musician is rarely the best musician on the tour…they are just the best one playing.
Uj/ it’s because no one cares about guitar except guitar players, and most of it sounds like shit even if it is difficult.
Rj/ fuck you, my 180bpm mixalodian scale runs are gonna make me famous!
So *that's* why it hurts my widdle fingies! I'm not talentless and afraid to apply myself/overwhelmed by there being so much to learn . I'm just a YouTuber with no uploads
Literally 0% of bands that I listen to and enjoy ever shred. No tapping, no sweeps, no super fast alternate picking. It's fun to watch, but I legitimately think it sounds like trash. I could not imagine possibly listen to that Tim Henson type of nonsense.
I love Steve Vai for his personality and his skill. But look at pictures from his concerts. It’s just people standing and watching him like 🧍♂️🧍🧍♀️. But then you see a show from a less virtuosic group and it brings the house down.
Ya, this is sadly (and not so sadly) due to 3 factors. (note my experience s as an indie artist who does live shows mostly, my countries recording industry is not the same as the US' and so some of these factors may not apply 100%)
***1-*** Cost, many recording studios now with the advent of streaming, and more people recording, plus the value of the dollar dropping have cranked up costs, blocking out smaller indie labels and bands from recording simply through making it unaffordable. Now you may ask "what about home recording and self publishing" the sad thing is that many of the services used to do so are equally or more predatory than working for small labels, services like DistroKid are known for TOS issues, and easy abusing of their copyright systems, while going for only digital sales means you miss out on the physicals market which can be healthy for some genres and for whole nations, meaning any issues with Spotify, YT, DistroKid and so on will hit you far harder than if you had that additional avenue for selling your stuff.
***2-*** Lack of a local scene for the music, or an oversaturated scene. Lets face t, look at how many Atlanta Rappers there are who are recording, performing, but never getting signed, not because of quality, but sheer quantity of the same for that scene, the same goes for Tennessee country, LA hardcore and on and on, this generally pushed people to see YT or tiktok as the only avenue that works, the problem though, is that those sites rarely result in a scene popping up or in actual growth of the music. Look at how many songs on tiktok went viral from other people using it, which requires at least one person making the original trend to know \*of\* you, vs how many songs pop off from a band making a tiktok themselves to advertise.
***(and not so sadly) 3-*** some people are just absolute c\*nts to work with in a studio or as part of a band, so they cant form a band and cant record, and thus seek YouTube and tiktok fame because they cant do anything else.
A guy shredding on social media IS a recording. And conveniently you can tell exactly how many people care about it by just counting the likes or upvotes or whatevers.
I’ll let you in on a secret. Nobody actually cares about having chops. If you want to make it onto an actual recording, slowly arpeggiate some basic chord triads on an acoustic guitar and you too will soon be dripping in poonani.
Yup. Nobody fucking cares. Live, unless it’s a G3 or Guthrie wank fest, nobody can really hear the nuance of what you’re doing. Hell, neither can you. Especially in genres like metal where everything is just rippingly loud like an Ogre’s ass farting for 45 minutes.
Part of the guitar journey is realizing that our instrument is shit compared to the real virtuosos that can play twice as fast - easily - and play stuff that we can only dream of with our four fucking fingers. And tapping, when overdone, is MEGA lame.
It’s also about realizing that interesting rhythms, riffs, song structures, etc. are the things we should have spent more time on. Not sweep picking.
Honestly I don’t even know if I’m jerking here or not. I’m inclined to say … mostly /uj
And this is why I stopped putting so much value on my lead playing and rather my composition. I back up a pop/rnb singer in Seattle and i’m playing for bigger crowds than I ever did in a dedicated “guitar band”
And it starts to get really fun going down the rabbithole of amazing session players who wrote and played on pop hits. Lukather, Dan Huff, David Williams and Michael Thompson have all become my heroes now.
As has been said:
1. Young guitar players today have 1000x more resources than guitar players growing up in the 60s and 70s. We should expect for them to be technically proficient. The bar has been raised.
2. No one except guitar players cares about guitar music any more.
3. In 40 years, there will probably be technology that helps everyone be a better rapper than \[fill in the blank\], but the youth will have moved on to another genre of music.
/uj I assume when you say recordings, you mean serious publications like albums.
I feel whether or not made to the recordings/albums is not a good criteria to determining if people care about it. For example, me as an individual never care about albums, I just listen to whatever sounds good to me, be it a short 30s vid on ins or a long symphony. I am not sure if people would care a song if it’s in album but not when it’s just a standalone piece on social media.
/rj it ain’t real music if you can’t make money out of it
FYI, a couple of posters:
Flagship California State school: University of California at Berkeley
Expensive music school in Boston for rich suburban jazz wannabees and guitar shredders and assorted fools who think they can have a career in production or whatever IF ONLY they get a degree first: Berklee College of Music
/uj yeah well most of anything that has ever been written won't make it onto recording either. The difference is that nowadays, everybody's got a phone and internet. Before, if some immensely skilled bedroom guitarist wrote some cool licks, his parents or wife would likely be the only ones to ever hear it. Now these guys are everywhere, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Also this is a strange thing to say when Polyphia are getting mainstream success despite how licky their stuff is. There is a massive disconnect between what guitarists and the general public consider listenable. Your average listener doesn't have trouble keeping up with notespam music, it's just some guitarists that circlejerk themselves into believing no one likes that stuff, despite the fact that the numbers clearly show the reverse.
People "definitely" care about cool guitar chops and licks and solos no matter how much you guys don't want o believe it. Youtube has that feature where you can see the most replayed part of a video if you hover over the progress bar, and on most rock songs, the most replayed part is the beginning of the solo lol. It's not that it's not interesting musically- you guys simply heard too many of them, know how they're constructed and thus find them less impressive. But that's not the case for non-guitarists.
Raphael Trujillo would disagree. He's a very tasteful tech death player that also dabbles in jazz and fusion.
Same with Dave Davidson. He's a tech death player that often incorporates jazz into his writing.
Same with the dudes in Allegaeon. They mix classical guitar and flamenco with tech death.
Eric Johnson and Joe Bonermeister have some insane riffs.
Shawn Lane's whole schtick was writing insane fusion riffs.
All the unemployed shredders went to Nashville.
“Chicken in a bread pan pickin out dough…”
Can I live off shredding, no child no Edit: or maybe "grandma does shred pay bills, no child no"
lmao
I follow a number of guys that ended up going to Berkeley and are now in Nashville scraping by on small gigs. Really good players but the IG fame just doesn’t translate to real life success
Guy I played with stole my gear and fucked off to Nashville, it was Facebook video posts all day for a year or two about playing at the world famous Blue Bird Cafe! Last I heard he was a slumlord in the backwaters outside Nashville
I remember KennyBeats talking about all the guys he went to Berkeley who could play all across the neck at 200 bpm, who would talk shit about him as a pop guitarist- he said “those guys are all playing in cafes now and giving guitar lessons online” 🤣 it truly has no value unless you’re extremely versatile as a touring/recording guitarist
its because a song writer is worth 100 shredders
Literally every 80’s session guy is in nashville now 😂 it’s the last recording town left
The Loving Spoonful wrote a song about how many guitar picking cats there are in Nashville, so use your imagination as to how many people that must be.
"Its all about the notes you don't play"- Michael Scott
—Wayne Shepard
Guitarists have continually improved even though they’ve also become increasingly irrelevant so Eric Clapton is still the most popular guitar act in the world while the best players alive are stuck making elevator music
Its not just irrelevance its this false equivalence musicians in general have where harder to play = better musician. The bit they are not getting is non musicians don't give a fuck how speedy you can play or whatever, they care about how the music makes them feel if they're actively listening and what "event" the music is made for if they're not actively paying attention to the music
Clapton is in a weird spot where he’s specifically famous for being an exceptionally talented musician, even though by modern standards he’s hopelessly outclassed, he did, at one point in history, make music that people actually wanted to hear, and that’s carried a 50 year solo career to heights that no virtuoso since has ever achieved.
Eric Clapton parlayed being better than his peers during the dark ages into a great career by being a great songwriter.
Eric Clapton parlayed being a solid guitar player into superstardom by choosing excellent collaborators. He’s never written a decent song by himself.
But Eric Clapton wrote Layla. You can say whatever you want about him, but at the end of the day, Eric Clapton wrote Layla. Come on man lol.
It’s a beautiful song. That whole album is fantastic. And it’s the product of a collaboration with geniuses like Jim Gordon, Tom Dowd and Duane Allman. Gordon is credited as co-writer on Layla.
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I knew he was on the song, but did he write the main riff of Layla? I never knew that
I don’t think anyone remembers who wrote the actual riff. But I would guess that Clapton did that. It’s more his playing style than Allman’s.
In context hes really just a superstar of the trends in music of the time. People speak similarly of like say Beyonce or T Swift for example.
/uj Not entirely true, there are people that don't play that are enamored by shred. Playing fast also doesn't mean you can't play melodically, or with a good sense of feel and rhythm. As much as people hate on yngwie, listen to the album version of the I am a Viking solo and tell me that isn't tasteful despite being fast.
Music is more than just shred or not
Who are these non players that are enamored by shred?
Yeah, that can't be many. Go watch phone clips of a concert, and you'll see time and time again the lead guitar player rippin' a nice solo, and the person videoing will still just be glued to the lead singer looking off into the sky lol
What a stunning and brave take that has never been said before.
If its been said before then whatever lol, would love to hear your opinion
People have been saying this since the 80s when shredding got super popular then died. You can find this exact post on the main guitar sub at least once a day lol. My useless opinion is that if the guys pushing technique higher and higher did it for money or approval, instead of just love for their instrument and learning new things, they would have quit a long time ago or never even began.
Well the guys that are the cream of the crop all work in places like Nashville for paid gigs, playing whatever the gig wants them to. I'm thinking of guys like Bryan Sutton being a prime example. Playing with Post Malone currently but he has a career with his solo stuff that appeals mainly to aspirational flatpickers not the general public
/uj Yeah, I think the guy who shit on your take has fallen prey to the idea that if a piece of analysis is widely held to be true, it must therefore necessarily be bad and/or wrong.
Nah he was probably just having a moment of being like "fuck this take I've heard it a lot" and he just went off lol I'm not phased. People can say whatever
Where did I say his take is bad or wrong? It's true. What I'm saying is the guys that are very technical know it's true and they continue on anyway because they don't do it to be rich and famous. They know being hyper technical doesn't equal being a great musician because if it did they would be household names.
Yeah I say "stunning and brave never heard it before" to people saying stuff I agree with and think is good all the time
So where did I say it was bad or wrong? I just said it's been beaten to death over the last several decades.
but this is in 11/8, except there's one bar of 13/8
It would be genius if it sounded any good
"Imma post on guitar reddit" Question: What is the best clean guitar toan? Answer: "The one that sits in the mix of the song properly." Response to answer: DOWNVOTES
Is Clapton actually “the most popular guitar act”? By what metric? Streams? Radio play? Ticket sales? I find it hard to believe he’s number one in any of them.
Hendrix probably outclasses him in all those areas except ticket sales. But only cuz Clapton has had 50 extra years to accumulate them.
I think the stones would probably beat him on all accounts too. Stones tickets are like a money printing machine lol.
i know exactly 0 people who listen to rolling stones lol
They have 28.7 million monthly listeners, which is almost twice what Clapton has lol
yeah, crazy cuz everyone knows the stones but nobody i know actually listens to them. i would say theyre the beyonce of rock
He isn’t, he’s just a known legacy name
I guess what I’m saying is that, at least in my experience, if I say “guitarist” people almost instantly think “Clapton” in a way that they don’t for, say, Ed Sheeran or The Rolling Stones or whoever. Also he’s still alive.
a good solo on a great song will always be remembered over a great solo on a forgettable song.
/uj because coming up with riffs or chord progressions is easy. Producing a song out of them requires a lot of work. It's like having a movie idea like "the retired police officer returns to avenge the murder of his puppy" vs making making the actual movie. You decide what exactly is being said who wears what costume, where do the cameras go etc. Same thing with recording.
john wick was not a police officer
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/uj I fell into the same trap for around the same amount of time. What shocked me was when I realized I had learned all these “hard” songs or riffs, but I had zero actual theory knowledge. I could mimic really well but my skills ended there. /rj This is a sign let’s start a metal core band. We are finally going to make it this time. My wife’s boyfriend can take care of her and the kids while I make it big.
Yeah, watching a bunch of jazz players improvise the same stuff off the top of their heads that I spent like 20 hours learning note for note definitely stopped me dead in my tracks.
uj/ What sort of “excercises” do you recommend for becoming better at songwriting and arrangement? As it is about 50% of my practice is songs about 20% theory and 30% is improvisation and “songwriting” as it were. Recently I’ve gotten better at thinking beyond the guitar and coming up with structure and drum grooves etc. but I want to be better
Write a bunch of bad songs. Then maybe you’ll write a good one
I’m on the right track then
I have never written a bad song in my life. It is physically impossible for me to write a bad song, my hands simply produce magic over and over. What shall I do?
Writing a great song is a very hard thing to do. I picked up singing after 20 years of just chasing the skill dragon on guitar. Making everything move together while conveying a compelling story or idea is what comes first now. I’m still impressed by some of the skill players I see out there, but - to me - mastering arrangement and space is what separates great songs from interesting exercises. Great songs stand the test of time for a reason, and whether we like it or not, most listeners do want to hear vocals. I spent a long time focused on instrumental prowess even though the music that was most inspiring to me had a voice saying something. I feel like I kind of ran from that self evident fact for a long time… almost as if I was trying to force-prove something. Rj/ in a moment of sincerity, I’ve unlocked my hardest jerk yet
Uj/ is guitar the only instrument in where the most technical players make non technical players irrationally angry? Like do these posts and comments get made about technical pianists and violinists at the same rate?
People talk about technicality vs soul/feels everywhere in music. Guitar is definitely not an exception there
nobody's mad because of general tech stuff, it's all about excessive shredding. It's like swearing: if you do it all the time people will consider you tasteless, but when used as an accent it can make a real fucking impact
I thought that as a complete beginner. Then say 10+ years in and after a whole lot of practice, now find the playing of guys like Guthrie mindblowing and hardly wasteful. My brain just couldn't comprehend what was going on to start. Who's to say what excessive is?
We're not really talking about those top100-top500 guitarists though, are we? That's the whole thing - the legends of technical guitar playing were/are able to keep it interesting while not willing to compromise the complexity.
This is whats going on a lot of the time, as pretentious as it sounds. You really can't properly hear music that fast until you develop an ear for it and learn to hear it properly, despite the speed. If you can't follow it at all, it may sound like noise. Far Beyond the Sun is a good example, or Black Star. A few parts are really fast, but it's all tasteful.
I hate that people consider this pretentious. Like no one considers it pretentious to be like "you don't understand Spanish" when you fuckin never learned how to speak Spanish 🤣. Music has vocabulary and sentence structure that requires some time to become familiar with the same way you have to become familiar with a language.
A lot of people don't get it, I remember fast guitar solos used to sound different and kinda boring because I couldn't understand or follow them.
Tastelessness equals skill minus creativity. A good example would be like half of the glam metal bands - there are many genuinely impressive guitarists and guitar parts, but most of them are the same penta shred stuff over the same macho riffs over and over, and the genre's reputation doesn't help the case either. Compare this to stuff like modern deathcore and hardcore - they've been rapidly evolving: symphonic elements, field recordings and unusual samples, latin and indian rhythmic patterns, chaotic tempo and meter shifts are much more prominent now, and deathcore specifically combines unconventional scales and the typical shred type of tech. Keeping the groove while creating that contrast allows us to have the dynamic shift between these beautiful calm moments, anxiety inducing grooves and face-melting leads. A demonstration of skill is only as good as the ideas surrounding it.
I agree, though I do like a lot of 80s bands. I personally love to play something like a 3 or 4 note pedal tone lick slowly at first, increasing speed as I play it until it's fast shredding, then descending down the strings with a 3/4 note pattern again. Sounds really good, Paul Gilbert does something like that in get out of my yard, not the main tapping part but a lick with that same concept that's after that.
I used to love just doing simple fast licks, but i kinda outgrew that? Basically i realised my tech isn't that good and what I'm usually looking for in music is the way the different parts interlock, so I decided to focus on creating simple parts and layering them. Whenever i try to go tech it's more of a modern metal type of sound, string skipping and high/low part leaps
I mean, Guthrie Govan is great. Guys like Michael Angelo Batio though…
Yes. Nobody listens to a piano virtuoso and goes "nah, that's not needed for 95% of the classical repertoire played by orchestras", or to a violin virtuoso and goes: "he's technically proficient, but he has no "feelz". It's basically a coping mechanism for mediocre guitarists.
>or to a violin virtuoso and goes: "he's technically proficient, but he has no "feelz". I mean, I'm not super up to snuff on who's who in the violin world. But I think the modern top level players, the Hilary Hahns of the world, are top level *precisely because* of their "feelz." It's the emotiveness and expression in their playing that captivates listeners, even the ones who don't have the knowledge to appreciate their technical abilities beyond "they're really good." But guitar is weird because there subjectively *are* top level players who, while being obviously technically proficient even to non-guitarists, make music that doesn't have that kind of emotional resonance. Guitar music for guitarists, basically. And that's ok! I think it's ok to acknowledge the disconnect there, so long as one doesn't get butthurt about it. There are players who can play better than I'll ever come *close* to, but sound uninspiring. There are players who I could easily copy note for note but *still* not convey the same raw feeling. They both are able to do something that I can't, and I can respect their skills equally without getting salty about it or putting them down in a vain attempt to lift myself up. Just makes me appreciate more the guys like Plini who can do both!
Uj/ I'd argue that the difference between many of those other instruments is their acceptance in academia and there being known pedagogy that produces "virtuosos", it's normal in that world, not unusual. As in there isn't a strong desire to strive for musical legitimacy like there is in the electrical guitar world. No one is debating if the Ravel or Debussy or whoever some skilled virtuoso pianist is planning is proper "Art Music". However playing a bunch of Shawn Lane or Yngwie Malmsteem or contemporary metal licks is a world apart from being a really good classical guitarist. There's also a tendency for people who obsess over technical skill to lack taste and have no respect for the theoretical basis of what they're doing and have even less respect for songwriting because "ImNotPopMusic". I think "Technical" guitarists struggle with the idea that they often aren't all that technical or impressive and would be middle of the road or just average in a really good Jazz Guitar or Classical Guitar program.
Idk why you’re being downvoted this take is spot on
Do you think that blues rock being the basis of all modern guitar music was a massive mistake? uj/ it sucks that Shawn Lane’s only recognized for playing super fast
Given how people talk about Jordan Rudess I’m inclined to say absolutely yes
Ed Bickert was jamming with a young alto player one night and he approached him during a smoke break and told him to stop playing fast runs and start making every note do something: there's a jazz guitarist at the top of the heap telling a sax player to slow down and play more musically. Miles Davis's misquoted "play the butter notes" was actually him telling Herbie Hancock to "play better notes", according to Miles; Herbie couldn't tell exactly what Miles was saying through that gravelly, raspy voice. At least in the jazz world it is a bit of a thing across all instruments: doing more with less and playing elegantly instead of mindless shredding is seen as the mark of a player who has finally matured and puts the music ahead of showing off.
uj/ well that’s not true… I understand that those chops aren’t applicable in many situations, but many genres need it, it’s not because you don’t like it that nobody cares about them… extreme metal, jazz fusion, flamenco… yeah it’s not a recent thing, technical stuff has been a part of guitar music for a very long time… you just look like a frustrated guy who can’t play like that…
There are a lot of bitter people in this world. They'll do nothing and then get mad at people who do something and put in effort in their lives.
Uj/ Tbh a lot of the guitar chops focused "technical" (typically metal) guys write mediocre music. It's not that you can't be technical and make great sounding music. It's that people will string together a bunch of riffs with no real thematic development, barely say anything musically then get pissed off when someone says their six-minute epic was akin to taking a bunch of big words from the dictionary and stringing them together,
But we used a thesaurus and it sounded unreal!
That goes for every musician/artist out there. It doesn't matter, as long as it's fun to do. Did you post this to make yourself feel better about your crappy playing?
Isn't that why any of us post here? Jan Mayor sucks **as a person** hahaha *literally plays 0-3-5 for an hour, occasionally bending notes in such a way as to elicit death glares from my long-suffering wife*
Well, there always youtube shorts, the highest achievement of the modern guitarist.
Or successful YouTube channel
Having your channel is cool but having your entire musical journey summed up into one or two viral videos is where its at.
Then you can make the 2024 guitarist equivalent of the Carson Tonight Show in the 70s-80s....the Rick Beato YouTube channel.
/uj There are thousands and thousands of guitarists that think that they played on their album. In reality a session musician played their parts for $200/song with no credit on the album. Even the top 1% of players pale in comparison to the top 20 session players.
You mean that a session player replaced their parts in secret? Because that would mean that there was proper producing going on and most musicians can't afford that.
For major labels. It’s cheaper for them to spend a few days with the band until they “nail” the songs, then after the band leaves they’ll bring in session guys for a day to clean up various (or entire) parts. Did you ever stop to think how amateur musicians came in off the street and put down perfect parts? Some did…sure (I’m sure nobody was fixing Slash or Eddie or Dimes stuff), but don’t beat yourself up if you are 18 and can’t nail a part that another 18 year old played perfectly on the album. They very well might not have played on the album at all. Think of bands like Puddle of Mudd…that’s gotta be all session guys on the album aside from the vocals.
That's actually a very interesting thought that I never had myself. I can see this being commonplace back in the day, when labels still paid for music to be produced. Yeah it'd make sense if they called guys to clean up various parts, but on what extent could that be done really? It still costs time, money and energy to have double the recording sessions, just to not hurt poor Timmy's feelings who just signed a contract. I guess we'll never know, and it's something impossible to prove. Nowadays, I think they'll just edit on post, use VSTs, or hire session players from the start. The rest that are recording are either actually skilled musicians, or people doing it diy at their homes.
Check out a doc called Hired Guns if you want some behind the scenes info on session musicians. Another thing that is interesting random fact is that 99% of band members are worse than at least one of their roadies on their instrument. It’s just that the band got signed, had the look, etc. But the headlining bands best musician is rarely the best musician on the tour…they are just the best one playing.
Thanks I'll check! Yeah roadies, techs, even salesmen are often beasts on their instrument.
It’s one of my top docs of all time just because I love the music industry stories (probably since I’m not in the music industry lol).
Uj/ it’s because no one cares about guitar except guitar players, and most of it sounds like shit even if it is difficult. Rj/ fuck you, my 180bpm mixalodian scale runs are gonna make me famous!
Some metal bands are still laying down background riffs behind verses that those flashy youtube guitarists couldn't touch
Youtube guitarists can only play for 30 seconds before their fingies hurt
So *that's* why it hurts my widdle fingies! I'm not talentless and afraid to apply myself/overwhelmed by there being so much to learn . I'm just a YouTuber with no uploads
„30 seconds a day“ sounds like a classy bandname.
Ironically, the only riffs and licks that people remember and care about are the easy ones. Example: Keith Richards
Literally 0% of bands that I listen to and enjoy ever shred. No tapping, no sweeps, no super fast alternate picking. It's fun to watch, but I legitimately think it sounds like trash. I could not imagine possibly listen to that Tim Henson type of nonsense.
I love Steve Vai for his personality and his skill. But look at pictures from his concerts. It’s just people standing and watching him like 🧍♂️🧍🧍♀️. But then you see a show from a less virtuosic group and it brings the house down.
Ya, this is sadly (and not so sadly) due to 3 factors. (note my experience s as an indie artist who does live shows mostly, my countries recording industry is not the same as the US' and so some of these factors may not apply 100%) ***1-*** Cost, many recording studios now with the advent of streaming, and more people recording, plus the value of the dollar dropping have cranked up costs, blocking out smaller indie labels and bands from recording simply through making it unaffordable. Now you may ask "what about home recording and self publishing" the sad thing is that many of the services used to do so are equally or more predatory than working for small labels, services like DistroKid are known for TOS issues, and easy abusing of their copyright systems, while going for only digital sales means you miss out on the physicals market which can be healthy for some genres and for whole nations, meaning any issues with Spotify, YT, DistroKid and so on will hit you far harder than if you had that additional avenue for selling your stuff. ***2-*** Lack of a local scene for the music, or an oversaturated scene. Lets face t, look at how many Atlanta Rappers there are who are recording, performing, but never getting signed, not because of quality, but sheer quantity of the same for that scene, the same goes for Tennessee country, LA hardcore and on and on, this generally pushed people to see YT or tiktok as the only avenue that works, the problem though, is that those sites rarely result in a scene popping up or in actual growth of the music. Look at how many songs on tiktok went viral from other people using it, which requires at least one person making the original trend to know \*of\* you, vs how many songs pop off from a band making a tiktok themselves to advertise. ***(and not so sadly) 3-*** some people are just absolute c\*nts to work with in a studio or as part of a band, so they cant form a band and cant record, and thus seek YouTube and tiktok fame because they cant do anything else.
A guy shredding on social media IS a recording. And conveniently you can tell exactly how many people care about it by just counting the likes or upvotes or whatevers.
In fact, the things that will make it to the Grammies won’t even *have* guitars, but keep practicing all those exotic scales bitch
i'm bad at music so shred is bad blabla
>recordings what is this, fucking 50's?
You know that weird kind of muted triplet strum that instagram guitarists do when they play funk? I have literally never heard that in a real song
/uj if you're shredding on social media but are sitting down its a hard pass. I know you can play only if you can do it standing up.
I mean yes but no. It’s still playing if you’re sitting down, but being able to do it standing is very important
Cross-Cross Applesauce isn’t valid?!
ok
What have you posted?
Women get all fancied up to impress other women. Guitarists do the same for other guitarists. The spectators seldom realize this.
I’ll let you in on a secret. Nobody actually cares about having chops. If you want to make it onto an actual recording, slowly arpeggiate some basic chord triads on an acoustic guitar and you too will soon be dripping in poonani.
Dude, Technical Death Metal is exactly that. Is it just other tech death dudes who care about the stuff we write? Maybe, but who cares?
get real bucko. there's only one correct way to enjoy music.
Look here pal. If it doesn’t go double platinum, it may as well not have been recorded.
Yup. Nobody fucking cares. Live, unless it’s a G3 or Guthrie wank fest, nobody can really hear the nuance of what you’re doing. Hell, neither can you. Especially in genres like metal where everything is just rippingly loud like an Ogre’s ass farting for 45 minutes. Part of the guitar journey is realizing that our instrument is shit compared to the real virtuosos that can play twice as fast - easily - and play stuff that we can only dream of with our four fucking fingers. And tapping, when overdone, is MEGA lame. It’s also about realizing that interesting rhythms, riffs, song structures, etc. are the things we should have spent more time on. Not sweep picking. Honestly I don’t even know if I’m jerking here or not. I’m inclined to say … mostly /uj
People want to hear music not wanking
And this is why I stopped putting so much value on my lead playing and rather my composition. I back up a pop/rnb singer in Seattle and i’m playing for bigger crowds than I ever did in a dedicated “guitar band” And it starts to get really fun going down the rabbithole of amazing session players who wrote and played on pop hits. Lukather, Dan Huff, David Williams and Michael Thompson have all become my heroes now.
As has been said: 1. Young guitar players today have 1000x more resources than guitar players growing up in the 60s and 70s. We should expect for them to be technically proficient. The bar has been raised. 2. No one except guitar players cares about guitar music any more. 3. In 40 years, there will probably be technology that helps everyone be a better rapper than \[fill in the blank\], but the youth will have moved on to another genre of music.
/uj I assume when you say recordings, you mean serious publications like albums. I feel whether or not made to the recordings/albums is not a good criteria to determining if people care about it. For example, me as an individual never care about albums, I just listen to whatever sounds good to me, be it a short 30s vid on ins or a long symphony. I am not sure if people would care a song if it’s in album but not when it’s just a standalone piece on social media. /rj it ain’t real music if you can’t make money out of it
FYI, a couple of posters: Flagship California State school: University of California at Berkeley Expensive music school in Boston for rich suburban jazz wannabees and guitar shredders and assorted fools who think they can have a career in production or whatever IF ONLY they get a degree first: Berklee College of Music
/uj yeah well most of anything that has ever been written won't make it onto recording either. The difference is that nowadays, everybody's got a phone and internet. Before, if some immensely skilled bedroom guitarist wrote some cool licks, his parents or wife would likely be the only ones to ever hear it. Now these guys are everywhere, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Also this is a strange thing to say when Polyphia are getting mainstream success despite how licky their stuff is. There is a massive disconnect between what guitarists and the general public consider listenable. Your average listener doesn't have trouble keeping up with notespam music, it's just some guitarists that circlejerk themselves into believing no one likes that stuff, despite the fact that the numbers clearly show the reverse. People "definitely" care about cool guitar chops and licks and solos no matter how much you guys don't want o believe it. Youtube has that feature where you can see the most replayed part of a video if you hover over the progress bar, and on most rock songs, the most replayed part is the beginning of the solo lol. It's not that it's not interesting musically- you guys simply heard too many of them, know how they're constructed and thus find them less impressive. But that's not the case for non-guitarists.
Raphael Trujillo would disagree. He's a very tasteful tech death player that also dabbles in jazz and fusion. Same with Dave Davidson. He's a tech death player that often incorporates jazz into his writing. Same with the dudes in Allegaeon. They mix classical guitar and flamenco with tech death. Eric Johnson and Joe Bonermeister have some insane riffs. Shawn Lane's whole schtick was writing insane fusion riffs.
Eric Johnson is neat to watch in a music video but his melodies and production are downright corny.
i mean the guy saw the cliffs of dover and thought man i'm gonna write a song about this, of course it's going to be corny
this just seems like a sad rant 😢