Cultivating the Great Guitarist Identity

I’ve been reflecting on how a guitar is made. There’s someone that plants a seed, waters it, protects it, lets it spring into mahogany, alder, cedar, or basswood, then someone else chops it down, someone else puts on on a truck, someone else takes it to a factory, someone else ships it to a guitar plant to cut the fretboard and body shape, someone inspects it and thats just for the guitar and neck. Then you have a Fender, or Gibson, Or Gretsch they slap a name on it. Yet who are all the somebodies that made it happen?

Those are your guitar scales, chords, rhythm, techniques, note names, arpeggios, slides, bends. The raw materials used to create music with. The raw materials that allow you to put your name on something you made. This is a process. It takes planting seeds, watering, protection, weathering storms and stress, getting sunlight, and evolving. A process that too many people fight when they say they want to learn guitar.

It could be the habits and first world luxuries that a globalized capitalism has afforded us the custom. Where the raw materials and harvesting labor are never worth as much as the executive designer making the Iphone. Who cares where it comes from I want the end result.

Learning a cover song on the guitar is like going to a restaurant for your meals. There are some amazing restaurants. Some so amazing people travel all over the world, and television and magazines rave about how transcendent and innovative this spaghetti is, but then what? You get hungry again. This time you’re not in the mood to make something or spend a lot of money so you go to In-N-Out, still not so bad, but then what?

You say, okay I’m going to make dinner at home tonight. I’m going to make my own song. Yet you don’t know how ingredients work with one another, you don’t know whether to use the oven or skillet, you put too much salt in your food and don’t know that potatoes can absorb salt, and then you get frustrated and go out to eat again.

Becoming a great guitar player is an identity. To have an identity you must have independence. With that independence you have choice, and with choice you can take risks. When you’re just learning cover songs there is minimal risk or choice. You have the choice to eat the meal as it or to take some of the filigree and have the sauces on the side. Most of the risk is just picking a song that you think you can complete.

When you understand, memorize, internalize, visualize, and connect the dots of the fretboards. To see the notes of the key you are in light up and chords becoming constellations it is a brand new feeling of exploring the cosmos. The most powerful force in the cosmos? The black hole. The point where light and matter can no longer escape, that bend time and space and time, that has all the elements and possible more, all striving towards a singularity. If you’ve ever been in the songwriting and creative process and loose track of how much time it has been, what you have to do tomorrow or didn’t do yesterday, and you feel singular and fully encompassed and rejuvenated in transcendence that music offers. This feeling is what keeps great guitar players around. Once you enter the black hole of creation, the world lights up.

So become like the universe. Master the elements in the periodic table. Fuse them together to create new compounds. Your connections and creativity in the ways you combine these simple elements are life giving even if they are simply two hydrogens and an oxygen- water. If you’re into heavy metal, plutonium and soft rock, golden oldies. That’s it for the puns.

These raw materials are the vertical integration that allow you to run the gambit on your own musical journey. The scales, chords, progressions, and harmony are the sleight of hand that magicians use to make miracles for others. Be part of the miracle.

I can hear songbirds chirping “Learning songs can teach you so many things!”. All I have to say is, well be willing to learn those things. Can and do are two different things. Everyone “can” be great at the guitar, yet a smaller percentage actually do.

I hear the broken records saying “Learning the classics give you your influences”. Influence is fine and yes I’ve got 329 guitar influences, yet if someone said sound like Jimi Hendrix in the key of C#major, could you do it. Do you know how Jimi Hendrix would have played in C# major or B flat minor? Can you revolve the scales and chord kaleidoscope? We cannot confuse costumes with identity. You you only know Jimi Hendrix in terms of what he has been and always now will be, Rest in Peace Brother jimi, then your trapped.

Great guitar players don’t always have to be original, they are just authentic. I don’t love homemade cookies because the are the most prolific or even taste the greatest, I love them because they are authentic. When you understand the ingredients to make music through the scales, chords, arpeggios, and chord progressions, basic music theory and then get your hands and mind moving with those tools in hand- you discover who you are as a guitar player in that moment. And that is great guitar player.

At this point you may think this is a Zen lecture, learn these disciplines to become free. It seems counter -intuitive to practice shooting an arrow so that you no longer need to practice to shoot the arrow. Yet think of what the foundational laws of the universe are. Creation. I’ve never seen anything destroyed in the world- just created into something else to continue on the purpose of service. Whether its guitar, engineering, yoga, entrepreneurship, being a good spouse or parent or child, if you get down with being of service to create in the world, the universe backs you up.

I confess, this isn’t how I thought about or new as soon as a picked up a guitar. All I knew was I want to sound as powerful as AC/DC. What I did realize early on was that it wasn’t AC/DC being AC/DC, it was the combining of power chords and pentatonic licks that made AC/DC. Which made learning scales, chords, arpeggios, theory, music theory much easier.

Having an identity on the guitar doesn’t mean you will be great at everything or want to learn everything. Steve Vai always says “I never waste time on my weakness, I just build on my strengths”. I think that is an enlightened approach. A fish does not strive to climb Mount Everest and an eagle doesn’t long to be at the bottom of the ocean. For me thats focusing on blues, rock, metal, and reggae guitar. Occasionally I learn some Americanized Flamenco techniques, but only because they sound metal. I’m a guitar espionage forensic agent when I’m learning songs. I’m looking at the DNA and the psychology of how Randy Rhoads and Jimi Paige made Diary of a Madman or Stairway to Heaven and looking to steal their secrets for my own mad musical projects.