Sometimes, when my mouse is hovering over the button that makes a new video upload happen, I have a moment of self doubt. There are so many other giants of guitar that have done what I’m doing. They are monumental players and their recordings were captured when they were at the top of their game. I can’t help but have a strident, internal voice asking me just what it is I think I’m doing.
This is as much a letter to myself as it is an article that I think would be useful for others. I have a desire to make my thinking around this a little more concrete; to etch it deep into my memory so I can silence that voice a bit easier. We’ll see.
They Had to Start Somewhere
I often think about this in reference to some of the truly astonishing players. Each and every last one of them sucked at some point. My frame of reference is jazz, so you can fill in the names of your choice in the following list:
At some point in their lives, Joe Pass had no idea how to fret a note, Wes Montgomery didn’t know how to hold the guitar right, and Barney Kessel only made noise. They all started somewhere, and where they started assuredly wasn’t pretty.
The one thing that I can say for sure is that they didn’t get better by not doing it. They were performing, practicing, recording, arranging, tooling around, sounding like garbage, and working it out.
This is especially true with regard to recording (videos or sound) and performing music. There is a set of skills that you need to develop to do that well, and you will only pick those up by actually doing it. Someone else might be able to show you what to do, but the practice is inseparable from the activity itself. By that I mean nobody is like “alright, today we’re gonna work on pressing the record button as a fundamental exercise for about 15 minutes as a warmup!” Instead, you sit down and record and, when finished, think about all the ways you could’ve done it better.
Not Everything is For Everyone
There are some fantastic players that I just don’t care for. Most of the fusion players, actually. I can look at what they’re doing and appreciate it but it’s not for me. I don’t seek it out. However, if I scroll through the comments it is glaringly obvious that the music is hitting some people right where they live. That’s great!
There are even some bebop guitarists that I don’t really like, and I could subsist on a steady diet of bebop in lieu of actual nutrition sometimes. It’s subjective! When I analyze this feeling, I come to the conclusion that skill is almost worthless in this equation. It doesn’t determine how much or how little I enjoy someone’s playing.
This means something fantastic for all of us that are at other points in our artistic journey: there is probably an audience for what it is you’re doing.
Music isn’t a merit or skill competition, after all. Someone can be way less technically proficient on the instrument but still connect with people through their tunes. It’s a medium of communication, a way to communicate a feeling or set a mood or to tell a story. Your ability to reharmonize on the fly and play hand-breakingly difficult chords isn’t a virtue by itself. If you can produce a voice that is idiomatically your own, then you will connect with an audience and both of you will be improved for the experience.
It Is Permitted
You can be bad at something online. Nobody minds. They’ll just move on and this leaves you free to engage in the aforementioned practice. Maybe a bored idiot will take a few cracks at you, but you have the various powers invested in buttons marked with strong words like “Block” or “Delete.” You can use those, too! Or you can ignore them entirely. It turns out that you have all the power in that dynamic.
Coincidentally, you can also be really good at something online. Nobody minds. They might stick around for a while and enjoy what you’re doing. You still get the possibility of a bored idiot, but you also still retain all the power in that dynamic.
Looked at in this fashion, it really is a win/win situation, no?
Final Thought
In an age where truly awful LLMs have been cooked up by some of the strangest, least pleasant human beings, it is important to see art being made by other, more pleasant human beings. I want to see your guitar playing. I want to hear your music. I want you to get out there and make art. Especially if “out there” is some sort of community full of other people making things. It doesn’t matter if you’re spectacular or not. I firmly believe that this is a small, individually-achievable step to wrest control of art back from algorithms and other tech that maybe doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
(As usual, I should mention that I don’t use LLMs or AI of any sort to assist me with writing these things. That should be especially evident given the last paragraph, but still. I want it to be explicitly known.)
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