Just how bad are you?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cyrokk
  • Start date Start date

My biggest weakness is

  • Pinky? Why would anyone use their pinky?

    Votes: 13 11.8%

  • I get the bends from trying to bend

    Votes: 2 1.8%

  • I leave finger-picking for my nose and toes

    Votes: 15 13.6%

  • Vibrato takes too much bravado

    Votes: 5 4.5%

  • My fret hand fears change

    Votes: 17 15.5%

  • My picking hand fears speed

    Votes: 25 22.7%

  • I am Eddie, god of guitar

    Votes: 33 30.0%
  • Total voters
    110
Uh, what are the strings for again? I just bang on the thing with the neighbor's cat. Sounds pretty good to me, and it doesn't matter if the neck is warped or not.
 
I dont know even one cover,and as far as scales go ...fish have em right?

ROCK ON!!
 
I think it comes down to really enjoying it. I've gone through phases when I take it too seriously and, lo and behold, I get nowhere. When I play simply for the joy of it, I find myself learning and getting more comfortable at a quicker pace.

I know a few players who love the IDEA of being a guitarist more than playing itself. This can't be a good premise to begin with. If you only want to be a rock star, go to a karaoke night. As with athletes, as cliche as it sounds, you have to love playing guitar enough to play on your own (and enjoy it) when no one else is around.

That being said, I am currently nowhere near where I thought I'd be 10 years ago, but I'm just beginning to relax and practice what I preach. The theory used to scare me or bore me. Now it's pretty darn fascinating in its simplicity!

"Don't bang the drum, just let it come" - Mike Scott

;)
 
I remember hearing that Miles Davis once said that you should play like you don't know how.


Or something like that.
 
I'm so bad, I should be in detention!

Seriously though, I realized by the time I was about 25 that I would never be on the same level as "The Greats".

Remember that when Steve Vai first showed up at Joe's, he didn't even know how to put strings on! Now listen to him.:eek:

Miles also said if you hit a wrong note, hit it again so they know you meant it.;)
 
amiableOne said:
I remember hearing that Miles Davis once said that you should play like you don't know how.


Or something like that.
Click to expand...

I think this was a cryptic instruction he gave to John McLaughlin during the recording of Bitches Brew. Probably a tough demand for him to follow. Maybe this was a general philosophy for him, though. I sure like it.
 
i can play some jazz comping, brazilian rhythms, acoustic and electric, especially nylon-stringer, fingerpicking, classical and other shit, but i suck at rock/blues solos. actually i can't really improvise. i can play classic guitar solos, and i can learn stuff by ear quite easily, and i can even read music (i'm studying this shit right now), but i can't improvise a solo to save my effing life.:)
 
I keep promising to learn to sight read well but never seem to get around to it. I've played in bands or as a solo artist since day one so I never did have to learn a lot of other people's songs and when I ocassionally do I just pick it out by ear usually. I can only read in G cleft and don't know anything about timing notes really. One of these days....

My older sister used to date this guy that could ride a bike backwards (sitting on the handlebar and looking over his shoulder to see where he was going) and could ride with no hands while guiding the bike with his butt, which left his hands free to play guitar! (He sold my mom the first guitar I ever had back in 1969 when I was 10.) He taught me how to ride backwards pretty well but darn if I ever could manage to do it with no hands. That's next on my list after sight reading....
 
Treeline said:
Chris - Martin Simpson is a killer fingerstylist who does guitar workshops. He has a really simple piece of advice for those of us (like me!!) who get stuck in a rut, and that is to do something different with the guitar first thing out of the case, every single time you take it out. It really doesn't matter that the "different" thing is - just that you try something that's different from whatever you did the last time. When I thought about that, I realized that I would slip into the same doodly chord pattern every time I picked the guitar up - without ever thinking about it. No wonder I was in a rut...
Click to expand...

yea, this works great, it's what I do every time I pickup a guitar -- this is probably why I have 6 albums worth of half completed songs *sigh*.

Dan S. Leonard
 
What's a trill? :D

I can do a roll-slide if somebody does the roll!
 
My Old Guitar teacher:

"Technique is secondary to sound. If you achieve the notes you want with the sound you want, I don't care if you play with mittens on."

He would also often say:

"You suck."

My teacher just had a way of explaining things so I could understand them.
 
Dirt Devil...no...that's not it...
Hoover....nope...not Hoover...
Eureka....no no no....not Eureka....
Kenmore...nope...not Kenmore either....

Kirby...yeah...that's it...Kirby!
I am the Kirby of guitar playing....
I suck big time:D
 
Most of the responses have been rather humble, yet polls indicate that most people think they are guitar gods.

hmm... curious..
 
lessee - my weaknesses...

You ready for a novel? :D

- I get completely lost from 4th fret through 11th fret. I'm not even too great in the upper registers - I stumble around blindly on the low E, A, and D strings.

- Timing. My fret hand stubbornly refuses to move any faster than 5 bpm slower than the actual tempo of whatever song I'm trying to play

- Pinky? That's what you use to reinforce your ring finger fretting, right?

- Alternate string picking? Change strings more than once every four notes and I'm all discombobulated...

- Improvising? I know every damned pattern available to the 12 note scale - doesn't help me figure out which notes to play when in order to make a decent solo...

I could go on and on and on :)
 
:D

That's a classic comment acid. Everytime I see it, I still laugh my a** off. One for the archives no doubt.

Dick
 
I'm pretty fucking bad...

Worse than the "giant sucking sound coming from Mexico" made famous by H. Ross Perot's statement about what would happen to prime US jobs once N.A.F.T.A. was in full force.....

H. Ross Perot.....hehehe....
 
If you are playing to please yourself what does it matter. Thats the way I justify my lack of skill. But I like some of the sounds I get from simple chords and finger picking. I have no clue where to start on a lead.
 
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