Art verses Technique

Hello,

I am listening (whilst writing this) to "Like a Hurricane" by Niel Young. Keep that fact in the back of your mind as I write this rant.

I am a guitarist. You can tell this if you look at my page, as I am holding a guitar, and I am in a room with quite a few other guitars in it.

I love the guitar.

I express myself through it better than I ever could with words. I am a guitar nut. Tell me a model of guitar, I can tell you who made it, what factory, who plays that guitar, its scale length and when it was manufactured.

I also have Aspergers Syndrome, (the so called "Trainspotters" disease) this obsessive love and knowledge of guitars is a symptom I know, but it doesn't mean I am going to change. Ha No Way.

So when I was a younger man, I was impressed beyond belief by the neo classical, super fast fret shredders that populated metal band in the 80's and 90's. Faster the better. I mean I still loved guys like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Carlos Santana, but they were not really fast, so I felt kind of guilty liking them. So if a bloke could play a scale quicker than another bloke, this automatically meant bloke A was better than bloke B (and they are ALWAYS blokes!)

Right?

Wrong. I could no longer hide from myself that listening to those lind of players was like listening to the sound of a typing pool. After a while, oh about 5 seconds they were just plain boring! But how could this be? I mean the were sooo fast!

Then it came to me. Playing guitar is not athletics, it is like poetry. No one would say that longer words make a better poem, or the longer the poem, the more enjoyable it is (Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is shit, read some Tony Harrison, or Shaemus Heany if you don't believe me)

So does technique matter?

I think that if you learn technique, and use it to express yourself, that is great. Trying to play with no knowledge at all would be like me writing poetry in French (which I don't speak), by randomly picking words from the French dictionary, so that the lines conform to Iambic Pentameter. More than likely it will be shit (However, now that I have written this, it sounds like a great idea! I WILL GIVE IT A GO! If any of you speak French, watch out!) but if you use a guitar solo just to expose your technique, that is always terrible.

Without Exception.

And so to Neil Young. In the band I play in we do a few of his tracks. At the start, I was still trying to impress the other members of the band with my virtuosity (such as it is) I really overplayed, and it sounded shite, like someone had sampled a solo from another track, and just dropped it into the song. So now I play to the song, and it don't sound half bad!

So Neil Young shouldn't be any good, I mean he is a technically poor guitarist, and his singing is terrible. Yet I really like listening to him, because he is an absolute genius songwriter and performer.

He would be brilliant still if he could sing like Freddy Mercury, and play like Steve Vai, but I don't know whether he would be any better. What do you think?

Be good

First posted on Yahoo 360