I notice a lot of people interested in music on the forum, and that's good, as a little early Christmas present for all of you, here's about 1/4 of the first chapter of my upcoming book "Fretboard Metaphysics" (Lansir Books), I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter One
Mental Musical Masochisms and other Stories…
At the beginning of my guitar-playing career, I found myself trying to follow everything other people said to me. “Learn how to play this song! Learn this chord, etc…” Now don’t get me wrong, theory and proper technique is very important in guitar playing, it makes a big difference when you know what you’re doing and when you don’t, just because all the other people are playing three-chord power pop crap doesn’t mean you have to. Personal identity is a big aspect in guitar, developing ones own techniques is a great way to form your own “Style”. I at first tried to emulate metal guitar heroes such as Kirk Hammett (Pre Load of course), Dave Mustaine, etc. But as I progressed as a player and learned all the “basics” so to speak (in other words just playing cover songs and not trying to write anything of my own), I decided to buy a chord book and a scale book…I learned every chord in that damn chord book, and from that scale book I began to manipulate and change the way the scales were “meant” to be played, I turned a “B minor” scale into “Holy crap what the hell is that” scale.
You’ll drive yourself nuts trying to copy everyone else, its good to have heroes in guitar playing and its good to draw technique and inspiration from them, but its also important to realize that YOU ARE YOU, and thus your style should reflect who you are.
You can make plenty of songs just by knowing some basic power chords and pounding the living hell out of them, and if by God if that’s what you want then by all means do it, but is it really musical? I found myself bored with playing heavy metal and hard rock music and thus went forward in my solo career, I realized that perhaps this was the way to go, I’m my own boss, I play the instruments and write what I want to, I’m not restricted to a label like “Death Metal” or “Power Rock” or whatever the hell else you want to call it.
Listening to all kinds of music is vital to developing an open minded style, jazz, rock, flamenco, opera, foreign bands, classical, swing…take something from them and modify it, make it your own, and then run with it. Yngwie J. Malmsteen fused heavy metal music and classical in the early 80’s, and basically was the top of the shred game for a long time, other bands I’ve heard lately even fuse Opera and metal, you could fuse death metal and polka and probably get something going with that if you wanted to.
Mel Bay sells a lot of books on chords and such, and they’re all pretty good, those guitar chord posters work too, sit and look at a book or a poster for a while with your guitar and learn 2-3 new chords a night, then practice composing with those new chords…develop new melodies and such, don’t worry if it sounds “lame” or something, it’s helping you to hone your music skills, and that’s step one to becoming your own guitarist.
As for scales, a lot of modern bands tend to shun soloing and complex guitar playing, because it’s too “old school” or it’s “boring”. When in fact it’s just obvious that the guitar has become nothing but a toy to back up some cheesy ass singer, I’m not saying that all bands have to rip on a solo each song and overshadow the singer/etc. But at least put some freaking effort into it.
As with the chords and such, just learn 2-3 a night, set aside 1-2 hours an evening to sit and practice your guitar, turn off the TV, shut off that internet, hey! NO E-BAY FOR YOU TONIGHT! Its guitar time!
Start with basic pentatonic scales; learn them inside and out, backwards and forwards, my instructional CD goes through a lot of basic things you can use to create your own style using scales and chords, and then twisting them to your own preference.
Music theory is just that: A theory! A theory can be prove wrong or developed differently and thus turned into something totally different!
A good example of excellent guitar players…look to some of these jazz players around the world, amazing players…sure they’re not on MTV but there’s a reason for that which I think is very obvious.