Martin Miller: is internet guitarist raising the standard of guitar playing

News:
01-06-2008:
A really interesting post on the petrucci forum by Martin Miller. He of this video fame:



Matin asks:
I was just listening to clips of famous guys and couldn't help thinking.... if they were unknown players now and were posting videos on You Tube, would they be held in such high regard as they were when they started? I guess the argument could be made that a lot of those guys sort of "invented" the style, so that was their mark (not just their guitar playing), but from strictly a guitar playing point of view, if someone like JP or Satch were just unknown guys


Some interesting replies, including this monster from Chris Ptacek:
I'm sure there are plenty of guys here my age or older (30's) who would see it from the perspective that I do. Many of us were playing for years before there was any concept of usable internet for guitar playing. Back in the day, you actually dialed someone's phone number with your modem, and logged into their computer BBS etc... it was none of the TCP/IP type stuff. Magazines and books were "the way." $50 instructional videos were a reasonable purchase. And apart from any close friends, or guitar teachers you might have been lucky enough to share goals and time with, the only examples of the stuff you wanted to play were the things on the records themselves.

The intarweb

- Has helped spread information about "what has been, and what can be done" as well as "how it's done." Things that used to be a matter "play, rewind, play, rewind" etc have become a matter of watching a free instructional. This is a GREAT thing.

- Has formed international communities of like-minded musicians. This causes group-think, and encourages people (sometimes) to push themselves.

- Shows that sometimes a 12 year old can play amazing technical things... which tells other kids that "you can do this too."

- Informs you of some sort of idea about how many people there are, out there, doing what YOU are doing, or what you WANT to be doing.

All of this is good. It raises the bar, technically. It also raises the bar in a number of musical ways.

It does some bad things, too.

- Sometimes we're over critical about recorded tones, technical things, etc... things that would have impressed us, or amused us, or stuck with us, sometimes fall by the wayside.

- Sometimes it causes people to turn into snobs. How dare we look down on some of the things we hear, some of the players we hear, etc. Sometimes we're looking for ways to put someone down, so that we can feel better about ourselves. Like the dude who did the Flight of the Bumblebee thing... everyone's reaction was about how "that doesn't sound good. Yeah it's fast, but so what?" Or some of the shitty things that people said about the Bumblefoot track etc. I'd like to think that someone should do something BAD, EVIL, WRONG etc to earn our disdain.

The praise we heap on some of the guys on this forum helps them significantly... it stands to reason that the bashing is problematic for the bash victims.

I think the web also has a homogenizing effect on young guitarists. You had to be industrious in different ways to figure things out off of your tapes and cds without slow-downers and tabs (good or bad tabs) and often times you'd have no idea how something was played unless you read about the techniques in a magazine. It caused guys like Zakk Wylde to develop insane and unique chops because he had no idea what tapping was. I actually invented tapping for myself... not like I was Joe Pro or anything... but I didn't know that "this" was what Eddie was doing on "Eruption." The result of that exploration made tapping and legato very easy for me to work on, imo. Trying to figure out how Mean Streets was played caused a bunch of people to invent new sounds.

A few years ago I realized that my goals were all weird, and a lot of that had to do with the competitive aspect of the guitar-on-the-web sort of thing. I was playing shredder stuff, knowing that I'd be hearing someone do it in a way that I liked better 20 minutes later... I sort of realized that it's a uroboros.... you're just chasing your tail. At least, it was that way for me. Technical achievement doesn't mean as much when you realize "LITERALLY ANYONE can play 'like John Petrucci'" or whomever. I know from teaching that you can take just about any "technically intermediate" guitarist who has time to practice and diligence to follow through, and get them to whatever technical milestone (within reason... not everyone will play 16ths at 250... but no one ever really needs to...) within a couple of years. Along a career of DECADES of playing, that doesn't mean a lot, does it? 2 years? 3 years? It goes by like NOTHING. I guarantee you... Paul probably feels as though the RMA opened last week.

That's quite a tangeant... JP Forum = Madzmanbloghue

Anyway, there's never been a learning tool like the web, pitfalls or no. The spread of information CAN'T HELP but to raise the bar. It doesn't mean people get better... it means that people either get better at what they're playing, or they get ignored.


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