Technique VS Composition

Technique VS Composition (or) Who's the greatest guitar player in the world, and does anyone care?

There comes a point in your playing where your quest for technique can actually start to actively work against you. What I mean by this is that your hand will actually start to fall into patterns of behavior, you hear something a certain way in your head but then you go to play it and your hand starts doing what you've been doing the most of. Maybe you've been working scales or practicing pentatonic licks a lot for the past couple months, and then you find your hands almost automatically playing those licks. In a way this is a good thing, the muscle memory has been so ingrained into your hands that they do it unthinkingly, but at the same time this is a bad thing because in a way you're just repeating an exercise you've done many times, not actually creating music.

The two biggest examples I always use are at opposite ends of the technique spectrum. On one side you've got Michael Angelo Batio, an incredible monster of a guitar player with technique out the wazoo. He plays right handed, left handed, both handed, one hand plays rhythm while the other does leads, he harmonizes with himself live. It's incredible. He's like the gold winning athlete of the guitar world. I'd argue that he's probably THE BEST guitarist on the planet and probably always will be. So why is it torture to actually listen to him play? Because it lacks rhythm and dynamics, it doesn't tell a story, it sounds like 1,000. exercise executed flawlessy and set to a drum machine. Then on the other end of the spectrum we'll take Kurt Cobain. Arguably a pretty awful guitar player who seemed to know one chord (the "power" chord Root/5th) and one scale, the pentatonic. And yet with one chord and one scale this guy was able to make multiple cd's, sell a ton of singles, rally an entire generation of pissed off kids, and kill glam/hair metal dead seemingly overnight.

So why is that? Why did one chord and one scale trump playing 2 guitars at once with billions of scales and chords?

And that's when we come down to what I think of as "Technique VS Composition."

When I was a kid I practiced non-stop, hours and hours all day everyday. I was determined to be the most bad ass guitarist on the planet. I learned every technique I could and practiced it until I could whip it out without even thinking about it. I prided myself on being able to do "impersonations" of other guitar players. Vai, Yngwie, Michael Angelo, Satriani, Wylde, Dimebag Darrell, Mustaine and Hammett. The shredders of that day. I'd go into "Yngwie mode" and start busting out diminished runs, sweeping arpeggios, shredding through a harmonic minor scale. Basically taking the stereotypical licks of those players and stringing them together. Then I'd joke with my friends, "Here's Kurt Cobain" and I'd butcher a chord and sound out of tune and nasty. Ha! Ha! Big laughs. Turns out the joke was on me.

One day it hit me like a ton of bricks. There's nothing "out there" I can't impersonate, yet I felt unfulfilled and terrible. I'd invested 100's of hours of practice and emulation into the guitar and I had nothing to show for it really. I couldn't write a song. So I stopped playing guitar, I felt like I had conquered that mountain and there was nothing left to learn. I didn't hear any other guitarists that inspired me or made me want to play, so I just stopped playing for awhile.

I also discovered girls, Alice in Chains, TooL and Soundgarden, and drinking beer with my friends in the woods around this time.

Suddenly I realized I loved Soundgarden. The drums were awesome, the singer was awesome, and holy crap the lyrics are really good! I started actually hearing "The Song" instead of just hearing the guitar player and hearing his technique, or lack of. I discovered how cool "The Riff" is, and how the riff and the song are way more important then a solo and technique. People honestly just don't care about how good a guitar player is, they just want a cool song to listen to. I was inspired, I wanted to play guitar. I went home and picked up my guitar and right away started shredding, sweeping, all that crap. I was bummed. I wanted to write music by my hands kept doing Yngwie type stuff. So I quit. I didn't touch a guitar for over a year. I just listened to music a lot, hung out with my friends, and let my hands get good and weak, slow and clumsy. One day I picked up the acoustic out of the closet and started just strumming an Am chord. I thought, "oh, I'd forgotten how beautiful just strumming a chord can be!" Then I switched to a Cmaj, "oh that sounds nice!" Then to an F then a G. Then I just repeated those four chords over and over for about 10 minutes while I started humming along to the guitar, making up little melodies and just strumming my guitar. I was finally actually making music, something had changed inside me, I'd grown up some. I realized it doesn't matter how awesome you are at guitar because for one, there's always going to be someone much, much better then you, BUT (and it's a really big BUT) that doesn't mean you can't be a better musician. I've met lots of people that can tap with 10 fingers and do all kinds of really bad-ass stuff on the guitar, and I always present them with the same question/challenge, "What songs have you written?" Most of the time I find they haven't written any, or if they have, it tends to sound like Michael Angelo type stuff. It's a composition of "impressive stuff" linked together and called a song, but has no real passion, rhythm, or dynamics. It's strung together exercises. It might impress a guitar player, especially a beginning guitar player. But to someone who doesn't care about guitar, it's wanking. And it doesn't sound very good. This is why shredders never truly get popular. Sure you could argue that Vai, Yngwie, Angelo Batio are popular, and in a sense they are, but really they're much more popular with guitar players then the average person who wants to listen to music.

Hang out with some chicks and try playing some Yngwie cd's and watch how fast they turn the stereo onto some simple minded hip-hop that makes their booty move. They don't care about how good a musician they were just listening to is, they just want that groove.

Which brings me back to Technique VS Composition. No one cares about technique other then another guitar player. And even then he really only cares in the sense of, "Is this guy better then me? Or am I better then him?" He's not listening with a critical ear for music, he's listening with a critical ear for his own ego. Which is why I sometimes have a really hard time hanging out with guitar players. Too many of them value technique over music.

To wrap it up I'll say this. I use to practice all day every day, I wont anymore. I like keeping my hands a little bit sloppy, a little bit loose. I like the struggle of trying to pull off some cool run instead of being able to effortlessly whip through a run and have it sound clinical. But most importantly I find that by limiting my practicing I never lose sight of how beautiful it is to just sit there and strum an Am chord.

in short: play music on your guitar, instead of just playing with your guitar.


I hope this long winded observation makes sense to some of you and helps someone who's maybe feeling like they're in a rut or they're fingers want to keep playing the same licks and runs. Sit down, chill out and just strum some chords. Hum along to it, make up a little song. You'll feel a million times better. People just don't care about technique, they just want to hear a nice song. When you remind yourself of that it makes it easier not to be frustrated that some super hard "betcha can't play this!" lick is not going as well as you'd like.

Would you rather play to 300 people all moving and grooving to a fun to play song? Or would you rather impress that one jaded and bitter guitar player in the audience and bore to death the other 299 people? Me personally? I say, "Screw that guy!" play the hell out of a "simple" song and rock out with the 299 other people that just want to have some fun and listen to some cool music.

Peace my Axe-Slinging brothers.

-M-