Ever work on anything and never get it right?

[ye olde fretmonkey]

I'm not as diligent at practicing as I really ought to be...time is a harsh mistress for me these days. But it's hugely frustrating to practice, practice, practice on something and still not have it come together. I must have played "Arkansas Traveler" 500 times in the last couple of months and can never get it to sound like anything. Let alone get it to sound like Jimmy Bryant. Unless I have played it 30 times already that very day, I can't play it for someone without going plink plink plink on it. It's just embarrassing.

Ditto for "Happy Go Lucky Guitar" and "Aw Heck" by Don Rich.

And we won't even get into my ongoing problem with "Solo Flight" by Benny Goodman/Charlie Christian.

[chickenpicker]

I think the way you play it sounds pretty cool to me. Does it have to sound like Jimmy Bryant?

And yes, I too, constantly make mistakes when playing.

[namida]

my problem usually arises in the difference from my own phrasing so i guess i really suck at coping. my only solution, i just wing it from how i feel it :)

[cowboytwang]

Ever work on anything and never get it right?

For 44 and 1/2 years I've been working on life, I ain't even close to getting it right. That's assuming there is a right way, or maybe I've got it right and everything else is wrong!!

[TG]

That's funny. I've been trying to get the hang of Arkansas Traveller for ages too. Some days it kind of happens but much of the time it comes out a mush. Mr. Bryant had a really good right hand...and a left one to go with it.

People have different hands with different nervous systems. Some players like Gary Moore and SRV could do whole passages using really fast downstrokes that my hands simply cannot do. I have to up-and-down pick to go that fast. That's going to make my interpretation of their playing a bit different with an accurate imitation nigh on impossible.
Same goes for tapping. My right hand just will not coordinate properly for it. I don't want to do EVH/Steve Vai shred tapping...just a bit of tasty Jeff Beck style tapping to add a bit of 'texture' now and again. But I can't seem to do it very well.

So I just play the way I can play and try to get better within those physical limits. The funny thing is, other guitarists find me a 'fast' player since I like to do bends and hammer-ons/pull-offs. I cheat. :)

I find Keith Richards an inspiration. His hands aren't ultra-fast or super-dextrous either, but he does good stuff with what he's got.
And then there's Django Reinhardt........

[TG]

Originally Posted by cowboytwang

.

For 44 and 1/2 years I've been working on life.....

When's your birthday? I'm 44 and a half too.

[cowboytwang]

Originally Posted by TG

When's your birthday? I'm 44 and a half too.

November 4th

[TG]

Me too. November 4th.

Cool.

[Telenator]

There are so many good songs out there to play!

Some songs I pick up like nothing because they suit my style and ability. Other songs, I just can't play to save my life no matter how hard I try.

I let them go. I accept that some songs just aren't in me so I spend my efforts working on stuff that suits me better.

Songs with down picking like, the intro to "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" I find nearly impossible to play. But a tune like "Snortin' Whiskey & Drinkin' Cocaine by Pat Travers comes to me in 5 minutes. Even though the Travers tune is far more complex, it better suits my natural abilities making the song better suited to my style.

I'm not saying "give up." But I am say, try to spend some of that time learning what your natural tendencies are and then build on that. Don't beat yourself up over things that just don't fit right with you.

[chubbyjackson]

Funny, when I saw the title of this thread the first thing that came to mind was anything by Jimmy Bryant...

[zombywoof]

Yeah, virtually every Richard Thompson solo. That guy's phrasing is beyond human comprehension.

[ye olde fretmonkey]

Originally Posted by TG

Me too. November 4th.

Cool.

Aug 13 for me, I'll be 46 somehow.

[Tim Bowen]

I think trying to ape somebody else's ideas is a great way to build harmonic, theoretical, improvisational, and mechanical vocabularies, at least initially (and even over the course of time)... or - if you've been doing this for a while, it's a cool way to jumpstart new ideas... however - and maybe it's just because I have a short attention span, or because I don't have call to cop something verbatim - I'd rather use such to spark me own lame-brained and fumble-fingered stuff, for what it's worth... isn't "style" built at least as much on what we can't do, as it is, what we can? Perhaps that's a "cop out".

#46 for me on 11/16/'06, which will be #78 for me mum, as we share birthdays.

[J-man]

Originally Posted by ye olde fretmonkey

Ever work on anything and never get it right?

Virtually every song I try to learn.

[Joel Terry]

Originally Posted by TG

People have different hands with different nervous systems. Some players like Gary Moore and SRV could do whole passages using really fast downstrokes that my hands simply cannot do. I have to up-and-down pick to go that fast. That's going to make my interpretation of their playing a bit different with an accurate imitation nigh on impossible.

Same goes for tapping. My right hand just will not coordinate properly for it. I don't want to do EVH/Steve Vai shred tapping...just a bit of tasty Jeff Beck style tapping to add a bit of 'texture' now and again. But I can't seem to do it very well.

So I just play the way I can play and try to get better within those physical limits. The funny thing is, other guitarists find me a 'fast' player since I like to do bends and hammer-ons/pull-offs. I cheat. :)

Tom has hit on a subject that, in my opinion, is rarely, if ever, directly addressed: The differences in the anatomy and physiology of musicians.

Yes, we're all similarly built around the same template, but we're not made the same. The fastest runner in the world isn't the fastest just because he or she trains a great deal (although that certainly helps). They had the rhythm to begin with; the coordination; a predisposition toward maximum efficiency in the economies of movement; predisposition toward maximum efficiency in inspiration/expiration in order to minimize oxygen debt; predisposition toward etc., etc.--the exact set of physical attributes needed to be the fastest. In a sense, a gifted body.

I don't intend for this to taken as arrogance on my part, but I have a superb ear. A gifted ear. I can hear something once or twice, and pretty much know how it's played. In fact, this is how I learned to play, and how I continue to learn. But I have a physical ceiling, especially with regard to clean speed playing. I can listen to, say, Jimmy Bryant or Pat Metheny, and follow what they're doing mentally, but I can't make my fingers follow, no matter how hard I try.

I'm by no means a defeatist. But there's just a certain point in my playing ability where I max out and the envelope starts pushing back.

So, yes, to condense yet another one of my famous verbose responses, I do have trouble playing lots of things, regardless of intense, repeated efforts to master them. That's why we hold those players in such high esteem. We marvel at their abilities. They do what few, if any, can. And that also goes for musicians with a gifted sense of phrasing, a gifted sense of rhythm and polyrhythm, a gifted sense of melody and/or harmony, etc.

I know I'll never have the dexterity to play like the fellows I've mentioned above, or Steve Morse, Andrew York, George Benson, Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Pass, and any number of other guitarists and musicians--but I'm OK with that. I have my own style, and I'm very proud of that.

Joel

[PK]

Originally Posted by ye olde fretmonkey

I'm not as diligent at practicing as I really ought to be...time is a harsh mistress for me these days. But it's hugely frustrating to practice, practice, practice on something and still not have it come together. I must have played "Arkansas Traveler" 500 times in the last couple of months and can never get it to sound like anything. Let alone get it to sound like Jimmy Bryant. Unless I have played it 30 times already that very day, I can't play it for someone without going plink plink plink on it. It's just embarrassing.

Ditto for "Happy Go Lucky Guitar" and "Aw Heck" by Don Rich.

And we won't even get into my ongoing problem with "Solo Flight" by Benny Goodman/Charlie Christian.

I let my son take the glory on Arkansas Traveler as his fiddle playing is unbelievable for an 11 year old :). I bang out the rythmn on AK Traveler and toss in a subtle lick from time to time ;)

PK

[chickenpicker]

Tom & Joel make a good point there about individuals with exceptional natural talent - I know that I could practise forever, and I would never be able to play like John McLaughlin - players like this simply have a higher ceiling. Nothing I can do about that.

One thing I noticed relatively recently, is to do with soloing: I usually make solos up as I go along, basing them on scales that fit the song. I don't learn solos and repeat them note for note each time. Anyway, I've found that I start the solo, then I "hear" the next few notes in my head, and play them, then "hear" the next phrase, and so on. It's sort of subconscious, but it's there. I wonder if I reach my ceiling because i can only store so many notes in myhead before playing them? Maybe better players have more note-storage capacity, or maybe they're wired differently so their notes don't needto be stored in their heads before playing.

[winny pooh]

In classical music there is a firmly established "method" to playing an instrument and as such they have over decades and centuries found out the best way to get from A to B.
The classical musicians know that with this "right way" of using your hands etc to play that getting close to technical mastery is not that impossible, it just takes lots of time and lots of practice. (look how many amazingly skilled pianists are out there)

Electric guitarists by contrast have only had their instrument around for a few decades and there is not that much standardised methodology for us to recognise bad and good playing habits. Most of us also never start playing by taking lessons, we pick up things from friends and often teach ourselves (i'm part of this category)
So the fundamentals of left/right hand positioning and use are never discussed.

The downside of this is that may players don't know how to adequately use their hands, the upside is that as a result of this we have generated great musical creativity because we discovered and explored instead of having a rigid musical framework like classical musos.

[captain gorgeous]

i've been trying to play "so what" like ronny jordan since i was at school. i can play the notes (it's not technically hard) but that ultra-precise but still swinging feel has, so far, eluded me.

i'm not sure if it's my musical brain, force of habit, fear of screwing up or a physical inability that hampers my development as a guitarist. probably all to some extent!

i find that if i ever "sing" a solo in my head i come up with some pretty interesting stuff but when it actually comes to the break in a song i tend to clam-up and just fall back on phrases that i know will work. i play it safe, which get boring pretty quick.

so the other day i decided that i was going to "write" a couple of solos by recording myself singing something interesting over a chord progression and then transcribe it for guitar and learn it. haven't tried it yet, but reckon it'll be an interesting exercise.