What if guitarists acted like martial artists in the movies? Hi Eric, I went to Guitar Center last night to get some strings and I was challenged by all the students at GC, unprovoked mind you, and after humiliating them in a guitar off the teachers ran out their studios and it was on ! Strats Teles and Les Pauls flew off the wall as they grabbed them to challenge me! I finally did a f melodic minor over E dominant 7, Oh with so many flats and added 13th and 9ths it was over quick. Thanks Sensei but just a heads up though in case the GC teachers show up at the QB today squabbling 😂
I also discovered the same thing about my own playing when learning drums. You - that is I - only really had and have the most fun when my competence and technical vocabulary had reached the point to allow me to not think too much about what I'm going to play, but rather, just let my playing "talk". In order to reach that point you have play a lot, hours every day, and be patient and let your body absorb everything about what you are trying to achieve whilst you are practicing. Also accept the old adage " slow and steady wins the race" - get it right at a slow speed, and the accuracy will remain when you can increase the speed. Try to play it fast from the beginning and you will build-in inaccuracies which will always be there.
‘… the day you can do it quicker than you can decide to do it’ … reminds me of a similar phrase Jackie Stewart once said to James May, on ‘Top Gear’ … something like ‘never put your foot down unless you know you don’t have to take it off again’. I know the context and content differs somewhat (and both kinda get on my tits) but, grammatically, it’s a peach.
Brillant, wise words from a wise man with a great sense of humor, plus, as a French MF, I really appreciate his so British accent… Such a good player, source of inspiration… Thank you Mr Govan.
Yes! I live for the moments that I hear my hand doing what I need to learn and doing that without a laborious process of wrote. Music is reaction to sound in a language learned by listening.
His approach to music is the same as that of a language. One can learn a bunch of words or phrases (passive language) but it’s not until you but it into context and start using it that it becomes active language. When first learning a new language you have to think about every word, but eventually the thinking stops and it can just flow freely
The most important aspect of teaching, I find, is to always make it clear *why* the teacher wants the student to learn something. When I let my students solve a similar three times in a row and they remark something like "why do I have to do this, it's just the same thing again", I tell them "ah! See? You've learned to recognize the problem *and* you remember the solution to it. Nice!" The aim of learning is not to become the best, it's to have fun getting to where your abilities can lead you. You don't have to master the three-finger-death-punch and you don't have to be able to play like Guthrie. Nobody expects you to, nobody demands it. Guthrie got to where he is by having metric f-tons of fun doing it, and obviously by having a born skill to coordinate his fingers and think about what he's going to play instantly. A *lot* of that is training, but a big part of it is a born ability _to_ train it.
Me thinks there are few guitars that can actually handle the task of transmitting the genuine expression Govan suggested as an ideal. That is, guitar makers seem to have a passive knowledge of how to build a guitar to match the sort of dead guitar playing he’s talking about. Everyone needs to get back to fundamentals, maybe a retreat is in order.
I think I like listening to GG talk just as much as play. The knowledge, the humble nature and entertaining delivery... good stuff. My favorite line of his was during a rig rundown about a pedal that was taken from him - he said "it was stolen by Romans" because it disappeared in Italy. Made me lol. Love that guy.
This is similar to an off hand comment I said to my mentor the other day. He showed me a lot of new stuff and I was trying to use it in solos against tracks. Normally, I can play with feeling, but I was thinking too much. I said, "agh, I know the words, but now I have to learn how to use them in a sentence." Which, after I said it, made me realize that's how I felt with a chunk of the things I know but don't KNOW. You can use big words all you want, but if they don't fit the context and sentence structure, then it's worthless and won't sound right.
I’d be a completely different musician if my first “teachers” first lesson wasn’t “learn this joy to the world tab and I’ll see you next week”. I kinda wanna start advertising my own lessons.
