Techical nous or individualism whats better

Manuel wrote: SteveG wrote: ^ I agree but I  think that Barre, as well as others, are talking about the need for a personal style mixed with technical expertise. Absolutely. You can not play a great solo, no matter how much you practice, if you don't have technique first, and practice will also enhance your technique. That being said, Personal style is necessary as long as your talent is there, to set you apart from others, otherwise, you'll just play and sound good (maybe), but won't stamp your name in music history.

Tapfret wrote: Nothing pisses my off more than the "technical ability=masturbation" argument. The argument is analogous to saying your favorite doctors are general practitioners and surgeons are medical masturbators. It is paradoxically self indulgent to accuse an artist/performer of having no feeling because you don't feel it. That all things mean the same thing to all people is rife with an absurd level of arrogance. Nobody but the artist is privy to his/her motivation. Prog/fans community in  particular should be cautious of this attitude considering that opinion is one of the basic tenets of the general disregard for the genre.

Originality is often lacking these days, and originality is not dependent on technique.
What is needed is to tap into one's unique personality, and in this time of wall to wall information access, it is very hard to hear that inner voice.
There is chemistry inside the individual and between individuals, and that is where creativity is to be found.
Creativity is magic, and magic is outside of method.

Nothing pisses my off more than the "technical ability=masturbation" argument. The argument is analogous to saying your favorite doctors are general practitioners and surgeons are medical masturbators. It is paradoxically self indulgent to accuse an artist/performer of having no feeling because you don't feel it. That all things mean the same thing to all people is rife with an absurd level of arrogance. Nobody but the artist is privy to his/her motivation. Prog/fans community in  particular should be cautious of this attitude considering that opinion is one of the basic tenets of the general disregard for the genre.

Edited by Tapfret - September 30 2014 at 00:44

Maybe it's that not just music but any kind of art needs some kind of individual genius' vision guiding it to be really interesting and innovative in content, but this imagination has to be disciplined by a certain degree of technical skill to be systematically composed into a well thought out structure to be appreciated by the audience? Depending of in nature depending on the specific cultural audience the artist has in mind.

So if it speaks to my buddy's soul too and we begin to see aliens without smoking nothing. Far out, man, far out.

I'm not primarily (-I didn't say exclusively-) interested in expressing emotions on guitar and am not really interested in any guitarists for their emotions any more than I am in knowing my favorite sci-fi author's emotions. I am mainly interested in work that takes one outside of oneself. Work that maybe contains emotions, but embedded within some invented world. For me, I prefer the musical equivalent of Impressionism over Expressionism. I think 'intangibles' might be a more broadly applicable term than 'emotion'.

I must agree with those who have emphasized how technical ability opens the door to intangibles. Ability to play fast can be (I didn't say must be) quite essential to expressing oneself. Expressing oneself or exploring intangibles is in the end about making decisions on the fly, and cultivating the ability to think faster can be of great assistance. Even a slow passage sounds better once a guitarist is warmed up.

I'm pretty sure Guthrie Govan can play anything. He can be flashy and technical, but he can also deliver something like this.



So yeah, a bit of both.

What matters is the artistic genius' natural talent for translating intellectual ideas into artistic expression by systematizing the free imagination's products into a coherent systematized artistic expression, in a way that appears natural by appealing to the shared human faculties of rational understanding and sensory space/time experience.

Hence, the genial artwork will in turn stimulate transcendental reason's capacity to triumph over the physical forces of the universe by uncovering the deeper existential truths into the noumenal world's causal effect behind the sensory world of appearances.

^Good point Catch but classical musicians can't get up and boogie either. Cool idea though.

Edited by SteveG - September 19 2014 at 10:11