Techical nous or individualism whats better

The problem with these discussions is usually that non musicians come along and say "Hey, Hendrix, man, best guitarist ever" - when asked *why* they get a bit lost for an answer, other than it's what they've been told, and, er........ I can't blame them for not knowing anything about the use of I7#9 chords and whether that's innovative or not, my take on it is "fairly but not much compared to what some jazz guitarists got up to.... and Hendrix had a great deal of influences, including jazz."

BrufordFreak wrote: Robert Fripp is full of technical wizardry but even he admits that he has great difficulty matching his solos to his feelings--tat they lack resonance with his heart. I remember an interview with him from the early eighties in which he cited John McLaughlin as being his prime example of a guitar player who expresses himself and his heart with each and every solo--whereas he felt that he was almost never capable of achieving such. (Though I do remember seeing him soloing on "Sheltering Sky" on the Beat  tour when he got so emotional with a particular solo run that he almost got up off of his stool! Everybody in the crowd roared cuz we knew how close Sir Robert came to actually "letting go"--and how seldom he actually did so.)

This is a great post BF because it touches on one of the intangibles in our  field. The relationship of the heart and emotions with the creation of music and how important that may be to some artists.

When I first got into studio recording as an assistant engineer, I had the chance to have lunch with a record exec who had spent the entire last afternoon with David Gilmour. I was absolutely stunned and immidiately asked what Gilmour was like.
His relationship with Gilmour was strickly business so it's not like your going to see all sides of the man. But he said something that stuck with me for years; "Thank God Gilmour has that guitar to express his emotions otherwise he would never be able to express himself." That was my first realization of the connection between the heart, the inner person and his instrument, and it stuck with me for years.

It's interesting but sad that Fripp was so close to "letting go" that night and perhaps could not do what others did with their instrument: Express their feelings.


Edited by SteveG - September 19 2014 at 09:28

^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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.