There is only one reliable way to rate one's own ability: Sebber’s patented “Face-Melt Scale”. It’s pretty simple if you can handle rudimentary mathematics.
After you perform a solo you count how many faces have melted in the crowd as a result of your fretboard pyrotechnics. Then you perform the following simple calculation to give you a percentage:
(A/B)*100
WHERE: A = Number of faces melted
AND: B = Approximate total crowd headcount
AND: 100 = The whole integer 100
The following (non-linear) scale is for guideline purposes only and can be affected by factors such as the nature of the gig (festival, stadium, bar/pub, prison, retirement homes, etc...) and how much the audience sucks (as opposed to the band, and pay attention to this as it can be VERY IMPORTANT in order to protect one's fragile ego from low face-melt percentage scores):
0% melted faces – “Uber-Suckage”: Either your solo stank like Joburg Water’s Northern Waste Water Works or the audience is utter crap. The most likely eventuality is it’s you that sucks, but if you're of the aforementioned fragile egotistical type, just convince yourself that the latter is the case. “Uber-suckage” is the most commonly achieved level on the scale, best advice for next time is to at least show up with a basic understanding of a pentatonic.
1-5% melted faces – “Very Poor”: The few people whose faces appear to have melted are likely to be in the 5-odd percent of people who suffer from naturally, or permanently, melted faces. In these cases small levels of personal satisfaction in the situation can be reclaimed by firing the soundman, or kicking the drummer, or by convincing yourself that the audience sucks donkey turds. This is where I’m at when I play out, generally, and if I don’t kick the drummer (I’ve run out of soundmen to sack), I tend to happily day-dream about that fat dude sitting at the corner table and how he’s blowing a double portion of steaming fresh mule droppings. The only way to improve here is to learn something other than a pentatonic, and please make an effort to make it some kind of interesting when you give it another bash.
6-10% melted faces – “Below Parr”: Ok, the score may officially rank as “Below Parr” or "Poor" but you have at least achieved something. Bearing in mind the 5-odd percent of people who have naturally melted faces, you have now, at least, managed to effect some peoples’ facial rigidity... only 1-5% of them, but that is at least something, take heart! You’ve finally melted a face that isn’t your own (after it’s been plied with half a bottle of Stroh Rum)! What this means is you’re still torturing the pentatonics, but now it’s more like water boarding: you’re finally getting some answers out of the bastardos!
11-15% melted faces – “Average”: Some may wonder at this and that “Average” may be too generous a rating for this kind of percentage score, but really it all comes down to the fact that it is, actually, rather difficult to melt someone's face when it's more than a few feet away and you’ve got little more than a guitar, amp and whatever sound reinforcement you may have. The Institute of Studying Stuff came up with figures that suggest a large but unspecified proportion of normal, or “garden variety”, gig-goers have notoriously difficult faces to melt down. This can be due to a variety of reasons, including the fact that a decent proportion of gig-goers are also guitarists, so their natural resistance to the phenomenon of face melt is attributed to their ubiquitous confidence that they could have done the solo better than you, even if they actually couldn't! There are also totally mentally deficient individuals who suffer from an abject retardation that makes them absolutely incapable of appreciating a guitar solo no matter how brilliantly executed (drummers feature prominently in this demographic), and thus have faces almost completely immune to face melt unless you also employ a blow-torch, oxy-acetylene burner or some similar high temperature device.
16% - 25% melted faces – “Pretty Decent Like” (pronounced in the fashion of someone from the northwest of England): Now we’re talkin’! You have successfully melted the faces of a significant proportion of the audience, who, if they were to divert their attention from you and your awesomeness to look around themselves, would probably think that they’d been instantly and inexplicably transported onto the set of the movie Robocop, specifically the scene where one of the bad dudes gets doused in corrosive chemicals and things suddenly get all melty. Of course, when one suffers from a dose of guitar solo-induced involuntary face melt, they tend to be unaware of their condition until someone points it out to them, often in a verbal exchange that follows this dialog (verbatim!):
- Gig-Goer #1: “Errrrr, dude, your face has melted!”
Gig-Goer #2: “No way man, that guitar solo rocked, now help me find my face otherwise I’ll have nothing left to melt if that lead guitarist lets rip again! Actually I’m now going to run in front of this speeding car”
Sound Effect: SPLAT
26% - 49% melted faces – “Outstandin’!” (pronounced in the fashion of someone native to the northeast of England): Ok, pretty much the only way to get more than 25% of the audience’s faces to melt is to let rip with another guitar solo before most of the faces you melted off with the last solo revert back to their pre-solo unmelted states. If you do this right, and time it right, then what happens is a cascade effect, almost a Mexican wave of face meltage that ripples from one side of the audience to the other. Sadly, before this can happen, a hell of a lot of faces in the crowd have completely slipped their moorings and have hit the floor, each most probably accompanied by a sound akin to that of a soaking wet bath towel being dropped on a large rock from a great height. In large audiences the sound of hundreds, or thousands, of melted faces hitting the turf, if you can hear them over the sound of your own awesomeness, can kind of gross you out, but don’t be distracted because the closer you are to 50% you approach a “critical mass” kind of event. At this stage it’s perfectly possible for melted faces to accumulate into waves that can lap against the front of the stage… if no stage, then prepare for the fact that you, and your rig, can be inundated with a literal mass of melt-face on a so-called-AGW-induced glacial melt-orgy!
50 – 100% melted faces – “War Criminal” (doesn’t matter how it’s pronounced): Oh boy, it’s big! You are now completely consumed by your own breath-taking, total and utter awesomeness, that you don’t even care what carnage is occurring in front of you. By now the likes of you and I are, truly, imagining the sort of out-of-proportion insanity that can only be described via some kind of simile: 14 on the Richter Scale perhaps? Because I’ve never been anywhere even vaguely, minutely close to this, I can only imagine that Joe Bonamassa, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and many, many others, have often looked up to the audience after offering them some of their best, and they see a crowd solely populated, by this guy:
Freaky!
