Keira WitherKay wrote:
but i have in the last years settled myself in the solo fingerstyle type style of playing and the list of awesome players in this genre is incredibly long .... and the skill levels through the roof as this is a very complicated genre that requires the complete use of the musicians instrument ......and one where a musician can't ever "fake it" and need the multi tasking and multi rhythmic ability that drummers have of doing more than one thing rythmically at the same time , and that is years of rehearsal in itself...
It's an interesting challenge for a guitar player. There's a long-running joke about people who go to their first Richard Thompson concert. Thompson plays mostly solo these days (he tours with a band, but not every year). So our typical RT Newbie sits there for a while and then asks "why isn't the other guitarist on stage?". Thompson has this skill that Keira is alluding too... being able to keep multiple parts of an arrangement going. In his case the challenge is a little different because a lot of what he's doing is songs that were recorded on an album with a band, so there's a strong rhythmic component as well. Given his reputation as a player the punters want to hear the solos, but then has to render the song in a way that it's still recognisable, lay down a bass part and still get the solo on top.
And whilst I agree with the point that Keira is making, that this kind of multi-tasking is a big challenge for a player, I think she has understated this challenge ?
A couple of years ago Thompson took part in some radio series where musicians would talk about what a record that influenced them. He nominated some compilation of pieces by jazz pianists. He said that to do what he was trying to do on a guitar the guitarist has to mimic what the pianist does - melody on one hand, bass or rhythm with the other. But of course you can't assign the hands in that way on a guitar. (Well... Ok, the Stanley Jordans of the world can, but then you have to do a lot of tapping and that means sacrificing other things.) So, Thompson continued, because you have one hand having to finger both sets of notes, and the other hand having to provide the timings of the two parts, what the guitarist has to do is not seperate the function assigned to each hand but to
split the function of each hand.
Which, when you think about it, is quite a job.
Guys who can do this are not to be pooh-poohed. And again Keira is right - this must take years of assiduous work.
