Wizard wrote
aubs1 wrote
Please don't take this the wrong way....
I was being intentionally provocative ... and am guilty of a thread hijack (apologies)
Certainly not taken the wrong way. ?
This leads to an interesting question about 'formal' training.
Is it for the theory? Which can be easily learned from the internet ...
Or is it to establish 'proper' playing technique? (which didn't seem to trouble Jimi Hendrix)
Was Hendrix's actual technique that unusual? His music shattered barriers, yes, but his technique???
There are laws of physics involved here - and you can't buck them. I find that most top players do a lot of things "right".
IMO you do have to separate essential points of technique from slavish adherence to text books.
To use cricket as an example, Jacques Kallis is a very correct player with a technique right out of the coaching manuals. Brian Lara was not - crouched too much in his stance, backlift was too high. Yet in the key moments Lara was still doing everything right - head still and over the ball, everything lining up correctly at the moment the bat hit the ball.
So it is, I think, with guitarists. It might look weird or flamboyant, but it will still be correct in terms of the way that fingers come down on the strings, the angle of the plectrum etc.
Hendrix was not, I think, that unusual in terms of playing technique other than that
a) he had mastered many techniques at a very high level
b) he had big hands.
The shockers that I see in rock guitarists tend to be right hand techniques when finger picking EG John Martyn who seems to use thumb and just one finger a lot of the time. Knopfler's right hand technique is pretty unusual and unorthodox - though his left ain't. Richard Thompson's right hand technique is also eye catching, but in fact he holds the pick just like any good teacher will tell you to.
I think in most cases the truly jaw-dropping guitarists don't so much have unorthodox technique, it's more the case that they have taken something to a very high level.
Musicians who eschew technique can run into problems I think, because the gap between what you want to express and what you can express is too great. I thought there was quite a lot of this going on in punk music with the guitarists either
a) having rather more chops than they confessed to having
b) running out of ideas, or ideas that they could actually execute
