[AX7221]

Originally Posted by osian

ITwinkle twinkle!!!!!! Sorry! I'm one of those people who if ever found themselves playing 'Greensleeves' would quietly open a vein whilst sitting in a warm bath!
I know a lot can be learned from such tunes but I find it physically immpossible to play them! Why IS that?
Thanks again to you all.

That is quite a graphic metaphor! I guess the reason you be you're looking at the short term? Which isn't bad, there's different ways to go about things, like I do things for short term gains then other things for the long term gains. When you wrote "there's a lot to be learn from such tunes" to hit the nail right on the head, basically it sounds like you recognize that's its beneficial you just don't have the motivation right now to go down that route.

The whole purpose of playing guitar is to enjoy it, and if we could, we would choose to only do what we enjoy the most, unfortunately that isn't the case. I've heard an anology for college that I think applies here too. People don't have to go to college (atleast more so 15-20 years ago), people can get an unskilled job, and they'll get job training over the years and just say after 20 years they get a job position "A". Now the person can on the other hand can go to college then when he/she graduate he/she start working at the job position "A".

Okay, so I used just mess around on guitar, I didn't know any chords and I didn't know any scales, and I had fun. Basically all I did was play fifth and fourth harmonies all over the place (note: I didn't know what a perfect fifth was nor did I know what a perfect fourth was I just knew if I played a note and another note on the same fret 1 string up or 2 frets up and 1 sting up I liked the way it sounded). However after some time that wasn't enough, and I wanted more.

So I started to learn scales and intervals. I learned the term "perfect fifth" and "perfect fourth," but I also learned a whole slew of stuff that would have taken a long time to figure out. Something that I found interesting was when I looked at my old recordings they were basically all in the minor key, but I didn't ulitize all 7 notes scale, I just knew some of them. So my brain was all setup up to hear minor keys, and so when I would experiment with say a fifth harmony on the root then a fifth harmony 4 half steps up (a major third) it sounded bad. So, when I learn the major scale it too opened up a ton of new stuff to me.

In short, play to have fun, but at some point everything you know just won't cut it and you will be willing to do the boring stuff (learn more things) to expand your horizons...maybe you will even learn from greensleeves...minus the graphic analogy.