[Disco King]

Originally Posted by teh b0lly!!1

you have to have a clear direction of where you want to go.
i find that the most important thing is to develope your musical 'brain', not your fingers.

i've been playing for around 14 years (man i feel old as shit typing this) and now i'm at a place that i can honestly say i don't get intimidated by amazingly technical guitar players anymore. i mean of course i get jealous when i see somebody playing something very technical that happens to be really cool or musical, but these two ends don't often meet.

the reason i'm saying this is, do you want to be a better guitarist to be able to impress people at guitar stores, or do you want to develop your playing to become a better musician?
even though you'd probably pick the latter, learning exotic scales, being obsessed with technique, and wanting to play faster - are pretty much the former.

Yeah, I'm also typically not interested in technical skill for the sake of it. Like, Yngwie Malmsteem and Steve Vai and all those guys, they may be good, but I find them boring as hell.

So, I'm not aiming that high in terms of technical skill, but I still wanna have some chops in order to broaden the range of things I'm able to play and create. Like, I find shredded solos in death or thrash metal kind of boring, but I'd love to be able to use shredding to link more melodic solo phrases in order to spice up solos. And I wanna learn interesting scales to create solos that sound different from the typical minor pentatonic stuff that's in a lot of rock music.

Originally Posted by teh b0lly!!1

just to be clear, this is not to shit on technical and theoretical proficiency. it's just that, imo, the real question is, do you want to be a great guitar player, or do you want to develop your skills as a tool for songwriting and musicianship.

I want to increase my skill level increase my songwriting ability, I guess. I feel like everything I write sounds kinda old hat. Like, generic chord progressions mostly using open chords or power chords, minor pentatonic leads, etc. I feel like I have no idea how to go about melody, and I usually write progressions without knowing how to go about writing the leads or the vocal line.

At the same time, I feel like part of the reason I want to use some less common scales and extended chords is because I'm not a good enough songwriter to make something unique out of the standard stuff, so I wanna write a song using a Byzantine scale or something because that's an instant ticket to making something sound different. Sometimes I think about how the vast majority of music I like uses the same major scale and triads and pentatonic scale, and how rock music doesn't tend to stray very far from the rudiments of classical theory and blues, and yet the music still sounds unique and interesting to me. If I were a better songwriter, I could probably also do something unique and interesting with the standard toolkit, but I am usually so bored with anything I come up with that I can't even bring myself to finish writing any songs.

Originally Posted by teh b0lly!!1

a musician i greatly admire always says that 'you should only strive to be as technically good as you need to be to facilitate the ideas in your head'. now that doesn't mean you should slack on your playing and not give a shit about how good you are - but rather, that you need to focus on the right things.

Even though I only have to be as good as necessary to express my ideas, I will never know exactly what skills I'll need to play whatever I will want to play, so I feel like just being a well-rounded player in general is a good idea. Plus, I might even get ideas from the things I learn.

Originally Posted by teh b0lly!!1

my tips would be:
1. play a lot, until you're able to anticipate what the phrase you're GOING to play is going to sound like. shorten the distance between what you want to hear, and playing it. improvise over songs. play along to songs.

Yeah, this is something I really want to do. I just kinda noodle around, and what comes out comes out. I can't hold an idea in my head and just crank it out, or do anything intentional and purposeful. It's more like, "hey, the song is in this key, so I'll just wank around in that key by playing random phrases using notes from the scale." Because I tend to get stuck in box positions because I have trouble linking them so that I can utilize the entire fretboard, it's always the same tired bluesy licks that sound like I'm doing some variations on going up and down a scale.

Originally Posted by teh b0lly!!1

4. write songs.

I should probably do more of this. I haven't written much for the past few years, because I feel like I'm not good enough to bother writing, and that I should increase my musical knowledge first so that I write better songs. But writing songs is probably the best practice for writing songs. I just have a hard time doing things I know are shit because it's demotivating and frustrating.

Originally Posted by Run To Me

Holy shit THIS

One thing I would add is pick an album you really like that's just a bit beyond what you think your current skill level will allow you to play, and then learn the whole thing. Everything I've learned on guitar came directly from learning songs via careful listening, tabs, and watching videos of the artist. I have never once sat and memorized a scale just for the hell of it; that's way too boring for me. I need context to get excited, and it sounds like you might also.

Yeah, I think I need to learn the discipline to learn songs all the way through. I'll pick a song I like and want to learn, will learn bits and pieces of them, and will get bored from working on the same song, and then will file it away with the intention of coming back to it later, but will never just finish the job. There are very few songs I have in my "repertoire," so if I were sitting around a campfire holding a guitar, I would probably have nothing to play.

I recently told myself I'd suck it up and learn just one easy song. Started learning "Into the Void," and I have everything memorized but the solo. And I keep telling myself I'll finish that part, too, but I'm so bored by the song that I just can't get myself to do it.