I’ve become more and more disheartened with my music and playing generally. Playing guitar has been pretty much my life for well, more than half of my life now but i still get to thinking that even against my better judgement, music is something you’re either born with or will never really ‘get’. I don’t mean that you can’t learn an instrument and make a good fist of becoming a great player, i just mean, to really get in there to that special Hendrix, Miles Davis, Django Reindhart place, you’ve either got it or you don’t.
I go through different spells of practicing and then not really practicing, have done from the beginning, when i started playing, but i always hear and watch people play and think to myself ‘what is that, that they seem to have and i don’t?’
I’m almost convinced that it’s not just about practice, i know and have known plenty of people that never really practiced but just have that special ingredient in their playing.
Obviously if you repeat that certain lick or scale or phrase over and over then you can get it really good and fluent but that’s not really it, because once you can play that killer lick, it’s really about where and how you put it, in a musical context. You can’t just go playing it willy nilly, it’d sound shit. That for me is where the argument ends as far as practice goes because your ears are more important to hearing what’s going on around you and being able to play the right notes than just having practiced playing really fast.
You can of course, train your ear, but i have to wonder if a certain amount of that is just pissing in the wind because, honestly, how much ‘ear training’ did a 20 something Jimi Hendrix get to do before the guitar became some extension of his body, totally in tune with his thoughts and ideas where he didn’t really have to think separately about what he would sing and what he was playing on the guitar, it was just one and the same?
The journey is the thing for me, so i’m not giving up playing, but i am almost sure that being at one with an instrument, and i mean any instrument, i truly believe Hendrix would have been as gifted had he been a sax player, is something you are born with, you can learn to imitate the illusion of it, as many do, but you’ll never really be ‘hearing Jimi’ so to speak.
Over and out
