I was thinking the other day, as most men do when they have lived long enough to look back without flinching, that I have been playing the guitar for over fifty five years. That is a long time to stay with anything. Long enough to have worn grooves in the wood and in myself. Long enough to know the truth of it.
The truth is simple. I am not that good a player.
That is not modesty. It is not fishing in a bucket for comfort or a “there, there”. It is just the measure of things. There are young players, half a lifetime behind me, who can outplay me without breaking sweat. I do not resent them. I only wonder how I have travelled so far and arrived here. I never saw it as a race.
I play by position. By shape. By the memory of where things sit beneath my fingers. My ear is serviceable but not sharp. Like the rest of me it was never trained. Sometimes I think it is made of wood. Guitar players talk about tone woods as if they were sacred texts. They argue over types and grains and ageing. It keeps the shops busy and the prices high. All bullshit but understandable. People like to find reasons for things. My problem is not the wood of the guitar. It is the wood of my hearing.
So I work with what I have. Geometry. Patterns. Scale systems. I let the fingers move and the mind follow. The sound comes after. It happens quickly now, in small flashes. Microseconds v milliseconds. If the sound that comes back is what I meant to say, or close enough, I accept it. That is a good day. I suppose I see what I’m playing rather than hear it first. This was probably not the model of creativity used by Mozart, Vivaldi or Miles Davis. But it kind of works.
I know chords and scales. I know a few moves. I can copy a line if I must. I work it out. These are tools. I use them to cover what I do not know. Over time the tools become familiar. Familiarity becomes a kind of map. I can move across the fretboard without falling through it. It is not scholarship. It is navigation. You need the right path to get home. Stick with it. When you find a method that works for you, don’t try to change it.
I have written songs, though I prefer to say I have made them up. Written sounds grand. Like you really knew what was to come. I have built them up the way a man might fix the plumbing in his house. Careful. Within limits. Never straying too far from what I know will hold. I avoid certain moves. I lean on others. I see the shapes before I hear them. It is not how the masters might do it. It is how I do it. Dave Brubeck, Jackson Pollock and Eric Clapton may agree up to a point. Caravaggio, Tchaikovsky and Da Vinci maybe not so.
Art is full of shortcuts. Some are honest. Some are accidents. Some are called modern so they can be explained. People mock what they do not understand. They say “my child could have done that”. Perhaps a child could have begun it. Beginning is not the same as finishing. The path from idea to ending is rarely straight. Sticking with the principle helps. It can also choke the life out of a thing. Mistakes take you to the edge of something.
In an artistic context, knowledge is power, if you allow it to be and that’s just how it is. Accept it. Discipline is good, you’ll be tight, you may be all over that King Crimson material or shining on in the Viennese string quartet. Ignorance may be seen by some as inferior but in it’s raw form it just might test or stretch the system. Enthusiasm and energy knock down walls. But you have to judge for yourself.
The tools you use make a difference. A guitar that fights back. A synth you don’t quite understand but you squeeze new sounds from. A voice that’s close to tuneless but full of soul or emotion and expression, or is just plain seductive. Software that mixes or bends and throws out unexpected tones. Tape speed mistakes, hiss, bleeding across tracks, mics in the wrong place, misheard or misread lyrics, accidents that happen in the moment. Keeping on playing where the others have stopped. Use the things that move you.
I do not know if I am a free spirit, stubborn or just undisciplined. I no longer care. I have been at it too long to worry about labels. What matters is smaller than that. A phrase landing clean. A note bending just enough. Staying in time. Serving the song. Finding something that sounds like me. Feeling good about how I arrived at that moment.
That is the point now. Not brilliance. Not speed. Not applause.
Just the few seconds when the guitar answers back faithfully.
After fifty five years I am still at it. Still feeling for the right note in the dark. Still building with blunt tools. Connecting the sparks. Still trusting instinct over theory.
It is not pretty but I’m getting used to it.
And that will be enough.
People may say. “In the end AI tunes will drown everything else out.”
Then we’ll have AiTunes.
Not sure about that.
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