PRESENCE - Volume 79
Inspiration For Guitarists
I got a comment on a recent video that I've seen many variations of over the years:
When you stop thinking about “notes” and start thinking about sounds, music can happen.
Sounds deep, right? Very zen. Very "I'm not like other guitar players."
I've complained before about the opposite kind of comment, the “jazzholes” who show up under an intermediate video and start showing off their knowledge of altered dominants that nobody asked about. That's one end of the spectrum, and it makes people feel like they'll never know enough.
This comment is the other end. And honestly, it might do more damage.
It's the myth of the musical “mystic”. The person who "makes their own rules," who never learned theory, who just feels it. As if great guitar playing happens through divine intervention if you just clear your mind of all that boring note stuff.
It doesn't work like that.
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit: even the pros who claim they don't know any theory know it in their hands. They might not be able to name the scale but their fingers know the shape, because they've played it a thousand times. That's not the absence of theory. That's theory learned by repetition instead of by name.
There are plenty of fantastic guitarists who haven’t gone deep into theory:
Billy Gibbons probably couldn't sight-read a Steely Dan chart.
Mark Knopfler would likely be lost playing a jazz standard.
David Gilmour wouldn't have survived an audition for Frank Zappa's band.
These are three of my favorite guitarists, I’m not knocking them at all. All three admit they don’t know a ton of theory, but it's not that they know no theory. It’s that they went deep on fundamentals and stopped there. That's a completely legitimate way to become a great guitarist. Upper-level theory isn't required for most music. Conviction beats complexity almost every time.
But that's different from what the comment is selling. The comment is selling the idea that thinking about notes at all is the problem, that structure is the enemy of feel.
In my experience, it's the opposite. The players who skip the foundations because they want to "just feel it" don't get to skip the work — they just do it the slow way. They're randomly hunting for the right note over and over, re-learning the same lick in twelve keys because they never built the map that would've shown them it's the same shape. They mistake confusion for freedom.
There's a sweet spot between the “jazzhole” who can't stop explaining and the “mystic” who refuses to learn anything. Learn the foundations - The Number System, the CAGED System, and the Landmark Pentatonic System. I mean really learn them, in your hands, not just on paper, and you get to the "just feel it" stage much faster. The theory doesn't fight the feel. It's what gets you there sooner.
That's basically my whole teaching philosophy in one paragraph.
Talk soon, Dustin
P.S. If you've ever felt like you were "supposed to" just feel it and it hasn't clicked, that's not a you problem. That's a foundations problem.