Oh cool! My favorites of his are Electric Hurricane and his Castlevania 2 video. =) It always amazes me how much he still practices. I always kinda figured that once you got to a certain level of skill things just sorta weren't as difficult anymore, but he works hours and hours every day on improving. I suppose it's not much different than wanting to be great at anything in life, but I never really realized how much work it took and that even people who are really insanely skilled still have to practice daily.
I think it can be compared to anything in science... Learning how to play your first chords and the notes on the neck is like learning the fundamental equations in physics... Sort of tough because the whole idea is new to you, almost like a foreign language... Once you get to a certain point and you are playing the more intense stuff, like progressive rock, you are getting into some pretty intense calculus... It's more of the same, so to speak, but at a completely different level... Then when you get into jazz and fusion guitar, it's like quantum mechanics... Shit just sorta stops making sense, but you can make it work....
Question: Is practicing an instrument emotionally draining? I know that I can't write for more than a couple of hours at a time I get mentally and emotionally exhausted after a day's work. Is it much the same in music, or is the creative process a little less intense than that?
Practicing an instrument like guitar can be extremely emotionally AND physically draining... Back when I first was really getting into it, I was playing 5+ hours a day, most of which was to a metronome practicing scales and different techniques... None of it is really musical or sounds great, but it's all foundational...It takes a LONG time to NOT sound like a completely annoying and clueless moron.... All through the memorization of notes and patterns, your back hurts cause you are hunched over, your wrist is killing you from being bent out of shape, and your finger tips are bleeding until you can get calluses... Every now and then you hit a wall where you try and try and try and just can't make any measurable progress, and many people give up....
It's not like writing music in that it's not really quite as subjective in terms of the "progress" you make... Either you can play the b major scale in triplets at 100 bpm or you can't... Either you can play all of the sweet child of mine's intro riff, or you cant....
Learning to play guitar and write music in my opinion is a lot different than writing lyrics... There are really set rules by which you should follow if you want to sound "good", at least in pop, rock, blues, and other popular genres... You are limited in terms of what notes you can play in given keys, what chords you can play in progressions, the limits of the instrument itself.... I'd go so far as to say that writing actual 'good' guitar music takes far less creativity than does writing 'good' lyrics... Most of the time, at least....
At least all that was my experience...
Watch this starting at 3:00.... This is the type of shit I did for hours a day trying to become a guitar god....
