The truth about old school players...

man guitar was so much better when i was growing up you know how many times i heard that many many times and each time i would hear that i would think that there we go here's the nostalgia of the old man speaking and you're wrong but that's fine you can believe that well it turns out it may have been right [Music] so i started playing guitar in the mid-90s 1993 i did my first electric guitar and at the time it was all about lead playing i was into the hard rock scene you know i was 15 years old and i just wanted to be cool and my guitar heroes at the time were slash kirk hammett and joe satriani so soon after receiving my first electric guitar i started taking guitar lessons with this local guy richard richard was a really cool guy we connected on a lot of different things but we didn't really connect on musical taste see richard was an older guy and he was old school i was all about those modern bands and richard to my tastes was kind of stuck in the 60s richard was all about hendrix jimmy page tony iomi i mean cool bands but to my tastes it is a little too old school i mean yeah there were some cool things in the older bands that i recognized but man not as cool as what i grew up with and so years passed and i was always really interested in the the modern guitar world always thinking that we are pushing the envelope forward it's better and better and now the gap between what's being heard today and these older guys is of course even wider but still today those early guys are seen as the the ones that started it all and i never really understood it until recently and that's because i wasn't really using the right filter but more on that later this is what modern guitar sounds like this is what it sounded like you know 50 60 years ago [Music] drastic difference right in a lot of ways today's instrumental guitar music is a lot more polished it's a lot more technical things that i heard today would not have been imaginable 60 years ago modern guitar music is a lot more exciting a lot more polished a lot better than what it used to be that's what i used to think for many many years until recently this really came as a surprise i was on my way to our family cabin in the upper mountains behind colorado springs beautiful landscape remote no internet it's a great way to kind of disconnect and discover new things about you and that's where i discovered that thing so i was driving down the gold camp road which leads to our cabin and i had my phone and set the playlist on classic rock first song comes up good old led zeppelin it's not like i've never heard the song before we all have it in our mind but for some reason it's almost as if i had never heard that song i don't know what it was if it was the beautiful setting or just me with no distractions or i'm not sure but i heard it very differently see the 15 year old me would have heard that song and thought it was sloppy uncontrolled and kind of unpolished overall but for some reason here i was in my mid-40s hearing the same exact song i had heard on and off in the last few decades and it sounded new and exciting and fresh so sure some might say well you're getting old man but i think it's something else what i perceived in that song was the original intent that jimmy was using when he was playing i was able to understand that what i had perceived as sloppy and uncontrolled when i was 15 was actually because this thing that jimmy was playing was new and exciting and fresh and the reason of all those imperfections was not because jimmy was a lazy player but it's because jimmy didn't want to lose that exciting feeling that he had when he first discovered that riff alright so the second track comes on this time it's jimi hendrix and i hear it too the same exact maybe lack of polished music comes through and i perceive that as the excitement of playing something that was discovered by jimmy and shared with us on that recording that day same thing with all the songs in the playlist there is this raw organic exciting purpose behind all the songs that i heard now the guitar player and me had to understand how can i use what i heard in my own music today and is that even possible because i mean the electric guitar has now been around for for quite a while is there anything new to discover with that so that gets a little tricky right because now 2022 we've heard so many cool things with the guitar the electric guitar and there are so many things that have been done and the guitar itself facilitates all those things right you have better instruments better gear better technique so how can a modern guitar player bring out through his music the sense of excitement and all playing something that has never really been heard before now before i answer that i need to clarify something i am not saying that today's guitar music is not pushing the boundaries those boundaries are being pushed every single day and there's a lot of really awesome modern guitar players that i admire quite a bit and that i really love that are doing it you're not thinking of tosa nebasi yvette young jean-pierre i mean those guys are pushing the limits but that's not really what i'm talking about you know think back when you first picked up the guitar you didn't know any chords you didn't know any riffs any scales and you started messing around with it you had that excitement right of discovering something new and if you had recorded that thing that you discovered it would be heard and that's the the thing that i'm after that's the thing that we hear in those older records and that's the thing that really caught my ear on that drive down the gold camp in the mountains i heard it in those albums i heard it when those guys played i'll state the obvious thing we are already probably too knowledgeable in terms of guitar to go back to that initial state of mind we had when we first held our guitar in our hands there was no expectation we didn't know how to use that thing so we used our creativity to just figure things out that's what i'm talking about so i tried different things i tried to go the tone route maybe changing to a sound that i'm not used to playing would bring back that initial childlike feeling that i would get with something new [Music] well that didn't really work it was just kind of awkward so i tried uh going the open tuning route that would completely change my perception of the instrument and the way that everything sounds breaking all the habits that i have [Music] and that kind of worked but that wasn't really a permanent solution because i didn't want to change open tunings every other song and then i tried using different types of guitars maybe that would re-initiate that spark that i had when i started to play [Applause] [Music] well that didn't last very long i mean yeah when i picked up a new instrument it did change a little bit to my approach of playing it's almost like i had this thing that i had to master and become more comfortable with which is kind of what i was after but i quickly got used to the instrument and in the end that was not a valid solution either i thought about all this quite a bit and i never really found the perfect solution everything i tried didn't quite work until i stopped thinking about the guitar i actually took a break for a couple months i didn't play i didn't think about music i was actually kind of burned out and then i got back to it now i still had all the baggage that i had acquired in the all those decades right i still knew how to play but for some reason when i picked up the guitar again i had that feeling that i had the very first time i picked up a guitar it felt a little bit foreign [Music] and then i realized that that thing that i was missing and that i had heard on that way to our family cabin in the mountains of colorado was actually a mindset thing and it's kind of weird because you might think that you can't hear a mindset but you can if i'm angry and i'm talking to you you will recognize that anger music is a language if i'm playing and i feel something you're gonna hear it with all those little imperfections in my playing i might attack a string a little bit harder [Music] i might play a little bit before the beat or after the beat all those little imperfections are going to be perceived as emotions when i'm playing and that's really what caught my ear when i was listening to those older guys instead of thinking what am i supposed to do with this i started thinking what can i do with this and that really helped quite a bit just a simple mindset allowed me to write songs that are more exciting riffs that are more engaging just newer things even if they were not completely new they added this extra sound to my playing that was a little imperfect but richer in emotions and feelings [Music] [Applause] [Music] now that is a great way to write songs but when it came time to improvise i always kind of went back to relying on the scales the techniques and i started thinking more in the lines of what am i supposed to do with this thankfully there is one guy that really helped me bring this type of sound into my improvisations and that guy is also an old school guy it's him and carlos helped me a lot watch this video and i'll tell you how it's done

Channel: David Wallimann

Views: 117,746

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Id: cw_D0Nn7X7w

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022