Re: Noodling

Lumpy wrote:
Rufus wrote:
Thanks. All I want to do is have
some fun and it seems I can do that
if I get in with the right people...
but those people seem to be getting
fewer and father between.

I would suggest that those other people don't
have a clear goal about what they consider
"good" or "successful" musician is. They aren't
having fun making music. They're thinking that a lot
of painful, dreadful, sacrificing work will eventually
lead them to some kind of "success", and then they can
stop all the painful work and only then finally enjoy life.


Mostly they seem to be obsessed with being the focus of attention by being on a stage...ASAP, and as often as possible. That's just not my thing. Though I do seem to like and prefer stagecraft - the stuff that goes on behind the scenes to make it all work.

....newbie friend of mine that recently quit gigging said to me that one of his biggest disappointments with it was how little attention the crowd actually pays to what the people on stage are doing. I figured that out decades ago.

I doubt that any of those craigslist garage band
kids are interested in "having some fun". They
likely consider the flash and hoopla of being
a rock star to be the goal. It's not really about
the music, to them. It's about the S,D & RnR.


Yeah - my take too.


re my "productive musician" definition...

You said -
"...If you're doing
what you want to be doing,
then you're being "productive", IMO..."

That sounds great to me. I wouldn't argue against that at all.
I'm suggesting that people would be more productive if they'd
actually define "what they want to be doing". And I'm saying
that a reasonable, universal goal is something like "When I decide
I want to play xxx song, I would love to be able to do it in seconds
or minutes or hours instead of days or weeks or months". I can't
really imagine that anyone's goal is to "not be able to learn
a song very quickly". Isn't that the common complaint of new
players? "I got this tab and I still don't sound like megadeath".


Yeah...and there's a lot of people that think they can solve that with equipment alone. I've only started buying more guitars and stomp efects over the last few years just because I can, and I have a curiosity about them. But for most of my 30+ years of paying I've only owned two guitars and one amp...and mostly only played one of those two - my '78 Les Paul Custom.

Having fun, having a career, having a hobby, having a baby, Having
breakfast they are ALL more productive and enjoyable if we are good at it.
At least it seems to me. Surely there are Martyrs who are happy
being unhappy. "I can't..." is, to me, a demonstration of
that train of thought. Life is short. I say "be great" at
everything you do.

Lumpy - Great Horse Manure Scooper




For some reason, I actually seem to play my best when I'm pissed off about something...as I mentioned, I play mainly to create solitude through extreme focus. Playing guitar is a "meditation" of sorts for me...I like to play loud, and I lose track of what's going on around me when I do.

Something that I'd also forgotten from playing back in the dorms is that I tend to get severely depressed just before a practice or performance...I go on a real *serious* downer...until I hit that first chord, and the louder the better. Then I just up and pound the hell out of it until it's all over and feel great while I'm doing it and after it's done.

Still happens today, even when I'm setting up a PA rig for someone else...but I can work around it. Big diff is that that's a *job* - fun job, but still a job; and I treat it as such.

--
- Rufus
.

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