Does Playing Guitar Make You A MUSICIAN?
Have you ever wanted to be able to say “I’m a musician” to people instead of just “I play guitar”?
It rolls off the tongue quite nicely, doesn’t it?
Well, what's the difference?
A lot of the things we learn as guitar players are specific to the guitar. And these things help us solely at - you guessed it - playing guitar.
But there is so much to learn about music itself. Many of these things are not guitar-specifics, and guitarists tend to ignore them...
... but these are the things that help you:
Improvise better
Write songs
... and incredibly enough, also sound better on your guitar!
Would you like all that? Watch the video below and I’ll show you where to start to go from guitar player to musician (even if you just started as a guitar player!)
If you want to start getting closer to being a real musician, it would be a big help to actually understand scales and modes in depth instead of playing A minor pentatonic over everything. If you want to learn more about scales and modes, check out my Master of the Modes guitar course.
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you. I got a comment on my video on negative harmony, and it's an incredibly deep comment. I have no idea what any of this means. I'm a guitarist not a musician. Fantastic point now, I don't know if the guy who was commenting meant that he does not want to become a musician and if just wants to be a guitar player or if he meant that He just concentrate on guitar doesn't care about music or if he wants to become a musician but I think making the distinction it's incredibly important you see because There are something you are going to get better at if you think you're a guitar player And there are other thing you're gonna become better at only if you think that you are a musician That happen to know how to make this instrument work in the definition of Frank Zappa by the way Frank Zappa said I'm just I'm a composer who can make a guitar work.
What's the difference? It's incredibly important you understand that okay? Yeah, a guitar player is somebody who can make who can get this instrument to make a sound Okay, no more no less. A guitar player could be a great musician and know everything about music how to compose out to arrange how to improvise how to write for an instrument or Could be not could be just a person who knows how to play three chords.
Okay? And the person who can play those three chords and make them sound good can very well define himself as a guitar player, but can hardly define himself or herself as a Musician okay a musician is when you have other skills, okay?
What other skills you should be at least able to either improvise or compose? It's not a question of exact mathematical definition. It's more of a question of mindset a guitar player will do everything They can okay to learn more about how to play guitar.
They will learn technique they learn phrasing, they will copy all the licks they can find on the internet and think they can play them, they will learn different kind of rhythmics, okay, they will train their fingers, they will do all those things and those are all good things.
I'm not trying to advocate for one mindset over the other, I'm saying they're just different. A musician, we may do those things, but a musician will primarily think how they can make music, how the music will work when music will function in the ears of a listener, what kind of emotion we are transmitting or not, okay, what kind of impact the music has, how you can create music not limited to guitar.
So it's a wider scope but less deep. scope, okay? Because you have to look over what the drum is doing, what the bass player is doing, what the keyboard player, what the singer is doing, what's the venue you're playing the music on, what's the style, the genre, the kind of listener, the situation, and a number of other things.
Now the best thing, of course, is to be a little bit of both. That I would advocate for that. Because for instance, that was a comment on my video on negative harmony. Negative harmony has nothing to do with guitar, per se.
It was not invented by a guitar player, it works on every instrument. It was developed by a music theorist who most likely played the piano, and then developed further by a saxophone player, so that's nothing to do specifically with guitar.
So if you are a guitar player, you really don't care about negative harmony. There's nothing that you can learn there that could make you better at playing this, at playing it. If you are a composer on your hand, or an improviser, negative harmony can offer a number of tools that you can use in your composition of improvisation, and have a very specific emotional effect on the listener, because everything you play in negative harmony is the psychological opposite of what you were playing before.
To play a chord progression with the negative harmony, you get the opposite. To play a melody with the negative harmony, you get the opposite psychological effect. Everything happy becomes sad, everything optimistic becomes pessimistic, and vice versa, okay?
Everything uplifting becomes depressing, and vice versa. That's something that musicians will go like, yeah, that's great, that's a great tool I can use, but a guitar player would be completely indifferent to a pure guitar player, because a guitar player would be more concerned about how they play this lick.
And again, remember, I'm not trying to advocate for one over the other, because you could want to be only a guitar player, you could want to be only a musician, you could want to be both. Or you could want to concentrate on being a guitar player for learning specific things, and concentrate on being a musician for learning other specific things.
The choice for me is that I want to be both, okay? And of course I cannot be as good a guitar player as I could be if I was only a guitar player because I need to spend some time being a musician, and I cannot be as good as I could be if I was not a guitar player because I need to spend some time learning guitar.
So you have only so much time and energy, okay, in your week, in your years, okay? And so you need to decide exactly how to allocate those things. But thinking about this, making the distinction and deciding what to do, it's important.
Now, if you're going away from this video thinking, blah blah blah, you're just talking to myself, you're not giving me anything, it's because you need to think about that. If you're going away and thinking, but you didn't even play anything, well, then you are a guitar player, okay?
But you didn't even play anything on the guitar, you need to think about this stuff, guys, because you are the artist and you need to decide who you want to become, and it's not my job to tell you who you want to become, my job is to give you the tools to become what you want to become.
And one tool is this, do you want to become a guitar player, a musician, or both, and in what proportion? And then, you have to decide what proportion of time you want to use for one or the other, and that's the thing, you cannot be 100% a guitar player and 100% a musician, because you have only 100% of your time, okay?
It could be 50 -50, could be 70 -30, 30 -70, 60 -40, whatever, but you have only so much time, so you have to make a choice. Then, if you want some help to see what you can study, how you can get better, either as a guitar player or as a musician, by all means, shoot me an email, write me, write me here in the comments, always happy to give a consultation and see how I can help you or how I can direct you to other people who can help you.
But first thing for yourself, do you want to become a guitar player or a musician? And again, I'm not giving any judgment value, and any answer is good, as long as that's the answer that you want, the answer that responds to who you want to become.
This is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com, and until next time, enjoy!