Do You Get Tired Of Being Told Fast Playing Has No Emotion"?

General Music Discussion
#1

I’d imagine most of the players here have been told that at some time or another, and have probably heard it many times. There is some truth to it in the sense that it’s possible for fast players to lack emotion, but it’s just as possible for other players to lack emotion too. Maybe a few fast players who lack emotion or feeling in their solos have given fast playing a bad name. You can all probably think of some very fast players who do lack emotion or feel in their playing.

I don’t think the detractors of fast playing have necessarily even heard the different styles of fast, electric guitar playing and the emotions those styles are capable of conveying. I recently mentioned the guitar solo in “Neatz brigade” by The Obsessed in a very different subject - I was asking people if they thought the fast parts of the solo were mostly picked or mostly a combination of hammer-ons and pull-offs. If you didn’t happen to seethe, or maybe are’t even interested in whether most of it is picked or not, listen to what a different type of emotion Scott Weinrich a.ka, “Wino” is capable of conveying through fast playing compared to the emotions a layer like Paul Gilbert conveys through his playing. I’ve never heard anybody say Wino’s playing has no emotion. Guitar Magazine described his playing as the sound of a man slowly getting angry. Wino has a unique style and it’s a style I wasn’t familiar with when I began learning how to play guitar back in 1984. I didn’t even meet Wino until New Year’s Eve 1998! As good as his playing is on his albums, he’s an even better player in a live performance in a nightclub or other venue. As I watched him perform it seemed that his guitar was simply an extension of his body; there seemed to be no separation between the guitar and the rest of him! His solos live tend to be even more intense than on record.

Here’s another song with a great solo by Wino:

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#2

Al Di Meola has the best response to this.

It’s a bunch of bullshit every time guitarists say, “One note says so much more than 100.” I always laugh at idiots who make that claim. Tell that to a flamenco player or a classical player and see what they say. It’s almost a defensive reaction. They take something they lack, attack it and claim they never wanted it in the first place. Sure!

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#3

Those people are the worst! They’re far worse than the detractors who honestly haven’t heard much of a variety of different styles of fast playing - those are just the ignorant ones who think since they’ve heard some fast playing and maybe what they heard wasn’t a particularly good example of it and didn’t have much emotion or feel to it. Those people aren’t stupid; they’re just ignorant. At least can be educated.

The ones you describe who put down fast playing as nothing more than shallow self-indulgence even though they know otherwise are, just as you put it, being defensive and they’re doing it in the worst way. They’re trying to compensate for their shortcomings as musicians by dismissing anyone with better technique than they have as soulless guitarists who aren’t doing anything but showing off their dexterity. The worst thing about those types is they are so insecure about their shortcomings that they feel compelled to attack anyone who has achieved a higher level of musicianship than they were able to achieve or than they were willing to put in the time and effort to achieve. Rather than improve their own sense of self-worth through self-improvement, they attempt to bolster their egos by trying to tear down the accomplishments of musicians who have put forth the effort in their determination to become great musicians no matter how much work it took.

#4

Well, by posting this on the CtC forum, you’re pretty much preaching to the choir.

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#5

Do You Get Tired Of Being Told Fast Playing Has No Emotion”?

I sooo totally do - I always cringe when someone says it and look down on them musically :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve never heard the Al Di Meola quote before - it’s a little harsh but I love it :slight_smile:

I think there’s a number of reasons why people say this:

  1. They can’t play fast and it gives them hope/is an excuse

  2. They don’t like fast music

  3. It’s a lazy creative boast thing

  4. They misunderstand music and the complex chord progressions needed to make slow/long duration notes say anything

  5. They misunderstand vibrato can only be done on a single long duration note

  6. They havn’t head the fast triplet ostinato in Steve Vai’s “for the love of god” - that is the emotive climax of that tune :stuck_out_tongue:

  7. e.t.c…

#6

I get your point. The mainstream perception of fast playing does change from time to time though. I think there was more prejudice towards fast guitar solos and guitar solos during the grunge fad of the early - mid 90s than there is now. That was one of the worst things about that time period.

I suppose the single biggest negative thing abut that time was the attitude and the lifestyle those bands were promoting. Now that most of the front men of those bands are dead now because they either overdosed on heroin or killed themselves on purpose, even the people who used to make fun of bands that played songs that rather than having a depressed “life sucks” message" were singing about enjoying life - from the self-explanatory “Girls, Girls. Girls” to driving fast cars like David Lee Roth sings about in “Panama” from their 1984 album to songs simply about enjoying the music itself like “Rock, Rock Till You Drop” (I had a girlfriend who especially enjoyed the line from that song: “Your mama don’t mind what your mama don’t see”) to songs about lust like the Whitesnake classic “Still Of The Night” and songs about love like “Sweet Child Of Mine” to songs about enjoying the whole lifestyle like"Youth Gone Wild."

The people who in the 90s criticized the songs I just listed and the bands that played them for being “empty, having no substance, and shallow” now have had time to see their heroes drop like flies while the bands that sang about enjoying wine, women and song remain strong to this day for the most part. They’re alive and well. Their reunion or farewell tours have been selling out arenas and in the case of Guns ’ Roses - selling out stadiums. So these people, the ones who criticized any fast playing as well as the bands that had flashy guitarists, now are realizing that maybe it wasn’t so dumb after all to be a band that celebrated their life instead of singing about how miserable their life is. Apparently some of them have even figured out that if you’re singing about a fast paced, fun filled life filled with energy and excitement, that a slow blues guitar solo just isn’t going to get the right emotion across to the listeners! A fast guitar solo can get certain feelings across to the listeners; it can make them feel a certain way that a slow solo just can’t. Slow solos have their place too but I’ve never seen any large group of people trying to convince guitarists who specialize in playing slowly that they need to stop doing that and start playing fast all the time, have you?

#7

Speed IS emotion. Blinkie lights = tone, while we’re at it.

#8

I’ve never seen an actual good player try to make the argument that fast playing has no emotion. It’s almost always a failed technical guitarist trying to elevate their self-esteem. It’s sad.

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#9

In my experience it’s mostly guys at blues jams with a massive hard-on for BB King and who don’t listen to much else. And even THEN, in my experience, the technical guys who don’t have much in the way of phrasing ability get it a whole heck of a lot more than the guys who can phrase, but also play fast.

I mean, end of the day, as a guitarist you need to latch into what makes you “you” and not worry so much about what other people thing. If someone ever tells me that playing fast has no emotion, I don’t try to argue with them, I just tell them I’m having fun. No one’s really pushed the point after that. :slight_smile:

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#10

Does anyone actually say this? Who says this? No joke, I honestly don’t know anyone who thinks the tempo of a piece, or sections of it, has anything to do with its musicality. And that’s even if “musicality” were a thing that we could measure. Which we can’t.

Which is probably why nobody I know thinks this way!

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#11

I’ve only heard it a handful of times - the most recent time I can think of (more than a decade ago) was a guy who also wanted me to play a Les Paul because “you could hit a note, go out to lunch, and it would still be sustaining when you came back,” and couldn’t figure out why I was playing a Mesa instead of a Marshall.

Basically, anyone that rigid in their world view is probably someone you’re not going to have a good conversation about music with anyway, so it’s not worth worrying about. :smile: On the flip side, the band I was playing with at the time (a blues rock band I would sit in with summers when I was home from college and then periodically for a couple years afterwards), one of the other guys in the band who was a guitarist but playing percussion and background vocals, in between songs after I’d been playing with them for no-joke at least two years, turned to me and said,
“Hey Drew… Does that guitar have seven strings?”
“Yeah, an extra low B.”
“Oh… cool!”

The guys who don’t give a shit about gear, technique, or appearance and just want to make music on the other hand… Those are the ones you’ll probably learn a thing or two from. Same dude once told me I played guitar like I’d survived heroin, which I think to this day is once of the nicest, if unusualest, compliments I’ve ever been given, lol.

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#12

It has more to do with a certain kind of person on the internet.
Vai talks about this 33 minutes into this Andertons vid. “15 year olds on the internet with god complexes.”

#13

I’ve heard it a lot, but I think it’s mainly people who aren’t terribly educated.

Tell me this has no emotion? But it’s full of super fast arpeggios! Classical music, particularly from the 19th century is FULL of speed! Something tells me the ‘speed has no feel’ group have never listened to any of it…

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#14

This.

I’m just happy to talk music with anyone IRL, I don’t know anyone who would say this. Well, at least not in my adult life.

I will say this though, the better you are at something, the more threatening you are to other people, and when the threat level gets too high, they have to cut you down.

#15

Surprised by the number of people who haven’t heard this. I’ve heard it my entire guitar playing life, going back 25+ years. I was a violinist prior to that. I even heard it at a company meeting a few months ago, from one amateur and one aspiring musician. They said learning theory removes all the emotion. The one note comment usually comes from Stevie Ray Vaughan copycats, which makes me wonder if they’re “stealing” his emotive powers. :slight_smile:

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#16

There is no such thing :wink:

Nobody ever imitated SRV successfully!

#17

It’s almost a guarantee that a comment like this will eventually appear under any video containing shredding. It seems that to some people slow blues is the only valid style of music and everybody else is just a soulless shredder.

I wonder if there is a similar situation with other instruments or if this is only a thing in the guitar community. Can you imagine somebody saying something like “Have you heard that J.S. Bach guy? The dude just shreds on the harpsichord with no emotion!” ?

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#18

Well of course not, he expressed more emotion with one note than all the other notes played throughout history. :grin:

#19

Agreed that such a comment will inevitably appear under a video that has “shredding” in it whether justified or not.

Bach, like all classical composers must have missed the memo advising that lines exceeding a certain speed limit are devoid of emotion :roll_eyes:

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#20

Did we post this yet? If not, what a shame.

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