its interesting, back in the old USSR days the sports scientists and coaches would have all the kids doing many various types of sports activities and they’d observe them to see which kids had talents for which sports etc
We might could do the same thing. Take someone and give them some basic tests. if after 6 months or a year, if u cant get the Yngwie 6 note pattern to a certain speed, you may not have great innate talent for the tech aspects of guitar
then u have the MASSIVE factor of luck lol.
What if VanHalen didnt have those exact 4 guys together?
What if Jimmy Page had never found John Bonham?
What if so and so agent hadnt walked into this or that club one night?
Hendrix had plunked along the chitlin circuit and trying to sit in with people for years and got nowhere. Then he just happened to meet Linda Keith who just happened to know Chas Chandler and the rest is history
yeah, I put John Sykes near the top of the “total package” lists. I mean, can Eddie or Yngwie or Paul really sing?? lol
but the point is well taken. Look at all the technical shredders who we look at and we are like, yeah, so what? lol They dont have all those other facets in place
Mastering all this things so early tells us a few things that help unravel that mystery.
One, they had great ambition to master those things.
Two, they the drive, the work ethic to put in the effort to do so.
Three, they were very gifted in their abilities to learn these various things. You can call it “a gift”, “talent” or whatever you like, but they had a combination of God-given gifts that allowed them to make tremendous growth in their playing from an amount and quality of practice that most guys would make some progress from, but not nearly as much progress. Isn’t that part of what genius is? Isn’t part of genius the ability to learn and master new things much faster than the average human being? Whether you wish to call it “genius”, “talent” or “God-given gifts”, clearly these guys were fortunate enough to have those gifts in all the areas which you listed. Some people might be gifted in one or two of those areas. To be gifted as Yngwie was in everything from composition, to technique, to stage presence makes him exceptionally gifted. That’s why we consider people like him so specail - they’re incredibly rare! If just anybody could achieve what he did as long as they put in the hard work, we wouldn’t consider those people so special would we?
Yeah, that boggles my mind that by the time they were late teens they had full unique vocabulary.
Perfect storm.
I competed in combat sports and cant tell you how many “gifted” young people I trained with who we were all envious of. But very few of them had the rage to master and at some point they ceased to be special.
as I age I place more weight on sheer hard work being a factor in these peoples greatness. Of course sometimes that work was driven by unhealthy factors like insecurity or massive ego or whatever, but still the work was there
I have done enough demos to know that I have the talent to put together a decent album doing all the singing, playing, writing, drum programming etc etc
So why dont I have such an album finished (it was a goal for this year…oops)
simple, I dont have the sheer drive to overcome tiredness and laziness etc
Id say hard work, focus, determination…those things outweigh the vague “talented” thingy
lotta “talented” people never make it
If given the choice of having talent or discipline I would take discipline.
Honestly, if you know how I can purchase either let me know.
the Soviet weighlifting thing is interesting because one of the manuals made an interesting point about the overall volume of training
they were saying that the volume had reached such high levels that it would be harder to make much future progress just based on MORE training. There would have to be BETTER (more efficient) training strategies etc
thats interesting when I think about weightlifting today. Though the Snatch and Total World Records were just beaten recently…by a Russian guy of course (so he is still a product of the old Soviet system), the Clean and Jerk record set in 1988 has never been beaten yet lol
(Edit, oops, guy who recently broke records wasnt Russian, he was Georgian. That was still part of USSR though…so I was still half right) Lasha TALAKHADZE
The soviets had the doping down to a science as well and the testing is better now
266 Kilos. 1988. still the true record
goes back to my own playing. I had played for about 26 years before i saw Troys work. I never could do the Paul Gilbert lick because I just wasnt that technically aware (I am now!)
so without knowledge of pickslanting and just way more techie awareness, I wouldnt have made much more progress. But WITH that awareness I took about a 30-40% jump in skills
same talent level, just needed better info and awareness
but just doing MORE of what wasnt working wouldnt have made it any better lol
That’s interesting because I would take the other. The reason being I developed discipline at an early age. I started lifting weights when I was 10 years old. I worked at it very hard and at my peak I bench pressed double my bodyweight, so that’s nice, but not extraordinary. At some point I realized all the discipline in the world couldn’t make up for having a small frame, a fairly low tolerance to the physiological demands of high intensity exercise, and a fairly low propensity for gaining large amounts of muscular mass. I was batter at gaining strength than gaining mass and I wanted to have both!
The point is you can create discipline in way that you cannot create genetic gifts. Those - you either were born with them or not.
With guitar, I had, and have all the drive in the world. You could call it discipline f you want; I happen to call it drive. I’m extremely competitive, even with myself. Even at my age, 50 years old, I still push myself to improve, to become as good as I can possibly be.
I’ve never not had discipline for guitar playing. As I stated, I developed discipline when I was heavily into weight training. The passion I had for music just amped that discipline up to a new level.
What I lacked, and would have loved to have had, is the ability to learn faster so that it wouldn’t have taken so damn long to get good, the ability to not just write cool riffs but to come up with the ideas to make them into complete songs, a better singing voice, etc.
There is no substitute for talent if your goal is to be a great musician. I wasn’t entirely without talent - I had enough that I got to where I have - but I wish I could have gotten to where I have faster and I mean that in regards to purely creative aspects such as composition - not just technique. I have enough ability now that if I’d been born earlier so that I would have been this good in 1980, that would have been awesome and I’d be well known. I’m not saying I’d be a guitar hero or a virtuoso, but I’d certainly be playing in a heavy metal band for a living and that’s all I ever wanted. The word “wanted” seems insignificant. That the 1980s are gone and that the type of music I Iove is not even remotely near as prevalent today as it was in the 1980s, that MTV playing heavy metal videos and having Headbanger’s Ball is gone, hell, VH1 isn’t even playing metal videos anymore. it just gets worse and worse!
That all these things are gone, and that even if all these aspects of the 1980s and early 90s when heavy metal ruled somehow returned, I’m still 50 years old in a highly youth oriented business, to say its sad, to say its depressing, is an insult to my emotions. I don’t know a word that describes how I feel about it.
I literally didn’t know what I had when it was 1989 and I was auditioning for one of the premier metal bands in Tampa, Florida that I wouldn’t continue to have the opportunity for similar auditions in 1994 or 1999, 2009, or 2019 if necessary… I didn’t know how abruptly tastes would change, I didn’t know that the grunge fad was coming and that by 1994, solos would be considered “passe.” I thought the way things were in the 80s was pretty much how they’d always be. The idea of heavy rock music losing as much popularity as it has seemed inconceivable. Rock was huge in the 50s, 60s 70s, and bigger and better than ever in the 80s so why would I think it would die?
The only way I can put it strongly enough is this: If I could have been the musician I am now back in the 1980s, and that meant that I’d have to pay this price: that by 1995 I’d be dead, I’d take that deal in a heartbeat!
Nice post, JonJon!
Let me ask you this: When you say you’re not Yngwie or even Zakk, when you started playing, or within a couple years of starting playing, did you develop a passion for it that was so intense that you said to yourself: "I don’t just want to play guitar for a living; I HAVE TO!!!
I ask that question because from reading your posts I get the idea that guitar was something you considered a serous hobby but not your future profession. Am I correct? If so, is it really any wonder that you didn’t have the same focus, discipline, drive as the guys who had decided: THIS is what I’m dedicating the rest of my life to doing!
You see, it’s my belief that in most instances, things like focus and discipline are actually nothing more than a byproduct of the desire to do this for a living - to either be a rock star, or if not, at least be a professional guitarist who makes enough money to live comfortably. Not rich, not wealthy, but enough that you’re doing at least a little better than “just getting by.” That said, if you felt a need to be a professional guitarist no mater what t took to get there, that even “just getting by” would be acceptable just as long as you were making your living playing the music you love!
Not even his note choices, his phrasing or his composing? Not even how he manages to et such a beautiful tone? None of that is a mystery and you understand how to do all that? Or are you strictly referring to proper alternate picking technique?
I ask that because if your intent was that “efficient alternate picking technique is no longer a mystery to me” that’s just a piece of what makes Yngwie great. Just because you understand what should be done regarding alternate picking, that’s a far cry from developing the coordination to do it flawlessly ad consistently even at very rapid speeds! I’ve already discussed how regarding the ability to execute those techniques requires the talent to develop great coordination and that regarding their ability to develop coordination, all human beings lie at some point along a continuum that ranges from guys like Yngwe and MAB at one end of the continuum, and guys who will never be able to play guitar at all at the other end of the continuum.
This talent, or Genetic potential" if you prefer, is hard to gauge unless you’ve given guitar playing your maximum effort already. If you haven’t already out everything you have into improving, then you don’t know exactly how much potential you have, do you? You can make an educated guess, but that’s not the same thing as knowing it for certain.
True, a lot don’t “make it.” One reason that hasn’t been discussed here is the choice in what music they play. The less mainstream your choice of music is, the less chance one has of making it! Shawn Lane could have been a household name if he’d chosen to play in a band that played music more similar to Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. He might have been more famous yet had he chosen to play for a band like Bad Company, Journey, Foreigner, or Boston. Then again, those last few bands might not have allowed him to display his chops! Imagine though, if Shawn had been given the opportunity to become the guitarist for Deep Purple (after Blackmore left to form Rainbow) and Shawn had accepted. Don’t you think he’d have “made it” big then? I sure as hell do!
Mick Mars isn’t extremely talented but he chose a band that only required a modest level of ability to play well. Stage presence and overall image were vital in Crue. So part of making it is choosing a babd that allows you to make the most of your particular talents. Imagine if Mick had decided to play Shawn Lane style music. I suspect the result would be that we wouldn’t have ever even heard of Mick Mars had he taken that path!
There are also other factors. Appearance probably shouldn’t matter a whole lot, but if two guys have equal musical ability and one is a short, fat guy with bad skin and a huge nose and is balding, and another guy looks like Sebastian Bach, I’m not exaggerating when I say the guy who looks like Sebastian could very well become a huge rock star and the other guy might not even be able to barely make a living as a musician. Especially in bands like Van Halen or Skid Row or Motley Crue or Guns "n Roses where the music is supposed to be “fun” and “sexy”, appearance will matter more than in a band like Dream Theater where the emphasis is all on chops!
Finally I’d like to say that when you wrote “hard work, focus, determination…those things outweigh the vague (why vague?) talented thingy” I had some thoughts about it.
First, if you think of talent as the ability to learn faster than the average guy, and the ability to use that to learn more things than the average guy because you’re spending less time on each of those things allowing you time to move on to learning other things, it’s not so vague is it? Remember how in math class in high school, some people grasped a concept right away without even having to study, while other people had to study at home very hard to even get a C in the class, you realize how the ability to learn things quickly allows you to progress faster and further than the average guy. If you can breeze right through Algebra and Geometry, then getting to Algebra 2 and Trigonometry will be easier for you than the guy who failed Algebra because it was so hard for him and as a result had to repeat it the next year. That guy will be doing well if he even passes Algebra 2 or Trig eventually. But the one who breezes through Algebra 1 and Geometry because he learns fast might very well go on to taking Engineering in college and taking Calculus 3 as well as Organic Chemistry!
A talent which results in being able to learn faster frees up one’s time to go on to the next thing and learn that, and so on. Also, since learning comes easily to him, he’s more likely to be able pass Calculus 3 than the average guy who most likely won’t even learn enough to be able to enter Calculus 3, much less pass it! I’m using this example because it’s easier to explain how the ability to learn quickly and easily affects one’s overall achievements in an academic mathematics setting than to explain learning guitar because success in math is so much more easily quantified and defined. In math, your answer is either right or wrong. It;s objective. Music is largely subjective even though anything which exists in reality can be evaluated objectively to some degree at least.
Drive and focus are at least somewhat related to talent. If you were to have picked up guitar at 12 and been able to play Van Halen solos within 6 months, it would have made you very happy and excited to see how good you could get with that talent of yours! But if you took 5 years to even play the solo to Runnin’ With The Devil, my guess is that you’d be so frustrated with how long it took to learn even the simplest things, that even if you began learning guitar with great drive and ambition, over the next few years while you saw other kids quickly surpass you and leave you in the dust your drive and determination and focus would dwindle. Don’t you think that would probably be the case?
So when someone says, anyone with enough drive can learn to pick fast and clean, and the ones who fail to learn to do that fail not because of a lack of talent but a lack of drive and work ethic, question why some of them had but then lost their drive. Could it be that even learning the simplest of things took them so much longer than their friends took, that it ended up killing their drive! They had the drive initially but their lack of talent eventually killed that drive.
It seems to be an accepted fact in this thread that ‘genetic potential’ for playing guitar is a thing. Call me skeptical.
If I understand correctly, genetic potential for weightlifting is mainly a question of fast-twitch muscle fiber density. This is actually genetic: it’s a result of your DNA, and it doesn’t change over the course of your life. It is also both directly measurable directly applicable to a sport that mostly only requires you to do one thing: be strong.
Playing guitar is not a similar activity. It requires lots of different skills, none of which are about having as much as possible of one individual genetic trait. In general, the skills and abilities that help guitarists get better don’t seem to be genetic, at least in any way that we can actually measure.
Other analogies like ‘innate’ mathematical ability do more harm than good to the genetic potential hypothesis, since such abilities and interests are known to be changeable over the course of a person’s life, and therefore not genetic.
CTC has proved to me that the reason I had trouble playing fast was that my technique didn’t support it. This is changeable, and not genetic. I’m no world leader of guitar playing, but the difference in my learning rate before and after CTC was ridiculous, and disabused me of the notion that ‘I can’t play fast because something is wrong with me,’ which I’d been carrying around with me for 30 years, even while playing professionally.
I believe that there are very, very few human unicorns. By and large, what one person can do, another person can do. Not that they will, but they could, if they went about it the right way. Drive and motivation are important, but so is technique.
Practicing bad technique for 8-10 hours a day won’t make you a superstar. I agree with @adamprzezdziecki, all those hours of practice by the greats are probably closer to a symptom than a cause. When you make progress, practice is fun, so you do it more.
When I was a stringhopper, I couldn’t practice technique for 8 hours a day even if I wanted to (which I didn’t) because I never progressed and I got frustrated (aka punishment), so I just decided to spend my guitar time playing songs. After CTC, I found I could make very noticeable progress (aka reward) in 30 minutes of technical practice, which made me want to practice more, which made me improve more, and so on. I usually have to force myself to stop practicing now. If I didn’t have a career and a family, I could easily see myself wanting to practice all day. Trust me when I say that I am not practicing for anything. I don’t gig anymore, and my recording work has never been shred-oriented. I practice because that’s how I like to spend my time. I suspect the same thing is true of the greats.
The thing about “genetic potential” is…you cant do anything about it so why worry about it? lol
When I look back at my life I have done many different things and Ive generally done well at the things I focused on. BMX racing, powerlifting, guitar playing, music writing, singing, competitive chess etc etc. I think ive competed at some level in at least 10 different activities
Like my friend used to say “im not a slouch at ANYTHING” lol. You cant tell me I have genetic potential for all those different activities. As kids, my generation stayed outdoors all day long when not in school. We played ALL the sports (except soccer which wasnt really big in the USA yet). Everything we did was cut throat and hyper competitive. Hell, we could be playing UNO and have a fist fight break out. I never had the experience of not being picked or being picked last when choosing players. I was usually 1st or 2nd
Yeah, when it comes to playing in the NBA or NFL or certain sports, there is definitely a genetic physical and mental makeup needed. Shaq wasnt ever going to be a horse jockey or a 3rd baseman. Ralph Samson was never going to be a sumo wrestler
When it came to guitar I had no clue. Every kid in my neighborhood played baseball and football but I didnt know anyone who played rock guitar. So it was all a big mystery to me. I didnt start until I was 20.5 years old
I started wtih Troy Stetina tab books with the cassette on the front cover lol.
So just the fact that I was serious enough to start with tab and books right away meant I was going to make better progress than the guy who got a guitar for Christmas but just plunked around on it once per week
That being said, Im no psychoanalyst so I dunno if I can even fully understand my whole mindset. I think i always figured I could be pretty good but who in their right mind thinks they will actually become rich and famous? Not starting at 20
Im pretty much a loner too so the whole “band thing” didnt really work for me. I always wanted to be in a good band but there are so many variables. The few times I tried it was just a disaster. So there’s that
The whole Malmsteen/Halen etc shreddy thing was pretty imcomprehensible too. There was no huge music scene where I was so I never knew anyone who could really shred that much. I was about 33 before I ever discovered the internet lol.
So whatever “dreams” I may have had on guitar never strongly revolved around being rich and famous or “doing it for a living”
Even though I was good at whatever I tried, I also have/had my struggles with uncertainty and disbelief
Bringing it up to today. What are my goals. Well somehow I DO believe I have the ability to make music more or less as good as those I grew up listening to: Led Zep, Halen, Malmsteen etc etc. With home recording etc that part is more or less under my control. As far as thinking I can ever sell one album, thats another story…that part is sort of beyond my control
So what hampers me?? genetics? Really nothing hampers me except myself. there is no one with a gun forcing me to NOT record and write songs. I have written and recorded enough demos to prove to myself I can make decent music.
At 51 years old, new vistas are opening as far as lead playing. so thats nice. With CTC a lot of the mystery and frustration has went out of it.
So now its down to internal qualities like focus, self belief, goal setting, and old fashioned hard work
Looking back on it, id say genetics arent quite the factor in making music as they are in sports etc. The few kids I knew who were into making music back then were sort of nerdy kids who COULDNT play sports etc lol
The one main limitation I have had to fight every day is like crippling self doubt. I assume its from being the kid of divorced parents and that whole trip. No father to teach me or give me confidence. Poor me. It is what it is.
But right now the only thing stopping me…is me
Peace, JJ
It’s a generally accepted fact that people’s genetic characteristics, both physical and intellectual, vary greatly. If you were to measure a statistical sample of the population you’d find that things as diverse as height, build, intelligence, tolerance to physical stress and recuperative abiilities, all range along a continuum where at one extreme you’d have the giants of the NBA and at the other extreme there are midgets. All these other characteristics range along the same type of continuum, including I.Q. as well as relatively trivial a thing as tolerance to sunlight.
Could the characteristics which give people the potential to excel as musicians somehow be exempt from the varying in the population along these types of continuums in the way that innate characteristics which predispose one to excel in certain areas do? In reading the posts here, I’ve learned that there are people who believe so or at least they would like to believe so. One need not be a philosophy major to know that people will believe what they want to believe. There are those who believe that the Shakespeares and the Mozarts of the world weren’t any more gifted in the area of creativity than anyone else; they simply “wanted it more” and persevered until they succeeded.
Despite the saying “All men are rated equal”, in reality people have different values, different gifts, and different areas in which they are predisposed to excel. If you’re lucky, the things you love and the ones in which you’re talented are the same.
If not, it doesn’t mean you can’t still spend your time doing something just for the enjoyment of it. While I certainly believe people’s potentials as musicians vary greatly, the only way to find out where your potential lies as a musician is to go after it one hundred percent and find out how far you progress.
This made me chuckle a little because I imagined Allan Holdsworth being told by some teacher that he’s not gifted enough.
You are focusing on the technical aspects too much. I believe some people have more technical talent than the others and not everyone can get to Rick Graham level, but that’s irrelevant. I think more important is that some people are born with higher pattern recognition abilities than the others, sort of a very high musical IQ. Look at complexity and the amount of Bach’s work for example, same for Mozart.
All the guys we are talking about learned through imitation. You can find patterns that Gilbert and Yngwie play in Al Di Meola’s playing for example. We tend to forget that music is a collective art in some sense, we all borrow and learn from each other. The difference between all the unmusical shredders and Yngwie or Eric is that they didn’t just learn the technique through imitating their heroes. They learned actual musical tools like understanding of rhythm, harmony, song structures, all that stuff. Not just some mechanical patterns. It doesn’t matter if they can name these things or not, they just know them and use them. That’s what makes them special. Yngwie wrote a concerto for ochestra having no formal training at all.
Ask yourself, have you done harmonical analysys of any of Yngwie’s songs? Do you have at least a few chord voicings under your fingers that you can use to play these chords? How can you be inspired to practice and spend time with the instrument if you don’t have musical tools and have no idea what to practice to acheive them? Do you have your own ideas for harmony or creating chord voicings?
There’s also one more aspect - the internet. There was almost no visual material when they were refining their chops, it was all by ear. Now we have all this knowledge about what can be done on guitar, we can see people that are doing things different than we do and it can be harmful in some ways. My natural technique is an exact reverse of Eric\Yngwie system. If I didn’t have youtube I probably wouldn’t know you can pick 3 note per string scales ascending and I’d stick to 4nps instead of being frustrated that I can’t do something. The difference between somebody like me and a genius like Yngwie is that I treated my trapped upstroke as a curse and he treated his escaped upstroke as a blessing. He was able to play convincing music this way instead of trying to force string changes after a downstroke. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
I’m getting a little bit of topic but there are many aspects of guitar playing and articulation is one of them. I have trouble listening people who pick every note because I feel like somebody is speaking to me using only one syllabe.
To sum all this up because I’ve written enough walls of text recently… They are where they are because they’ve had purpose and were visionaries, it was what made them put all these hours to their craft. Too many guitarists forget that they are musicians and guitars are just tools.
well correct me if I am wrong but this IS a forum based around the concept of acquiring TECHNICAL proficiency isnt it?
arent every single one of your vids ive seen posted of you playing some strictly technical exercise? lol
I was simply suggesting a possible test off the top of my head to try and gauge a beginners potential or lack of it
Hey, I didn’t mean that as any sort of attack.
All I’m trying to point out is that motivation to play all these hours doesn’t always come from discipline and very often great technique comes with desire to play certain stuff. Some people are just lucky to figure efficent movements on their own, there’s that part in Jimmy Bruno interview when he talks about figuring out sweep because he wanted to play a certain Charlie Parker lick. Look at Steve Vai’s tapping from Building the Church. He envisioned something really original and then made it a reality through really hard work - there was a precise goal at the end of it.
Yngwie or Eric might be not as technically talented as you think, there are probably 1000 people on youtube that can do Yngwie cleaner than Yngwie, the difference is that Yngwie put his technique to good use and was a pioneer. It’s like Troy said many times, people who figured out technical stuff by feel now can show us what’s possible. They’re homo sapiens like us and with the right tutoring anyone can get at least decent at guitar. The question is what do you do with that skill then.
Fun fact, I didn’t practice anything till the age of 20 and I’m 23 now, I just played and learned through imitation. Then I tried to convert to pure alternate picking and practiced really organized and hard - I spent hundreds of hours practicing stringhopping and got nowhere (I really like the tone of it though, nothing better than using a lot of pick flat on the string). But still, there was a goal behind all this - I wanted to get into jazz, playing swinged 8th notes would be troublesome for me, I couldn’t do transcriptions because most of that music is based on horns and they play completely different things than I could do with my setup, etc.
I spent many hours trying to learn to sight read, I got nowhere and I’m really discouraged to try it again. Maybe I could do it if I put more hours, but for now my mindset makes me scared whenever I see sheet music. I still did it with a goal in mind - being able to read is essential if you want to play session jobs.
Am I talented? I don’t know. All I know is that I’m here because technical problems keep me away from my goals, like playing that fucking cool solo from Pat Metheny’s Third Wind or violin pieces I’ve always wanted to play. Now when I know it’s possible because mysteries of crosspicking are unraveled, I’m motivated to practice again.
23? omg, ive got socks older than that!
With the fast picking thing, im coming from a different place. I started playing in 1988. So all of the Yngwie stuff was still new and fresh. Joe Satriani “Surfing with the Alien” was HUGE. So it was massively intimidating. There was no internet. I was overseas in the USAF. I knew maybe 2 people who played guitar. There was no music scene. I was pretty much on my own
So I guess I got a pretty deep mindset that it was impossible for me to play as good as those guys. I had tab books but what good were they going to do?? Seeing the tab for Joe Satriani “Midnight” just made the problem worse lol
All you young guys, when you started playing you could just click a video that shows you exactly how to play whatever you want to play, So lets face it, 2 years of hard work and any beginner now can shred scales etc no problem. So you young guys are always talking about adding touch, feel, phrasing, chord knowledge etc. Im trying to add a LOT more fire and aggression to my playing
Like I said, im coming from the opposite direction. Im just starting to believe that I can actually have great picking technique. How many years of bad habits and poor technique do I have to overcome? How much disbelief do I now have to try to turn into positive belief?
Well its weird because even without Yngwie’s picking chops I still got to be a pretty good player. I have always been one of the better players locally. So its weird now because many on this site have massive picking chops and I see vids like Teemu’s and all of a sudden I am barely in the middle of the pack. I wonder what ive been doing for 30 years. This is something youll never be able to relate to so maybe some of my responses on the forum will seem odd lol
Anyway, its good because I have many fresh challenges now and frankly I feel I have a lot to prove.
Just a related thought: If you spend a lot of time on the Internet within guitar communities your view of your own abilities is likely skewed. It’s the equivalent of watching guys bench 315 for 5 or 6 clean reps on YouTube fitness and thinking that you suck because you can only do bodyweight for 5 or 6. The reality is most people in your gym probably couldn’t do that.
Even the most middle of the pack players here - whatever that means, I don’t think of people on here in that way - would likely blow away the average person in a music store and impress quite a few. Try not to lose sight of this. Obviously, there are exceptions if you are playing in some of the more frequented music stores in NY/LA/Nashville but you get my general point.
tl;dr: Doesn’t help being too hard on yourself.