Most haters will come up with the line of “he’s not play with feeling”.
What does that even mean? Doesn’t look constipated enough?..
Take MAB for example, even tho he’s dead pan, the skill and music is doing the talking, not his face.
That change at 3:47 is so musically expressive dispite Mike barely emoting. Yet I’m like YEAH MF! 
What is wrong with people saying such things have no feeling?
I don’t play piano but often attend master classes where a famous pianist will constructively criticize a student’s playing. One of the most common problems is a student playing with no dynamics. The master will often interrupt them, asking, “what is the intent of the composer, how do the dynamics change?” The result is often a blank stare; the student is just making sure to hit the right notes, but not thinking further about exactly what that note should be.
Turning to MAB, I love his playing, but I view him as a delicious frosting, delightful in moderation.
One example that comes to mind is Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever. Nitro’s cover is awesome (particularly Jim!), and I love MAB’s face-melting excess, but I prefer the original, it’s “richer” in my mind. What do you think? 
hahaha then I definitely play with feeling:
I agree with you, “feeling” is way too vague, and saying “play with more feeling” has basically no pedagogical value. What exactly needs to be fixed?
If note choices, timing, phrasing, tone, intonation, vibrato, dynamics etc. are good, it will sound good in my opinion!
Playing with feeling should be something like this:
OMG that was great. I can tell already this will be the highlight of my day (and I just got started working too…)
Seriously “feeling”, while vague, I think is a combination (conflation???) of several elements. It’s often something that isn’t likely repeated exactly the same when the player performs it at another event. So, some spontaneity is involved. This could be melodic, dynamic or rhythmic. For classical musicians, they’re given a firing squad if they change the ‘notes’, so all they really get is freedom of articulation, phrasing, dynamics and rubato. These are subtle. I think many listeners and critics could miss these things and label classical music in general as lacking feeling. Anecdotal, but I know an amazing (though not famous) jazz guitarist and he thinks that classical music, in general, is cold. After all, if your main focus is on the ‘notes’, then sure - 20 different recordings of the same piece will sound pretty much the same to you. This perceived ‘carbon copy’ phenomenon could add to one’s perception of stale performances lacking this ‘feeling’ we all hear so much about.
Jazz and blues musicians, on the other hand, are expected to never play the same solo twice. The energy that this brings across can immediately be viewed as emotional. “Mistakes” or notes not quite as cleanly executed are common even from the most skilled and this adds a type of humanity to the performance. Intentional or not, rhythmic divisions start getting blurry, piling more ‘life’ and ‘feeling’ to the experience.
In both extremes (classical on one end, blues and jazz on the other), a connection to the music that becomes almost spiritual is present. I think that’s really the heart of it for me. How much of themselves are they pouring into the performance? It’s often manifested through how we see the player reacted (body movement, facial expressions, appearing in need of a good laxative etc). So listening to an audio only performance vs seeing one filmed (or in person) could give an entirely different audience experience as to how much ‘feeling’ we all just experienced.
Maybe an easier way to think of it is what do performances that people claim ‘has no feeling’ have in common?
I find classical music anything but cold, the range of dynamics a pianist can use while performing a piece is mind blowing. Also, I think guitarists in davidglamour syndrome are a special kind, I’ve never heard anyone disqualifying a classical piece because it has fast passages, and there are hundreds of thousands of compositions having them. But when it comes to guitar, and they hear someone performing above 2 notes per second, they start throwing the tomatoes…
Same for me. It actually moves me more than any other genre. But, we all have different tastes. Things that really touch my soul are perfect melodies, clever chromatic harmonies and form/motif development. I’m sort of a nerd though.
Yeah, I tend to agree. Gilmour is one of my absolute favorites. Though, what I love about him I certainly don’t think it’s fair expect others to play that way or that anything that’s not as minimalistic as his approach isn’t valid. It’s strange indeed. I think there is likely some bitterness involved because they lack the discipline to pursue what’s required in technical playing lol!
I guess at the end of the day, I’d rather hear someone like Gilmour than someone who plays a million miles an hour but is “boring”. I didn’t say “lacks feeling” 
But a solo that’s full of descending 6’s at 150bpm and little else just doesn’t grab me, musically. It definitely earns my respect since I know the mastery required. What I’d prefer…mix that technical prowess in with some great phrasing, good melodic content and tasteful vibrato (over top an interesting chord progression)…then I’d probably rather hear that than a Gilmour solo
Right. I wish they’d focus on the positive, rather than discredit the hard work of the virtuosos. Full disclosure, I haven’t heard anything MAB ever played that moved me musically. I think he’s amazing though. I’m sure what he plays does move plenty of people. I’m not going to dislike his playing for being fast and a little mechanical (part of the allure with him I think). I really enjoy his playing actually, but in a different way than I enjoy Chopin. He’s certainly not worse than David Gilmour like the tomato throwers shout lol.
I guess it’s about 2 different kinds of enjoyment. Some things make us go “wow!”…other things make us go “ah…”. Both are great experiences!
It sounds to me like other people are already giving more/less the same opinion, but… if we have a given piece of music, feel is basically the choices made around how the piece is performed. Each note has a choice on timbre, dynamics, vibrato, etc. If I make a single choice, and play each note with the same characteristics, it doesn’t have much feel. But if I’m consciously changing those characteristics, now it more feel.
I think this is a really good start at defining “feeling,” even though I struggle with defining something by what it’s not.
I guess for me it’s the little idiosyncratic fingerprints on a performance that indicate a real person played it. Their attack on the guitar, their vibrato, ways they may go ahead of or behind the beat, how and where they bend, slurred vs stacatto articulations, whatever - the little ways people add personality to a piece.
I think technique and feeling can exist together - Yngwie may on occasion fairly be accused of playing without feeling, but at the same time no one (well, with a caveat I’ll get to) would listen to “Dark Star” and say there was no feeling or emotion to his playing - it’s positively explosive.
I think the caveat is some people, when pushed, will say about something that they think has no “feeling” that “…it has too many notes.” I disagree, but the very fact I’m a member here is probably evidence alone of that. 
But I think shred solos can have a ton of feeling - one of my favorite lead breaks is Satriani’s “until we say goodbye” for the tremendous amount of feeling he squeezes into what at the end of the day is a reasonably technical solo:
Maybe 1:25 or so is the lead-in to the solo, and about 1:38 or so he starts.
I always attributed that phrase to “blues lawyers”, maybe because I saw it thrown around the most by people that spent $$$$ on chasing tones that correlated with playing styles that are heavy with “feel” (i.e. lots of bends).
I think that you’re right. But the real fun starts when the artist has great technique and can start to make it sound exactly as they want, basically “owning” it. I think that this concept holds in art in general, and some people just provide a vision that is amazing, and perhaps that’s what people mean by “feeling” (?). Even simple covers can have this property. Careless Whisper is a great piece of popular music (from George Michael), but this cover by Seether is really pretty awesome, they just took it and made their own song that is so different, and yet so similar.
I love watching MAB so much, but when I’m just listening, I can no longer tell that he’s playing cross-armed, etc., and much of the magic suddenly disappears… I love him because of his incomparable technical skill, not his interpretation of music.
There’s a lot more to “feel” than the presence of bends, and if you dont believe that, have I got some out of tune, sloppy, uncontrolled bends for you!! 
I think there’s another closely related aspect to this too, though - for me, right or wrong, I think a lot of “feel” comes down to the interprettion of a peice and the various articulations/the guitarist’s touch on the guitar that comes across in the interpretation. But there’s absolutely a composition side of it too, I don’t know if I’d call that “feel,” exactly, but when you get to another variation, “soul,” I think you’re closer to the mark, and it absolutely has to do with musicality. A lot of the less interesting shred stuff I’ve heard, certainly from amateurs but occasionally from some pretty well known players, often musically can sound more like a technical exercise than it can a song. MAB gets a little close to that here based on the first thirty secnds or so of the video in te OP, which is probably ok because in context i suspect this IS a technical demonstration and not an example of a serious composition, but I’ve heard plenty of bedroom shredders write things that are…
…like, idunno, example that’s coming to mind here is a guy who keeps posting videos in this Mesa/Boogiue facebook group I’m in, where they’re all sweep arpeggio peices played with a TON of gain and low end so the whole thing is a sloppy mess (sloppy technique doesn’t help here either), but even if theuy were played with perfect accuracy, the “song” is always just a series of arpeggios, chord after chord played with the same basic sweep moving around a little bit, no harmonic movement within the peice or anything just a series of same “shape” arpeggios played over and over and over again, with every once in a while a pause to bend a note and strike a big Yngwie pose for the camera, etc. It’s not that there isn’t “feel” in the playing, although that would be a fair comment too perhaps, so much as there’s zero thought to melody and lyricism and tension/resolutionb in the writing; it’s just a technical exercise masquerading as a song.
So, when one of the “blues lawyer” crowd criticises a shred solo or song for lack of feel, sometimes they’re just turned off by the sheer number of notes being played, and while this is all subjective, I’d disagree with them because I think speed can be an incredibly useful texture in a compositional sense. But, sometimes it’s also because the solo, or song, or whatever, is just repetitive, and it sounds like a exercise that’s being driven by technique rather than a song, and IMO that’s a pretty fair critique, regardless of whether it’s a sweries of unending 32nd note alternate picked scale runs with little variety in note grouping, melodic contour or intervalic jumps, etc, or if it’s 8th note blues playing with little variety in note grouping, melodic contour, or intervallic jumps.
But, IMO, I think the compositional side of this (“is this a song, or is it being driven by some pattern on the fretboard?” is a different question than “is the guitarist executing this song with feeling?”
Gonna tell my grandkids this was Paul Gilbert
“Yeah, used to post on a forum with him. Over 100,000,000 confirmed string changes… Hell of a guy…”
But seriously to be on-topic, the whole “playing with feeling” thing in my experience… 9 out of 10 times you’ll see it as a comment below a video of someone with insane chops, and it is meant as a dig against the person. It’s such a tired remark that it is basically a meme. I can’t take it seriously and cringe whenever I read it.
Shredding can have a ton of “feeling” and can convey aggression, anger, etc. I know Chris Impellitteri said a lot of his shredding was meant as a conduit for the anger he felt over losing his parents.
Ozzy has always had amazing guitarists in my opinion. The only one I ever heard criticised for playing without feeling was Gus G. Why? Anyone have any thoughts on this or how they feel when they listen to Randy or Jake?
@Drew I’m not saying that playing with feel means bending more, just an observation that most players that “blues lawyers” seem to imitate, or at least specific songs, seem to be heavy on bending. Just my personal observation, not a fact.
That being said, I always thought the “with feel” argument is dumb. IMO there’s playing that fits the music or it doesn’t. Plenty of shoegaze stuff is trem picking a few notes (which arguably a beginner could do within a few sessions) and can elicit all kinds of emotions, frisson. Same holds true with bands like Sunn that just hold out chords forever.
You are right. I think that Ozzy’s guitarists put every drop of their blood into making Ozzy’s individual song as good as possible; they exist to make Ozzy look glorious (or Shanon will surely smite them).
In contrast, when MAB was working the above cover of Cat Scratch Fever, he jammed in a totally inappropriate solo that was dripping with his incredible technical talent. I don’t think it was about the song, but the opposite: The song was a means to showcase his chops. Just because MAB can melt somebody’s face off doesn’t mean that he always should; the song might not want that.
I think both are playing with feeling, just different feelings
I know this will sound condescending to some but I think if someone says something like “no feeling” or “where’s the feel?” then they lack the vocabulary or observational skills to be more articulate about their negative impression from the playing. The critique is never valid as the term is so undefined and subjective. They probably mean something like “this playing did not have an emotional impact on me.” And I think that may be because there wasn’t anything in the content of the playing that ‘accessed’ that sort of aesthetic-pleasure switch in their brain and ears, but I think it also can be because they get distracted by some other complex ego cycle related to the virtuosity.
Because as much as someone can mock John Cage’s 4’33" or think it’s a silly idea, seems I haven’t heard anybody say “that piece has no feel.”
Something I do think is valid and I wanted to point out:
I think the difference between different ‘levels’ of guitar playing ability can be codified or ranked in categories and such, but I think the difference between music connecting/communicating or not can not be codified and organized into some quantity of tangible variables. I think this is a different issue than simply personal taste varying from person to person, it’s more so that guitar playing can check all sorts of boxes of correctness for dynamics, tone, technique, even creativity, and I don’t think it necessarily means it will have that type of impact that separates good music from bad.
Not to be overly philosophical but I do think there’s a sort of other-worldly quality to certain music that by definition is impossible to parse out. Or more specifically, the relationship of certain music to certain ears, part of the reason why some music connects with some people so well.
So ‘there’s no feel’ could mean something really f***ing stupid like “that was really fast and kind of cool and I feel really bad about myself that I can’t play fast cool stuff like that, and I don’t want to sit with that feeling so I’m going to find something negative to say about this other player so I don’t have to feel inferior” or maybe it means “this music doesn’t make me feel the special good feelings I feel when I’m listening to playing I really enjoy, and I can’t articulate why, though I do recognize the skill required to perform this music.”
Sorry man, I was trying to make a joke there that evidently didn’t come across.
