Somebody in TikTok was discussing finance but it could have been guitar

General Music Discussion
#1

I love TikTok (indeed, my iPhone limits me to 15 minutes per day), but this guy was discussing finance, I believe, and it could have been as if he was talking about guitar technique:

It can be a terrible mistake to listen to the advice of somebody skilled who finds what they do to be easy. Because the people who do things naturally often have no idea how they actually do it. They just rationalize after the fact to explain it. Those rationalizations become what they teach, and it can be very misleading. We get excited about learning from people like this because they’re at the top of their game and they’re very high status. But it’s often better to simply observe them and spend time with them. Someone who has struggled at something is often a much better teacher. Spend time around people who naturally win at things to learn through imitation and influence, but learn from the people who do the work.

No wonder I love CtC so much.

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#2

I think you can relate that to anything in life, people who go far are those who need the least amount of instructions. The problem is that they most likely won’t be able to provide solutions to problems that a regular person would encounter.
I started to play the guitar at about the age of 12 and at 16 I was pretty good at the shred stuff but felt like I’m not really progressing anymore so I started to look for a teacher. I took lessons from a guy that taught 10 minutes away from where I lived and it turned out that he is a fantastic player who can play everything from classical fingerpicking pieces, bebop, funk, country to yngwie stuff. I’ve learned very important things from him but none of them were about technique despite the fact I was constantly observing his picking hand and trying to imitate what he was doing. He’d tell me to practice slowly, play from the wrist and build up and that obviously didn’t work.
I progressed as a musician because he would make me pay attention to stuff like “your melodies aren’t made of any intervals wider than minor and major seconds” or “in this song you have two verses 16 bars each and the second one ends differently to connect smoothly with the chorus which is also 16 bars long”. Very useful and valuable stuff that a 16 years old sweep picking obsessed kid usually doesn’t care about. Very thankful for that.

Those sequenced pentatonics he does are super cool, his usual stuff is DSX + descending sweep and DBX combined. Maybe I’ll conduct my own CtC investigation on his playing someday :smiley: .

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#3

That dude in the vid, smokin :bomb:

3 Likes
#4

Well said, @kgk. I think this is especially true when people try to “rah rah” about “motivation.” If you have motivation (and interest,) something is easy. If you don’t, it’s not.