Have yall noticed this shit? Laypeople will watch any person who can barely actually play just spam his elbow picking while randomly fretting with GOBS of distortion and they’ll think it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever heard.
Now I mean this more in the context of technical playing. When it comes to slower playing like Gilmour or BB King then it’s easier for them to discern good playing but when it comes to shred fucking forget about it lol.
I guess it’s just the sad reality that when you get deep enough into something, most people won’t be able to relate to it and will have a very different experience. Maybe there’s also the case where something looks more impressive if the person is really doing big exaggerated movements and facial expressions, but guitar nerds like us are more impressed when someone does something we know is crazy hard and make it look easy.
I imagine almost any field has similar examples, and in those fields we would be the clueless ones. Photography, painting, dance, carpentry, etc. Though maybe some fields are more exposed on social media and gain this “undeserved” praise. I’ve certainly seen my share of high view count guitar content that makes me want to never go online again.
At live concerts, shreddy stuff can quickly drown in a mix too and the people in the crowd might be listening more with their eyes, if that makes sense.
Not sure if there’s really anything to do other than focus on your own stuff and what you are interested in.
No CoNsEcUtIvE rEpLiEs AlLoWeD: Since subtext is dead: what I am saying here is that we are the ones obsessed with a picture of someone eating a sandwich.
That’s well put, and it’s funny how for the laypeople they often need visual cues to let them know what they’re hearing is “good”. Lmao.
That being said, I notice in videos of my own playing that my hand movements look “boring” and not as impressive when I’m playing fast because I use so much economy of motion in both hands. I kinda envy players whose hands look fast and give that impression of speed without having to do spasmodic/ over exaggerated hand and arm movements.
This shouldn’t surprise you in the least that I love XKCD. I finally wore it out but I had the Correlation t-shirt for years, haha.
But, what’s it called, the Peter Principle, I think? The observation that the information necessary assess your expertise in a subject is also the information necessary to become an expert in a subject, and accordingly people routinely over-estimate their abilities in areas they lack expertise (and, while we’re at it, often under-estimate their abilities in areas where they do have some expertise?). This feels pretty comparable, where it’s hard to know what technically advanced guitar playing is, if you’re not yourself a technically advanced player, so you just point to stuff that for whatever reason resonates with you and assume it’s really good, because it moves you emotionally somehow.
And, when push comes to shove, you can’t exactly call someone wrong for feeling that way. We listen to music that sparks joy. For me, that involves cascading legato lines. For my daughter, that’s “up up up” which is what she calls K Pop Demon Hunter’s “Golden,” though to her credit she’s also a big fan of “dada oh-yeah” where for whatever reason “oh-yeah” is what she calls guitars. I’m probably raising a shredder.
EDIT - I took it to google. Dunning-Kruger effect.
Peter Principle is probably loosely appropriate here as well, the tendency in a hierarchy for people to get promoted based on their competency until they reach a level where they’re no longer competent. I think I’ve seen that band live a few times, and one could argue it’s a major influence in my own writing. 
Side quest:
The famous physics quote “shut up and calculate” is attributed to Feynman, but it was actually coined by the less-famous guy David Mermin, as a pejorative characterization of some physicists’ (including mine) attitudes. This is what I always think of for the Peter principle.
My impression perhaps goes in the opposite direction: the most common reaction I’ve noticed from laypeople after witnessing some face-melting technical shred is “oh cool!”, like being really good at beer pong, but there is one thing everybody and the next guy seem to be able to perceive with no musical background required: rhythm.
Specifically, it is quite interesting that I have identified pretty similar reactions from normies after watching a wide spectrum of players of all levels and styles, such as Vai, Yngwie, Nile Rodgers, Juanes, Carlos Santana, Cantrell, Les Paul, Dimebag, Billy Joe Armstrong, Greg Howe and some others, and the common factor I have found is that people seem to appreciate their art even if they don’t like the music, and rhythm seems to be king for those guys even for the complex stuff. It seems to apply to all of them.
In contrast, players that give me the subjective impression that they keep technical difficulty at the top of their musical shopping list (e.g. Rusty Cooley, maybe?) most frequently get the “nice trick” reaction.
I agree with you generally. I would mention though that there’s an incredible depth of technique in things like dynamics, note shaping, bending and vibrato, tone production (from the hands, not the gear), etc. Gilmour and BB King are absolutely masterful technicians in those technical dimensions. When combined with phrasing and note choice, it’s these dimensions that lay people refer to as “having a good touch” or “playing with emotion.”
Sure, I’ve met plenty of lay people who can’t discern between the different levels of “fast” playing, but I’ve met plenty of guitarists who seem to be completely ignorant of these other technical dimensions. There’s no shortage of guitarists online who’ll tell you that Eric Clapton is “not technical” or that he’s overrated, while there are absolutely technical dimensions where he was peerless in his time, and is still among the elite even now.
Beyond that, there’s a huge amount of heavily edited, mimed, and often outright faked playing online, and many guitarists don’t seem to be able to discern real from fake either.
Something I’ve noticed about myself as I’ve gotten better (andf I’ve broken through a few plateaus since joining this place) is it’s started to help me “hear” fast playing better, and some of the stuff that I love I always assumed was faster than it was, but as I get better at hearing the flow of fast, liquid phrases, I’m finding it’s actually not as bas as I thought and part of my problem is I’m probably rushing my playing. So, I might even add that the ability to “hear” discrete notes and phrases in fast runs is itself a skill.
Clapton is a bit of a special case in that you need to assess his innovation and mastery/popularization of the blues vocabulary (which, not for nothing, no one is ever going to scrawl “Drew is God!” on the White House), with his racism, his plagiarism (some of his more famous leads were note-for-note Freddie King solos), and then later in life his anti-vax advocacy.
He’s hardly alone in this, and there’s good toio - after getting clean, he did a tremendous amount to support recovery programs, and he kind of reminds me of Lance Armstrong in this respect, grade A asshole, probably permanently tainted competitive cycling in the eyes of Americans, doped through his entire career and lied about it/destroyed the careers of people who tried to come clean and implicated him, until it was convenient for him to fess up himself… but also unquestionably the best cyclist in his generation and one of the best ever (doping doesn’t make you fast; it helps you recover from the training faster so you can do more of it, and Armstrong did the work harder than anyone), and had a quiet reputation, as a cancer survivor, for quietly picking up the medical bills of other strangers he met going through treatment themselves.
People are extremely complicated, and Clapton is, well, still a person, whatever the graffiti might say.
There’s a mention of this in a book I read recently “The Brain That Changes Itself” (about neuroplasticity), it’s been demonstrated that an ability to perceive a haptic stimulus at a higher rate resulted in the ability to distinguish percussive sounds at a higher rate.
That totally makes sense to me. There’s very little that “sounds fast” to me anymore.
I know. It’s hard to be a fan of Eric Clapton in 2026.
Speaking as a person with an alcoholic parent:
I have to believe that some amount of the behaviour of addicts, and the hateful things they can say is a result of their neurochemistry being damaged by substance abuse. It’s the only way I can maintain a relationship with that parent.
I’m not at all saying that I support the shameful things that Eric Clapton has said or done in his life.
This is a really good point. And, I guess I should also be careful what I’m saying here as well because it’s too easy to shit on someone for who they are today, and use that as a reason to undercut some of their contributions in the past. Eric Clapton is not a great person today. But, the tone and vocabulary of the electric guitar today would be VERY different without Clapton in 1966, and while slagging off on “boomer bends” whatever those are might be popular now, progress and growth doesn’t have to follow a straight line to be valid and he’s one of a handful of maybe a dozen or two people who can really claim to have fundamentally changed how we see the electric guitar.
I’m listening to Tony MacAlpine while working - Maximum Security is such a great disc and I’m not even huge on neoclassical - but I really should go back and listen to some early Clapton today as a reminder of why we care about him today.
Sure, easy for YOU to say! But yeah, it’s starting to click - learning to hear not just a blur of notes, but the patterns within them, is pretty cool. Even stuff like SRV (where some of the larger intervalic jumps if anything increase the illusion of speed) it’s cool when suddenly they stop being flourishes of sound and start being concrete phrases. I don’t know why I was so slow on the update here, I’m 45, lol. But it’s coming together.
I admit I’m not a Clapton guy, barely listened to any of his shit other than Layla and Sunshine of your love. I find his style of blues kind of boring.
What did he do that stood out? He seemed pretty typical of the genre to me except without the virtuosity of SRV or the abilities of Robben Ford.
Nobody else had this level of control over dynamics, articulation, note shaping and tone production in 1967. Nobody.
This is all technique. You don’t just plug a Les Paul into a Marshall and sound this good.
Absolutely.
Ike Turner is another, even more extreme case. He’s one of the most influential rhythm players ever, but you know, fuck him.
The sweeping stuff that Rusty does still sounds hellaciously fast to me, but then I don’t really do much sweeping so I’m not so attuned to it.
All that you find “typical” in the genre is, to a great extent, all Clapton.
I have a conspiracy theory about guitar making things sound faster than they really are.
The same lines feel a lot “slower” when played on other instruments, or at least that’s my impression.
Rusty’s sweeping is absolutely absurd. I can almost come close sometimes – sweeping clicks for me more easily than most techniques – but never really nail it.
I mean it sounds good and tone-ful and I like his note choice and execution but nothing about it stands out to me beyond that. I’d much rather listen to Jeff Beck or Rory Gallagher if I want to hear that sort of late 60s early 70s stuff.
And of course there are techniques for all aspects of playing but I was speaking specifically about technique in terms of the shred context. When it comes to tasteful blues and phrasing I classify that differently in brain than techincal shred style playing.
I think it has something to do with the “attack” of the pick on the strings. All that extra noise that comes with the note being played coupled with gain/distortion I think really adds to the perception of speed.
I also notice that, often, when I listen to guitar isolated tracks from famous metal songs the guitars seem slower than when fully integrated into the mix.
It’s not about standing out. It’s about subtlety.
You should transcribe some of this stuff. Focus on aspects like dynamics, the variations in how vibrato is phrased, the microtonal bends, and the articulation of the notes. Understand that this isn’t accidental, it’s all deliberate and intentional.
Then, try to play that through a 100W Marshall and make it sound that good.
That kind of stuff is just obnoxious, really. One of my favorite Albert King solos, and I guess probably favorite solos, is his “Personal Manager.” The verse fills are just a taste in understatement and dynamics, but then you get to the solo - he opens up for a chorus with a bit more grit than was typical for him at this point in his career, and then comes into the turnaround, aroundf 2:20 here:
…and it’s the same note bent over and over again… but it’s never the exact same note, each one is ever so slightly different. He does it again at 3:08, and it’s just maddening how he subtly builds tension thorugh the repition and the sliiiiightly different ways he arrives at the target note, faster or slower.
It’s a goddamn master class, and it makes me very insecure about my own bending control
I feel like I got pretty good feel when it comes to slow note shaping tbh. I’ve never been able to play through a 100W Marshall head, I’m a modeler guy - I would like to though.