The Student: “I am very discouraged. What should I do?”
The Teacher: “Encourage others.”
The answer to this Zen query is significant to me concerning guitar playing, for a couple of reasons. Finding new ways to encourage my students is one of them: If a student seems to be uninspired, I start looking for ways to spark (or rekindle, as the case may be) their interest in playing the guitar. I ask them to bring in some songs they want to learn, and we pick from them. I demonstrate by playing my guitar along with the song as we listen to it. Other times I might show them something they didn’t know, or play them a song of my choice in hopes that they may try and learn it.
Another thing it made me think of was how recently a good friend of mine encouraged me to revisit the instrumental piece “Mood For A Day” by Steve Howe of Yes, so he could hear me play it again…it had been so long! I can’t tell you how glad I am he encouraged me to play it, because it has been great re-learning and playing this piece again!! And I can play it even better than I could when I was 16!
Some nice guitar playing during the lead part:
Today I listened to Liz Phair’s album Exile In Guyville. A great album for guitar. (My copy is on LP.) I recently listened to Exile On Main St (by the Rolling Stones) and figured now would be as good a time as any to see if maybe there was anything to the whole thing I had heard about concerning these two albums.
“Phair commented in interviews that the album was a song-by-song reply to the Rolling Stones‘ 1972 album Exile on Main Street. Some critics contend that the album is not a clear or obvious song-by-song response, although Phair apparently sequenced her compositions in an attempt to match the song-list and pacing of the 1972 album” (wikipedia).
Interesting, and there seemed to be a sense of there being a reply with some of the songs, in some way or another…
Yeah, it’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it. They- they-punctuate it. You know, they give it purpose. [Pause] And all the ideas for my songs, all the influences, all come out of that. All the influences, all the feelings, all the ideas come from that. I’m not doing it to see how good I can sound, or how perfect the melody can be, or how intricate the details can be woven or how perfectly written something can be. I don’t care about those things.
-Bob Dylan
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