Forgive me for going off on a bit of tangent here, but there’s a story I’ve been telling for a long time that I find illustrative…and that relates somewhat to what we’ve been discussing here.
I’ve always been fascinated by the dichotomy between “trained” and “feel” musicians. As is probably obvious, I’m the latter…although I did play in school band through 10th grade (sax and oboe) and learned to read music. But once I got a guitar, I left all of that behind, and, as I’ve said, have never really applied much of that kind of learning to guitar playing.
The story that sums up the difference is this: a close friend of mine in high school had an older brother who had a fair amount of formal musical training, as he was the guy who always played the organ during the school orchestra’s classical concerts. (As I recall, he otherwise played trombone.) I suspect he did Bach or whoever else was on the program on a given day.
At some point, this older brother took up guitar. It was apparent that he had learned his basic chords well enough. But one night, at a party, both my friend and his brother were in attendance. I had a guitar, and he had a guitar (both acoustic). Some jamming ensued, and I started playing Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand.”
If you know the song, you know that there’s a long instrumental section in which Neil stretches out on guitar, while Crazy Horse plays repeated iterations of Am and F behind him. Those two chords alternate like clockwork throughout this jam, one measure of each ad infinitum.
So I’ve finished the second chorus, and I’m going into this jam section. As long as my friend’s brother was playing along with my chord changes, he was fine. The very moment I abandoned playing the chords and took off on lead, he became hopelessly lost. This guy, for all the musical training that had gone into him becoming a fine organ player, capable of playing Bach, could absolutely NOT play one measure of Am, one measure of F, another measure of Am, etc.
He couldn’t “feel” these simplest of changes, and had no concept of when to change from one chord to another, even though I had established the pattern before starting to play lead. He wasn’t just a little off…he was off very badly…even after I came back and played a few more rounds of the chords. When I stopped, he was lost.
Lest you think I’m singling him out as particularly incompetent, I’ve talked to many others over the years who’ve made the point that some musicians, for all their skill, just can’t improvise, and are totally at sea if they don’t have sheet music in front of them that charts every single note that emanates from their instrument.
While I could greatly benefit, I’m sure, from more formal musical training, I’ve always been leery of it at the same time. If I have to make a choice, I’ll take being a “feel” musician any day of the week. It has worked for me (for playing admittedly mostly simple music: rock ‘n’ roll and country) for nearly 50 years now.
I have another less dramatic but still illustrative story, but I’ll save it just in case others would like to chime in on this subject. Does anyone else have experiences along these lines?