The original poster on the subject of Disturbed never said they were good or brilliant just that he liked playing their songs. But it is impossible for a highly skilled guitarist to sit idly by and believe that somebody would like or credit Disturbed for any reason other than their own ignorance toward “the truth” about relative guitar talent levels.
Nobody misread anything, I don’t think. You are just doing what all young hotshot fret flyers do; you hate that somebody came along and got recognition with a handful of powerchords and no solos while you meanwhile have devoted your life to learning every scale, mode, and chord figure known throughout history. So it chafes your ass a little. I know this because I used to be the same way.
Some of the best guitar players I know write the worst music; strange but true. Or at least have the hardest time writing music (songs, that is). That’s what happens when you lose sight of what it was like when you were a listener, as opposed to being a player. I hear songs and they deconstruct in my mind as they play, same as any musician; but who am I to pass judgment? Most modern fret flyer guitarists of the cloth that Lee is cut from make music not for the listener, but for the musician–things that would impress another guitar player to hell and back, but mean little to the average ear.
I learned about this stuff the hard way when I myself was caught up in the elitist mentality. I used to go to the Guitar Center in my town (both of them, actually) and proudly jam on my favored rigs, being sure to gloat to my friends that I’d yet to meet someone who was as good as I was in those stores. But one day I got a wake up call, when I heard a guitarist for a band that I thought were an ignorant bunch of morons, play all kinds of insane stuff alone at his house one day. It made me realize that, wow, some really great guitar players sometimes just choose to play simple stuff (or in some cases, REAL crap, as in, ‘unmelodic pile of mess sounding’ crap).
It changed when I caught myself telling my best friends of then 12 years to go **** themselves because they weren’t as musically inclined as I was and thus were of no use to my band. Right about then was when I got the wakeup call. A few weeks later, the guys who WERE good, decided I was not good enough for them, and kicked me to the curb. I tried to tell them no band was worth ruining good friendships over; they did not agree (one of these people is the same guy who later joined that band that ripped off my song for their CD, if any of you remember me talking about that).
For the record I have been in 13 (yes, THIRTEEN) bands. Almost all of them met premature demises or roadblocks because of the presence of similar elite guitarist archetypes. These guys who get lessons and books and videos, and have a rack of no less than 4 guitars, sporting the Mesa/Marshall/Line 6, telling you that “Oh you should do this and you should do that, do these finger exercises and learn Cliffs of Dover and listen to Satriani because he’s a GOD and don’t forget Yngwie.” They’ll recommend their favorite (and coincidentally most impressive) scales and modes, and will spend about 12,000x more effort and time on a solo then they will the song the solo goes in–or hell, make the whole song a solo. In my experiences, these proud elites are often jarred by the idea of playing with another, and in many of my past situations, I found that they are usually compounded by a deep need to prove oneself, to the point where it ruins the good comraderie of being able to jam with others.
The most memorable of these is a guy named Mark Raimondi–the best guitar player I’ve ever heard, as well as the worst song writer. He’s berklee educated, so don’t kid yourself about it. Our band self destructed majorly because of his desire to be the top dog. First he would proudly lead us in ‘blowing other bands off the stage,’ bands who were always supposed to be our friends in fact. Before long he turned his attention to me, since I wrote a lot of music in the band, he felt like I was trying to ‘take over’ his spot. He started trying to ‘blow me away’ on stage night after night. And I was supposedly his partner. Before long the band dissolved when, while working on music, he would try to add parts he thought were too difficult for me to play, just so the rest of the band would have to wait around and watch me struggle. I seldom struggled; I think it surprised him how much of what he could do, I could also do, but did not always choose to do. There are times and places for every technique; he did not understand this.
Regardless. For someone asking people not to point fingers and chastise, you were rather quick to do it yourself. Playing guitar is not about being the best, and we shouldn’t criticize each other’s taste when it is of no consequence to each of us here.
In fact, I’ve often found that most guitar players who think the way you seem to, Lee, do not even enjoy playing guitar 1/10th as much as they enjoy being the untouchable best at something. It works out really well with guitar, because half the people you’d be playing to ‘compete’ against aren’t even aware that there is a competition, making it a shark’s romp in a shallow pond. It is the equivalent of being proud of being the best lv 60 rogue on a server full of lv10 warriors in World of Warcraft.
Unfortunately playing guitar in 2005 is seen as a competition. Well, it’s not. I say as long as your good enough to make music that is coherent, more power to you–and in this case, Disturbed is quite capable of that much.
We all have different tastes. Why can’t people just accept that?
