Dammit, Jim! I'm a guitar player, not a...

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If you can actually play, its very hard not to copy other things that you hear. But we couldn't copy anything because we couldn't [play] - Roger Waters

  I've been playing guitar almost 30 years now, but I've always had problems composing original material.

 I used to overthink things and believed that I needed to study everything about music, and theory, and deciphering sheet music before I could be qualified to write a song.

  William Mann who was a critic for The Times [London] wrote the following about The Beatles:

one gets the impression they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes and the flat submediant key switches so natural in the Aeolian Cadence...

     John Lennon was reported to have said, Aeolian, cadence? sounds like a type of bird.

  I was a child of the 70's & 80's. I grew up in era of Heavy Metal, and people like Eddie Van Halen, and Yngwie Malmsteen (who I met once but thats another story), who are technical geniuses. Everything I grew up hearing taught me that if you can't play at a 100mph then you are not a worth a damn as a guitar player.

 My musical heroes include people like John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Kurt Cobain just to name a few. If there's one these people have shown me is that Creativity and Originality are also important too, and you don't HAVE to be a technical genius to be a successful musician. I never wanted to be one of those flashy, technical dudes other than to just fit in with all the other musicians I knew. Fact is I can't play that fast, nor do I want to. Hell I can't even THINK in notes that fast, much less play them.

 

 Ok so you don't have to be a musical theory genius and a technical wizzard to be a songwriter in modern music. My next idea had to do with inspiration and God. My thinking was that some people are just born or destined for greatness or have been born with this "personal hotline to God/The Universe" and either you have that or you don't.

  Afterall, Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday from a dream he'd had. Keith Richards wrote the riff from Satisfaction after waking up from a dream he had as well. Iggy Pop has talked about how if he can't get a song completed in under 10 minutes then it just gets thrown out.

  And yeah I know what some of you might say, that yeah his music sounds like it was written in under 10 minutes, but hey man, some of those old guitar riffs are heavy as hell, and Lust For Life? thats just one of those tunes you just can't get out of your head.

 And Mozart, being a technical genius, wrote the following to a friend once about how easily musical ideas came into his head:

     When I feel well and in a good humor, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish. Whence and how do they come? I do not know, and I have nothing to do with it. Those that please me I keep in my head and hum them.

 Inspiration is a funny thing. You only have it when you're not expecting it, and if you look for it, you'll never find it.  I've come up with a couple descent guitar riffs of my own. Everything I do is acoustic, and my style, if you could call it that I like to describe as "Pink Floyd Floyd on Heroin."

  The couple descent guitar riffs I've come up with on my own always happened by accident. Whenever I sit with the guitar with the attitude of, "ok I will now create a cool riff around which I will write an awesome song." it never happens. The only cool original things I've done, have always happened when I'm just playing in the moment and my mind is clear of objectives or goals or ideas. And there's something about the nightime too. Its weird but I could never play or write anything original during the daytime.

So what have we learned today?

•  You don't need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of music to write music.
•  You don't need to be a technical wizzard to be an awesome guitar player than songwriter.
•  For a lot of people (myself included) originality is much more important than technical ability
•  Inspiration is wonderful and special but ultimately not required. What's the proof? There are thousands upon thousands of awesome rock songs but only one Yesterday. Just because you didn't write it in some awesome dream, doesn't mean it can't be cool.
• The truth is, songwriting is a craft, and like any other craft its something that requires time, and hard work to master.

I always wanted to write, but I always figured it'd be no good unless somehow the hand just took the pen and started moving without me really having anything to do with it. Like automatic writing. But it just never happened. - Jim Morrison

 Yeah Mozart was a genius composing Symphonies at age five, but he didn't compose anything good until he was sixteen and had been playing his entire life.  Thomas Edison said genius was 1%  inspiration and 99% perspiration. Yeah Paul McCartney was 23 years old when he wrote Yesterday in his sleep, but he been writing songs since age 13. 10 years of practice and hard work set the foundation for Yesterday. In fact all The Beatles were all seasoned professional musicians that played thousands of gigs before anyone ever heard of them.

  So the reason I've never been able to really write any of my own material is mainly because I never actually worked at it. Kind of like Jim Morrison's quote, I thought if just didn't automatically happen there was no point in trying.
  Sometimes I also think that I maybe learned too much early on. My teens were spent learning theory, practicing flashy techniques that I didn't really want to be doing anyways and learning classical guitar. Like Roger Waters said at the start of this thing, sometimes I think that if I wasn't so concerned with sounding like how I thought I should sound so people will like me, that it would've forced me by default to be more original since I would've lacked the technical ability to simply mimick what I was hearing around me. There is some precedent to back up that statement. George Martin the legendary producer of The Beatles, once said of Paul McCartney:

I have often been asked if I could've written any of The Beatles tunes, and the answer is definitely no; for one basic reason, I didn't have their simple approach to music. I think that if Paul, for instance, had learned music 'properly' - not just the piano, but correct notation for writing and reading music, all the harmony and counterpoint that I had to go through, and the techniques of orchestration - it might well have inhibited him...once you start being taught things, your mind is channeled in a particular way. Paul didn't have that channeling, so he had freedom, and could think of things that I would've considered outrageous.

  And there's another thing too. I just don't have a driving urge to be creative. Sure I could practice and learn how to write a descent song, but I just like to play. I don't have a need to express myself musically the way someone like John Lennon has that driving creative urge. I don't have that burning in my soul that all my musical/artistic heroes all had. John Lennon had something to say, I don't have anything to say. I just wanna play the damn guitar.
 
  I'm just not a songwriter, I'm a guitar player, plain and simple. The only times I've ever felt like writing something original have been situations where I'm trying to impress a girl, or the real rare occassion that I meet another musician that I get along good with and we collaborate.
  I do very well with a songwriting partner. When it comes to playing or writing with others I've always favored people I get along with and am comfortable around and shares my same views on music and art  versus some dude who just has a good rep a singer or guitarist. I'm descent at coming with an intro or a riff, but not so good when it comes to melody and song structure. If I run into anybody I can collaborate with so that I can focus on my strenghts then I'm all down for trying to be creative.
  If not thats cool too because hey, I'm just the guitar player.