1. The Athlete: the stage where we are preoccupied with how our body looks. This is the stage where we tell ourselveses, "'I am how good I look, how strong I am, how fast I can run, etc...
2. The Warrior: the stage where we seek to earn, accumulate and conquer the word. The stage where we ask, "what's in it for me?"
3. The Statesman: the stage where we realize we are not what we accumulate and thus ask the question, "how can I serve others"
4. The Spirit: The last stage where we ultimately realize that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and not human beings having a spiritual experience.
Jung said everybody goes thru these stages. Not everybody will spend the same amount of time on each stage. Not everybody will go thru each stage in the same order, and people can change back and forth between stages, but these stages are present as we go thru life.
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I'm proposing my three archetypes of guitar playing: The Guitar Player, The Musician, and The Artist.
THE GUITAR PLAYER
Guitar PLAYERS, are simply your everyday amateur guitar enthusiasts. Guitar Players for the most part rarely leave the safe confines of the bedroom, though emerging occasionally to jam with friends, play at Guitar Center or the occasional party, or college campus quad.
Every great artist or musician first starts off as a guitar player. Guitar players won't usually be found in bands, and by "band" I mean a band that has graduated from the bedroom, garage, party stage and is an actual working, gigging band .
Guitar Players come in many ages and many different levels of proficiency. Many guitar players strive to become "musicians" or artists, while some are content to remain guitar players their entire lives.
THE MUSICIAN
The Musician is a working guitar player. They may not be rock stars, the level of pay on the musician level can vary greatly but all musicians share the following points in common.
* They play in public
* They're make a living or are trying to make a living playing
music.
* They self-promote their projects
The Musician varies from the street performer busking on Fisherman's Wharf, or the Las Vegas Strip, the shitty Van Halen cover band you saw playing in a casino last weekend or any number of people probably on your Facebook friends list who is constantly, plugging, and self promoting shows, and self made albums.
Some musicians have conquered their local or regional circuit and may have a small but loyal following that allows them to make a modest living, while some may be playing in dive bars for beer money, some may be playing on the street corner literally trying to survive
While the Guitar Player may or may not ever want to perform publicly, the Musician NEEDS to be in front of people.
THE ARTIST
While The Musician and The Artist can both play original music, what separates them is this:
The Artist unlike the musician is not motivated by money or fame in order to create.
The Musician can become successful enough to where he no longer needs to create in order to pay the bills or reach a certain level of fame. Now he is an Artist and creates because he chooses to. Now he creates because there is something inside him he has to get out and whether it ever sells a single copy is irrelevant.
You don't have to be famous to be an artist either. It seems rare these days but some are born artists and become musicians from day 1 with no concern about money whatsoever and seek only to create for the sake of creating.
In the last few years I became frustrated over the fact that I was a guitar player "borderline" musician but was not an artist. As a kid I just sort of naturally expected that once I picked up the guitar and learned my first few chords that the floodgates would instantly open and original music and songs would just flow naturally and effortlessly. But they didn't and I beat myself up about that for a long time, and made myself feel bad because I had this stupid notion that it is MANDATORY that every guitarist MUST create original music.
But thats bullshit.
I'm a descent guitar player with the potential to be a good musician, but I am not an Artist. I don't create anything original, and frankly I don't really have a bold artistic vision that I need to share with the world. But I've only in the last year that I finally accepted that, and believe that
it's ok to JUST PLAY GUITAR.
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