Legos

This oversimplification will quickly run into trouble, but let’s not let that stop us.

Musicianship generally falls into two main categories:  the people fully understand the instrument and use it to express art, and the rest, for whom the instrument is like a puzzle that sometimes makes art.

A true musician looks at the fretboard of a guitar for example, and sees the shapes that evoke all the different moods.  The happy and sad sounds, the tension, the mysterious, the disorienting... basically they understand the palette and can paint any picture right there in front of you. 

For the rest of us, guitar is a puzzle that we sometimes know how to put together.  We hear something we like and we practice practice practice to imitate it.  It's like a parlor trick.  We may call it up from time to time (and actually pull it off in the moment!) but it's mostly rote.  The real musicians sit down and start sketching images and the rest of us do our best to recreate those sketches - almost like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.  We learn all the pieces and assemble it.

But I’ll tell you something about us jigsaw puzzle players; we're having fun. The puzzle has a lot of pieces that can be put together thousands of different ways, and not all of those ways make music (those are the bad days - it happens) but somehow it doesn't really make the guitar less fun.  Well, actually yes it does.  But so what?

So while us Puzzle People would love to sit down and freeform sketch something compelling, we don’t really have that, and that usually leads to becoming discouraged.  Not all us punters share the “guitar is a fun puzzle” outlook, but it can definitely help those bad days when you walk over to the guitar and step on a Lego.