Playing Guitar - Music Is An Amplifier

The Easiest Way To Master The Fretboard!Uncle Tim's Building Blocks

The series was developed visually, because people natively think visually. You do not have to interpret a picture. You can understand it by looking at it.

And when you combine it with knowledgable text, the meaning and rules of music will jump out at you!

Immediately you will begin to see into the instrument and develop an understanding that is not possible any other way.

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Have you ever seen people that somehow get a bigger voice in life. Maybe they become a politician or a public figure. Maybe they join a band that gets some big scale attention, or maybe they start to refine their music so it takes on new meaning. Whatever the case when a person enters the public spotlight, they draws crowds and they get a bigger voice.

In my mind one of two things will happen. They will either tone it down and muffle their personality or it will get amplified.

As musicians, I don't feel like we have much of a choice. When you look at people that are just starting to play (for the first time), they are usually teenagers or slightly removed. I meet people every week that are adults learning to play, but usually they have tried before and then put it down.

The teenagers that I have met are learning to do one of two things. To express themselves musically or to meet people of the oppposite sex. When I learned to play it was for both reasons. The first time I exercised my new public voice I realized in the middle of the first song that I was getting more attention. And that new dynamic took some time to work through. But the thing I was not prepared to take charge of was the fact that now people would pay attention to me and actually seek me out.

I was just a sky kid that spent more time playing baseball and football than playing music. Now they wanted to know all sorts of things about me. All because I could play a few songs. This phenomena is quite natural. You show an interesting side to your personality and people are attracted to interesting things. When you play music, you by the very nature of the activity, draw attention to yourself. Usually when on one else is competing for that attention, unless the lead singer never stops talking.

People are vulnerable to the effects of music. We are all emotional beings. We respond to emotional statements. The guitar is an emotional statement manufacturer. It spews them forth. And if you are the person doing the work, expect to become the focus of this attention. Ready or not!

And do you know where this machine gets the raw materials from which to construct these emotional statements. From you!

The guitar pulls these things right out of your mind and heart and amplifies them. And it does it so well, that anyone within ear shot can hear it. This happens irrespective of what kind of music you play. Grunge players are affected by this, just like people that play ballads and love songs. Women too! Probably even more so.

This is different than playing songs at Christmas or other holidays. You will still get the attention but when you are performing throughout the year, you are putting out a message and the message is directly tied to you and who you are.

If you like loud sounds, then your music will reflect that. If you like clever conversation, you will probably write songs that are clever. If you hate people as a rule, you will probably write songs about how you hate people. Everyone is affected by it. And when you hear a message in someone's music that you can identify with, you are attracted to it. If it is wrapped in what you consider beautiful, you may be captured by it. It can have a profound effect on people. Often when people are going through a tough time, they will find a song that reflects their feelings and rally around it. It becomes a great source of inner strength. This stuff is powerful!

The fact is, music can act like an amplifier to bring more meaning or more strength to your message and you as a person.

So in a way music acts like a magnifying lens and helps to make the issues we sing and play about seem bigger than life. This is something you can use to jack your music up. The people that are attracted to it will have more to react to, more to identify with, and will get more meaning out of it when they listen.

Usually this does not even show up until the process of shaping the musician is well under way. There is much work to be put in place before this high level effect shows up. The performer must develop their talents and put themselves into their work. You have to be careful because the message you eventually send out may be quite different than you think. If you go out and make a bunch of mistakes people may walk away thinking "that guy never could put it all together". Really! So this amplifier must be controlled, at least for me.

An audience of ten people will do. One time I was playing scrabble with my cousins and family and I started to sing a song I wrote about my sister-in-law when she was in the Peace Corps in Thailand. When I finished they all started clapping. During the middle of a scrabble game! You could see it was important to them that they express some sort of statement. It was cool.

When the final pieces are put in place and a polished sound is crafted, the subtle effect of a personal signature can emerge. It will probably sneak up on you and it might not even be known to you until you hear the tape after a performance. This even pappens on a small scale. As in the examples above, this will happen time after time. It is very powerful because it leverages all the skill you have and combines it with emotional and musical statements. Humans respond to that.