I played guitar for a lot of years, and got pretty damned good at it. But like anyone else, when I started out I sucked. Big time.
One of the best guitar lessons I ever got came from my older brother Jim. It’s a lesson that went way beyond my guitar playing – it has applied to my entire life.
I was in my room one day, door closed, amplifier blaring. I had just bought a couple of new cheap little guitar pedals, convinced I would soon sound like Eddie Van Halen or Ted Nugent. I played the same riff, over and over and over again. I’m sure it was damned annoying, but I didn’t care. I knew that with just the right tweak of the the right knob, I would soon sound awesome…
About an hour into this, and my older brother Jim burst into the room. “Damn it, stop playing that! It’s not the damn gear, it’s in your fingers!
Stunned that he had come in the room to yell instead of tell me how freeking amazing I sounded, I simply said “What”?
“It doesn’t matter if you have that pedal, another pedal, a different guitar or a rack of Marshall amplifiers! How you sound totally comes from how you play – It’s all in your fingers, not the damn gear!”
He knew I wasn’t learning a thing. He knew I wasn’t practicing. He knew I was looking for the short cut to something that only comes from hard work and perseverance. My guess is he listened to me for hours, trying to think of a nice way to tell me I sucked, but the annoyance finally got to him and he yelled at me instead.
I read an article sometime after that where Ted Nugent was all excited about trying out Eddie Van Halen’s guitar rig. No question about it, Eddie’s sound was huge and everyone wanted to figure it out. He asked Eddie if he could try it at a sound check and Eddie was happy to oblige. Ted plugged in to the most coveted guitar rig in all of rock-n-roll – and low and behold, he sounded just exactly like Ted Nugent!
It wasn’t until several years later when I had put in all the time and energy to really learn how to play that I realized how right my brother was. I was in a studio working on getting “the sound” when I got tired of it and grabbed my trusty old $100 pawn shop Music Man amplifier and just recorded the track. It actually took me getting rid of all the fancy toys to hear what I actually sounded like – and it sounded awesome. All that sound just came out of my fingers, my beat to hell Jackson guitar, a single cord and cheap amp. I never gave a crap about gear after that again, and it was so liberating.
It still applies to my life in developing websites and software. The latest plugin, framework, development environment, coding tool, book, computer, printer, monitor, conference… they don’t matter. Yes, some of those things can be nice to have and make your work a little bit easier – but unless you’ve mastered what your doing with your fingers on any keyboard you touch – none of it matters.
So don’t let what you don’t have hold you back. Once you do the hard work and it’s all in your fingers – you own it. You control it, and you can do with it as you choose!
My thanks the authors of Rework for reminding me about this!
