When I started to learn guitar, I had my heroes- some of the rock and roll greats (Jimmy Page, Hendrix...) plus a bluesman or two (Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson…), and as I proceeded down the path of learning, the list of heroes grew longer and longer: Django and Segovia made it on there pretty quick.
That said, for all my adulation, I resigned myself to the ” fact” that I would never be good enough to play like them, and by that I mean that I would never improvise a lead guitar solo, or even play a solo proficently. My resignation to that “fact” was based on pretty solid ground; those guys effortlessly ran around the guitar neck, whizzing between licks and keys at breakneck speed while I sat at home struggling to form a G major shape and doing my best to avoid string buzzes, ugly rattles and dead thuds where there should be clear notes.
“Those guys are just made of different stuff” I concluded
It wasn’t until much later that I was listening to a song, and when the lead guitar break came around I thought “Maybe I’ll try it” . I think it was Ritchie Blackmore. Anyway, I sat down at the record player, picked up the needle , dropped it on the guitar break, picked it up at the end of the break and repeated that about a hundred times, trying to pick out the notes as they went by. And lo and behold, I found I could do it.
I got good at two things; playing lead guitar breaks by ear and finding the exact spot on a record to drop the needle.
I realized then that I had, over the preceding years, followed a path that lead me to this point, and following that logic,it occurred to me that I could get to anywhere I wanted to go, if I could build the path to get there.
Years later , I studied Jazz, and one of my tutors mentioned, probably in an effort to uproot any discouragement in us, that the great John Coltrane once had to be told how to play a C note. In other words, even if you’re at the very beginning of a very daunting, perhaps impossible looking path, you can rest assured that every master at the other end of that path stood right there where you are and felt exactly the same way. In fact , if the young beginning “whats-a-C-note ?” John Coltrane had walked into the room at that point, I could have offered him lessons.
Of course for me , this was a guitar lesson, but more accurately it was a life lesson delivered via my guitar. It’s a perspective I’ve hung on to and has served me.well and it has has diffused many an irrational fear or feeling of hopelessness in the face of whatever new challenges life presented.
Hopefully it can do the same fore you 🙂