why......

[Azrael]

... are most of the guitarrists ont his board/site respectively most of the guitarrists anywhere else into rock/metal - electric guitar? and why are so few playing classical stuff and learning classical guitar? is it because classical musicians seem to be so .. i dunno.. uncool? or what is it?

I also started to play electric, but after i could play shred n stuff i discovered that classical music can be much more challengin then the fastest metalsolo - and there is much more tonality in it. Dont get me wrong - i love rock and metal and i play it alot and write songs and all - but i also love classical music and play it and write classical pieces. rockguitar has lost its challenging touch to me the day when i was able to play it myself without major problems. on classical guitar there is still so much left to learn for me and ( i think) it also pushes my rock/metal play into new regions.

so why are there so few classical guitarists here?

[Edited by Azrael on 11-01-2002 at 04:38 PM]

[chris mood]

I've been really getting into playing the nylon string over the past 6 months, about the only time I pick up my electric anymore is when I have a gig.
Playing the nylon string is so much more physically demanding, when I pick up the electric now it is effortless. Anybody who doesn't think the Nylon string guitar is cool should check out Paco de Lucia, he's a god.

[Azrael]

:) what about a lil chat? (link in the other post)

[Josh Redstone]

I seriously would play a little classical, but the lack of a nylon string acoustic is a little problem. I made it up by playing electric songs on a steel string. That'll get your hands in good shape.

[Azrael]

well - you can also play classical pieces on the electric without distortion.. sounds nice too

[Josh Redstone]

I've done that. Usually its not straight clean though. I put some chorus and phaser on it sometimes.

[Led Zeppelin]

Im learning classical now, since a few months ago. Before that I was mainly acoustic. I have an electric but I maily just use it to mess around with as its easier on the fingers than acoustic or classical, Im not into pedals or shredding or whatever. Its just an extra really.

[SLY]

I'm somehow opposite ot everybody else here :-) I've started out with a Nylon string learning classic & spanish stuff, then I switched to Electric and taught myself (with the help of Books/Tabs/Net Stuff/etc.) ... I still like to play both, but I feel that Acoustic guitars generaly gives you very limited options compared to Elec. , and I've found out that the elec. guitar is the instrument I usualy like to express myself with, mostly bec. it's very unnique & versatile.

[Lordathestrings]

Check out Rick Emmett, who played lead for a Canadian band callled Triumph. He's absolutely killer on electric, acoustic, and classical!

[newmillguitar]

My friend, David Raynes, from Canada and a moderator here, directed me to this discussion group.<br>

I’m 50 and a pretty well established classical guitar composer/performer. If I can do one thing, I can tell you people that it is one long continuum this music thing.<br>

When I was a teenager I figured I’d play electric guitar for fun and girls. One thing led to the next and through my father, an opera singer and my uncle, an amateur classical guitar builder, I was handed a classical guitar and the desire to look at music as a serious art form.<br>

The continuum of music, to me, besides being a life long obsession and endeavor has popular music on one end and on the other end of it is “serious” music on the other. Popular music is product and serious music is science, involving the same research thing.<br>

Most music that I liked when I was younger and still, in the realm of popular music, existed somewhere in between these two poles-popular and serious. Most people called it progressive rock, art rock and other sundry terms that moved it along from AM radio to the emerging FM stations in the late 60s and through the 70s<br>

Now at 50, my obsession with electric guitar is in full bloom. I have studied serious composition and classical guitar for the last 25 years and got my terminal degree in composing and performing and what’s left? All of it. The whole continuum.<br>

I have applied the electric guitar to composition using a transducer nut (logarithmic inversion of the fretting system), processors and the sheer joy of finding something fresh to do. I still spend a lot of time on the classical guitar and I teach college classical guitar but this is something that I am used to so I grab for things that aren’t totally defined, which is on the electric guitar mostly.<br>

Keep doing what you don’t know how to do and you will be refreshed constantly. My first thing was the electric but I can say that I didn’t know classical so I reached. Jazz could provide the same stimulus for metal players.<br>

Apply all of it to you chosen endeavor, like classical guitar techniques applied to the electric guitar. Stretch your ears and get used to modern music and not Mozart and Beethoven, which is into the common musical understanding. Embrace when you don’t understand and don’t belittle it because you don’t understand it.<br>

I have a website, http://www.newmillguitar.com where I promote what’s new in the classical guitar and in the near future, what’s new in the electric guitar.

Happy Trails,
Larry Cooperman

[mc9mm]

I've been playing classical guitar for 8 years now.
I think the reason so many avoid classical guitar
when they start playing is, like you said, because
they seem very uncool.
I also thought it was pretty geeky before, but then I realized that it holds massive cool-ness. ( + you get
the attention of the ladies ;) )
I think many guitarists realizes the same thing at some point.
Its like when you grow up, almost everyone wants to
be a pilot, fireman, racecar-driver, astronaut or
something like that. Its just so cool.
But then you realize there are other proffesions
that are just as cool.

[newmillguitar]

I didn't asy anything about classical guitar being uncool, I wasn't even aware of it until my uncle hipped me to it. He lived in NY and I was living in the South so I almost never saw him.

So I spent a lot of time not being interfered with. Pop music was fun and anything by someone over 21 was suspect, never mind Mozart. My dad and sister sang that stuff that made me run out of the house but Stravinsky's Firebird blew me away. Cool had something to do with opera but not with orchestral music. Orchestral music is a must for a guitarist. Jimmy Page and Berlioz kinds or orchestration.

I keep refering to the last post but I'm 50 and I get set off on a tangent. This thing of cool is very important. Anyone can play fast licks with the correct accoutrements but can they play three highly philosophical notes that make all the disinterested turn around and take notice?

Where does this skill come from, this musical philosophical thing? I know and I said it in my earlier blab, reaching for something that isn't yoou at the time.

[Josh Redstone]

I never thought classical guitar is uncool. I just like to play the electric better.

[newmillguitar]

I know you didn't say anything about personally thinking classical guitar was uncool. I was origiinally talking about opera and classical music's chick attracting power as compared with pop. I need pop because it was fun and all the girls I wanted to do were into pop, I was too so therefore it was a better survival mechanism.

Makes me wonder what cool is in music. Is it something strictly sociological? Popular music is tribal, Country, Metal, Acoustic, Grunge all have that tribal association. Music of the Tribe and I wear this and expouse this. I have a pierced liver and you wear a cowboy hat. I play this music, you play that.

Is music a stand alone art or does it have to have social commentary attached to it? Is cool relative? Why do I hate some kind of music? Is it because it was a product of another tribe?

"Cheesy music is good on a sandwich." Bob Eggplant 2000

[chris mood]

It would be interestimg to hear what some of you veteran nylon string players think of Paco De Lucia, I have been quite infatuated with his playing over the past several months, and the more I hear and figure out the more amazed I am by his talents.

[Josh Redstone]

I dunno what what makes music appealing to some people. The sounds, the beat, whats being said, I dunno. All I know is I dont cave to what others think is cool. I dont know why, but I hate most modern popular music. People ask me why I dont like it, I dont know what to tell them. If a girl thinks a song is cool, I probably still wont play it, I'll just putter around, playing whatever comes out. (they usually think that is neat anyway, why, I was showing off just the other day)

[newmillguitar]

Beat is primal and at the base of human existance. Our hearts are beat, we live in some sort of rhythmic thing in the short term, medium term and long term. No one knows exactly what the regular pattern is but it's there and we respond.

Now girls and social order are part of it. The dance thing, the dance of the tribe. I did it, we all do it at some time or all of our lives.

This is part of music but for some people, a small part or not at all a part for others. I am split, my tribe is dying by some accounts but in other accounts my tribe is too large to die.

Paco, someone asked me. He rocks and is Zorro.

http://www.newmillguitar.com

[pstring]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by newmillguitar
[B]My friend, David Raynes, from Canada and a moderator here, directed me to this discussion group.<br>

I'd be careful, that David Raynes is bad news, a bad influence and it's rumuored that the butter has slipped off his biscuit.................

[chris mood]

Hmmmmmmmmmm,

I read the description of a "Zorro" on your website and don't know if that is a good thing or bad.

[Zeppelin]

I spent my first year of guitar playing with a classical acoustic guitar.
i stopped playing it in the second i got my first squier because i never wanted to play guitar because of classical influences.
ive always listened to bands like queen, deep purple, ac/dc .. all those guys (except for blackmore who plays only acoustic now) are pure electric guitar players and it was obvious to me from the first second id play electric guitar as soon as i could..

[^Chacron^]

I've spent most of my musical life playing classical music as my first insrtuments were the piano and 'cello, and I have a classical guitar and I play it, i love hearing classical guitar pieces, or classic guitar mixed with electric material...stuff like Rush's 'Farewell to Kings'.... but I've always found the electric much enjoyable to play. Its all personal taste really, even though my taste seems to change all the time.