the emotion factor?

u know good guitarist should have three general feature. tone, technic, emotion... u can find "your tone" with some gear experiment and lil good old phisics. u can build your technic with music theory and practice. but what about the emotion?

i wanna know your ideas about "the emotion factor"?
whats it, whats the way of improving the feeling...

it's the detail... for example, it's not just whether or not to add vibrato, it's whether the vibrato is narrow or wide, fast or slow, whether you bend the note a bit sharp or flat sometimes. Maybe slur across frets rather than using vibrato, maybe mute a bit and so on....

I've followed the advice of many other players - limit yourself to a few notes, and then play them as many different ways as you can. By restricting the vocabulary, you have to be more creative with it's use. If you can do this for long enough, you'll find some of the stuff you did makes it's way in to your normal playing rather than being an exercise.

Some of the emotion comes from choice of mode as well - it's hard to make Lydian sound particularly dark, for example.....

Originally Posted by: zreynoldspI've followed the advice of many other players - limit yourself to a few notes, and then play them as many different ways as you can.

good point, playin simple things in different ways... :)

I think emotion is the defining factor in a guitarist's success. Without the emotion behind the music, it's nothing but regurgitation of music theory.

Not to say theory isn't important, I find theory to be an extremely important element in music. But the emotion ties it all together.

Thats funny because my guitar instructor was telling me yesterday the importance of feeling in music. It can be the way you pick the strings, like when you pick hard for an angry sense, or smooth easy picking for a softer emotion. You can have two awesome guitarists, all never missing a note, (playing the same song), but if none of them have any emotions, its boring. Music should touch you on the inside, however corny that may sound. We all have different tastes in music cuz we can relate to the feelings, how it makes us feel.

Originally Posted by: Danny C.We all have different tastes in music cuz we can relate to the feelings, how it makes us feel.

thats it! :D

I would have to say that the emotion comes mostly with phrasing. And that's all I know.

music is emotion, they are 2 sides of the same coin. Make sure you are proficient in your playing because like all art you are trying to connect with other human beings through a medium and just like a painter practices with light and shade and experiments with different techniques so as to be able to convey his thoughts on to canvas (or some other surface, I don't want to limit my painter friend!) we need to practise so that our emotions can flow freely.

if you want to hear some deep emotion or feelings listen to some older blues and you will find what your looking for.

and play with them and try to do the same things you hear them doing and you will find emotion in yourself

Originally Posted by: zreynoldsp it's hard to make Lydian sound particularly dark, for example.....

E lydian over a Ab minor progression.... ;)


for solos, remeber that the space between changing notes is just as important as the notes them selves. you can do create tension by holding a note that works well ove one chord and the doesnt over the next chord in the progression. Becker did this the opposite way where he played a note that sounded werid over the chord but sounds perfect over the next chord that followed.

also try to arpegiate major and minor triads that show up in every scale, you can contrast these to give a dark and light feel.

Originally Posted by: FireAndIce24E lydian over a Ab minor progression.... ;)


for solos, remeber that the space between changing notes is just as important as the notes them selves. you can do create tension by holding a note that works well ove one chord and the doesnt over the next chord in the progression. Becker did this the opposite way where he played a note that sounded werid over the chord but sounds perfect over the next chord that followed.

also try to arpegiate major and minor triads that show up in every scale, you can contrast these to give a dark and light feel.

good advice and all, but i think we are getting too distracted by emotion: what you just described was a technique, not emotion. you cant describe emotion, you cant give ways to help a musician create emotion, but after that, its just creativity. understand that the more experienced you are as a musician to your instrument, the easier it is to create emotion, (there isnt much you can do on a guitar at first but make people cringe!) but you just have to grab your guitar, have an idea of the feeling you wish to provoke, and do it. some days i will play scales, scales scales, lead licks, solo stuff, bla bla bla. some days just doing blazing fast lead runs make me happy. but today, for example, i didnt warmup or anything. i picked up my guitar, dug through a few boxes to find different fx pedals that might modivate me. it took me over 4 hours of just sitting there, but i made a really melodicly moving song wiht just a chorus and wah pedal. maybe on a better day all i would have needed was a clean channel, but today i needed those. to make an incredibly drawn-out story short, use what you have at your disposal, and dont force it if it doesnt come. emotion should be raw on an instrument, and only planned out if it involves alot of technique.

try playing chord sequences like this

each letter represents a chord where the amount of times it occurs represents a beat

C C C C C C C a a a a a a a a a G G G G G G G e e e e e e e e e

Not that I'm a proficient guitarist, but I can say that putting emotion in music is the same as putting emotion in speaking. You can simply utter the words "I love you" and there's absolutely no emotion, and the same words said differently take on a whole new dimension.
Do you have an ability to speak with emotion/ If you do, that centre in your being from which your spoken emotion emantes is the same one from which your playing emotion will emanate. Just you mean to speak with feeling when you mean, so will you play with feeling. You "switch the centre on". Play as if your guitar was your voice.