What do you want to do with your guitar?

I read in article written by John Petrucci (Dream Theater)
that it is important to know what you want to do with your guitar so that you know what you should practice and i realized that until that day i was fooling around with the guitar and i thought i was practicing.

So what really you want to do with your guitar playing?

strumming chords and singing, shredding, playing weird chords, slide guitar, fingerstyle, playing rhythm guitar,
playing riffs, become a studio musician, write songs,
create noises and sounds, find new techniques...?

surely you must have many things in mind to do but what is the number one?

I want to play melodic solos, a blend of Neil Young, David Gilmour, Roy Buchanan and Freddie King,
when i play i try to sing through my guitar

I might hold a slightly different mix of role models, but taken all 'round, I think you've got it just about right! :)

I am always on the lookout for new sounds, I am a tone freak, as well as an effects lover. I only have a wah and a DD5 delay pedal, but I am getting quite a bit out of them, even so far as to put wah before delay, get an infinite loop, unplug the wah, put it on the other side of the delay and play again, it didn't do anything very interesting, but I had to try. I love hearing new ways of finding a sound that really cuts through the same old stuff. I am a fan of subtelty too, I spend hours trying to find new tones for a song so that it sounds just right, unfortunately I am limited by a squier guitar and a valvestate with crap distortion.

I would have to agree with Bardsley. I've never heard of the term tone freak but I guess it fits. I'm almost always trying to find new tunings and chords so that riffs and solos don't sound like repetitions of the music out today. I still believe in the creative side of music which needs to have a refreshment in mainstream. But I love all the off the wall chords that if put together make complete total sense. Thats what its about creativity and expression. If we stray away from that we are just products of a copycat system which isn't cool to say in laman's terms.

all right! i'm guilty! i fit in the tone freak catogry too. i don't care if my guitar isn't a well known make, it is the sound that is important to me. actully to be more spesific i am a fx freak as by time the signal has gone throug a DD3, Wah, Flanger and my BOSS ME-33 with simulater feedback and amp simulaters there is very little of the origanal sound left. but that dosen't bother me, my mision on the guitar is to come up with stange new sounds and techniques, as somone famous might have said (actully its of a Roland add) "don't imatate, inovate!" don't get me wrong, i would never go to far in the fx department and mess up a song, i just like the sonic capabilitys of a lump of wood, a few bits of metal, the odd circuit board and an expesion pedal (or two)

I'm a tone freak too... i admit it, but i've discoverd something really cool!
I don't know if it only works on just my amp or everybody else's too.

Any way what i do is connect the input to headphones socket, and turn the gain and all volumes up, except the master volume. At low master volumes, the amp screams and ear pircing whistel, if you turn up the master volume , the sound gets louder and lower, It's sounds a bit like an oscilliscope sound generator type thingy..

i've not played about wich this much, out of fear of blowing up my amp, but i can manage to get it to "play"
a few notes.

Please try this, and get back to me... tell me if it works, or if this is a well known old trick...

I love effects, but i haven;t get an fx box of my own though...

oh yeah i forgot, my amp is a transistor amp, if that makes any difference

Personally, I just want to be able to pick up a guitar somewhere and play. Be it a B.C. Rich through a Marshall or a classical guitar, or folk or alternate tuned one. Really I just want to be able to play and do a good job. Entertain people and, at the same time, express myself. Seems a little weird and perhaps even crazy, but that's my ambition. It's not an easy task I know, but it is possible!!!

Originally posted by educatedfilm
...Any way what i do is connect the input to headphones socket, and turn the gain and all volumes up, except the master volume. At low master volumes, the amp screams and ear pircing whistel, if you turn up the master volume , the sound gets louder and lower, It's sounds a bit like an oscilliscope sound generator type thingy..

...most of us just stand close to the speaker with our guitar...

Feed back is feed back, and this doesn't sound like feed back.
Try it, instead of trying to sound like a smart ass.

You're sampling a portion of the output (the headphone jack), and coupling it into the input. That's what feedback [u]is[/u]!

It sounds diferent your way, because instead of building up the sound based on the guitar's resonances, you're strarting from the low-level 'white noise' in the amplifier, and buliding up whatever resonance the amp has. Adjusting the master volume 'tunes' the amplifier resonance to a lower pitch, while also making it louder.

(Yes, this is a well-known old trick)

I know i'm getting a little hiss (which i admit is white noise- noise from wide range of frequencies) from the distortion, which comes out of the head phones, and causes postive feedback loop (this is the proper term, when you say feed back to guitarist they see Hendrix or Sonic youth and what they did, and that sounds different).

"and buliding up whatever resonance the amp has. Adjusting the master volume 'tunes' the amplifier resonance to a lower pitch"

sorry i dont follow that. Why should it tune to the natural resonating frequency?Shouldn't it just get louder?(as you've got a constant driving frequency, and there's no real reason for it to change).

My orginal question was getting sound out of an amp THIS way (perticularly THIS sound), and you said yes. Which you could have said first time with out sounding condesending (back to your "can you say feedback" remark).

"What do you want to do with your guitar?"

Make a living from it. You see, in Ireland all artists(which includes musicians) pay 0% tax, which makes it an ideal job if you can get the work. The problem is, the music scene in Dublin(where I live) isnt very lively in comparison to London or other places.

You've almost got it. The 'white noise hiss' is a broadband composite of all audible frequencies. When you change the master volume setting, you change the input impedance of the power stage, which changes the loop impedance of the system. In this particular case, the resonant frequency shifts down. Since the change happens relatively slowly, and since there is so much gain in the system, it is able to 'track' the change in resonance, and keep on howling.

Well I just want to make people go "Damn I didn't know you could do that!"

Actually I have been studying Hendrix for the last couple of months.The more you study him the more you appreciate his genius.