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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
