Boredom and a change of direction

I've been playing guitar for several decades now, although with a break brought on by other commitments of around 15 years in the middle; acoustic to begin with, then moved on to mainly electric.

A few bands later, and I found myself at the start of this Covid-19 completely bored. Fed up with playing rock music, and with no focus or musical direction. (The biggest setback of being in a band is having to play the same songs over and over, which is made worse if you're growing generally bored with the genre - also, so many pub bands play rock covers). Lockdown rules also prevented getting together with other musicians (I'm in the UK)

Thankfully, my son bought me a subscription to GT as a Father's Day gift. I pretty much raced through GF 1&2 in a couple of days, then decided to give Country 1&2 a try.

I'm now happily working on playing techniques that I previously neglected (chicken picking is especially fun, as is hybrid picking).

I've also decided my next band or project will be playing country.

Has anybody else had a similar change in musical direction, and music listened to, since joining GT?

While I'm not a musician, by any means, I understand what your saying about being bored with certain things. I tried learning guitar back in the early eighties and at that time just wanted to play rock. My instructor, after teaching me the fundamentals was teaching country music cause that's all he knew.

Well I gave up guitar shortly thereafter and fast forward into the early 2000's and I found myself listening to more country and folk music cause like you I started getting bored of rock. It didn't seem to make any sense to me anymore. I can appreciate some of it and I still listen to some of the old stuff (Motly Crue, Poison, Van Halen, Heart to name few) when I'm feeling nostalgic. Country just seems to speak to me now.

As for my guitar playing, well im sort of starting over after a 40 year hiatus, but have made so much more headway with GT. I play many genres and styles, but really love fingerpicking the most. Can't get enough of it. I'm currently in acoustic 2 and have also done some of the country 1&2, but had to skip some sections as lead playing and chicken picken are just not sticking to me. I think I'm more a rythm player anyway. Maybe in a few more years. I do play a few easy leads on my electric, but no ones gonna mistake me for being a shredder

One suggestion, if I may, is that theres an awful lot of YouTube artists that are taking contemporary classic songs and doing finger style versions of them. There's even a band called The Peterson's that do bluegrass variations of these songs that sound really good. Have you tried doing something like that? Take the rock songs your band plays and change em up. Put a different spin on them with other kinds of string instruments. It might reinvigorate some of it for you. Just a thought. [br][br]

Moe

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I've looked through Acoustic 1&2. There's some really good stuff in there, and quite a lot which could easily transfer to electric.

I once tried a Travis Picking version of "She sells sanctuary" by The Cult during a band rehearsal.... the other members were not amused, but I quit the band that evening so no great loss (I thought it sounded pretty good through a bank of effect pedals ... ).

I had a similar situation with my guitar playing, wanting to reignite my playing as covid lockdowns were trying to happen here and there. My daughter suggested learning slide from a player on fb. He taught through fb messenger, starting probably around June or July last year. Fast forward to the present and I'm playing all things slide in standard and open tuning! Because I was able to have someone show me the mechanics one on one, I got it down. Since then I've exhausted everything slide that GT has and believe me, they've got some great stuff such as Curtis Lowe, Statesboro Blues, and the awesome Zeppelin song, You Shook Me. I play in a church Praise Band and I turn at least one of our songs each week into a slide anthem. Never stop growing!!

I recently finished GF1, so I'm not ready yet to focus on a particular style, but I started listening to a variety of guitar music to set future goals. By doing so, I explored a few styles more in depth and came across delta blues and that's the first genre I'd like to master. (I even bought the Gretsch Jim Dandy, specifically for this reason.)

Maybe it wasn't guitartricks as such, but learning guitar definitely inspired me to do some research in genres I didn't know well before.