Miguel de Maria -> RE: How do you not become a mediocre player? (Feb. 24 2006 14:41:20)
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Well, I'm a mediocre player, so don't know if my advice really counts... :) Let me make a distinction. There are two broad categories that I have noticed among experienced players. One is the competent musician. The other is the eternal intermediate player. The competent musician plays with good rhythm, enough technique to play music, good enough ear to pick up music to play with other musicians, and a repertoire of songs he can play without messing them up. The eternal intermediate player usually plays Paco de Lucia or Vicente Amigo pieces with bad rhythm and lots of mistakes or weak notes. He may be able to play along with a compas CD, but he wouldn't have much of a chance of pulling them off in a live situation. The eternal intermediate player has invested a lot of time in tremolo and picado, and can usually wow friends and family with these flashy techniques. Of course, he probably knows that they aren't _really_ mastered, and they aren't reliable under pressure situations. Notice that in my competent musician category I didn't mention the difficulty of the pieces. You see, I put Grisha in this category, as well as a bunch of mediocre musicians who can just strum some chords in compas for singers. To me, it's a mindset and way of prioritizing your time. You can have flash, but you have to have the foundation. I think the foundation is rhythm, technical ease, knowledge of songs, and the ear (the ear can be intuitive or analytical knowledge of harmony, chord patterns, and intervals). The lesson I get, at least, from listening to Grisha's and Todd's advice is to slow down, work constantly on my rhythmic accuracy and other aspects of basic musicianship. Whether this means I will end up playing flashy and complicated parts with the kind of verve they show is unknown. I do, think, however, that it will eventually at least land me in the competent musician category, which is where I would like to be.
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