the guitar is the piano but you put your gross fingers on the strings

 i realized today that i think of the strings uniquely for a guitarist

for a long time they were these abstract things to me. sort of formations that seemed beyond my understanding especially because i was playing electric first. the pickups kind of obfuscate some of the simplicity of acoustic sound. And that's what I think i want to talk about. The physical dimensions of acoustic sound.

 At it's core, it's vibrating metal. The other day I heard a rattling sheet of metal in my vibrating vent that was reminiscent of a guitar. everything beyond the fret-board and the strings is accent on an acoustic guitar, an electric adds the pickups and the whole dimension of sound synthesis, almost two isntruments really.

But I'm not presently interested in the dimension of sound synthesis here. I want to talk about the literal sound of the strings, the guitar itself.

 I realized at one point in a way that's sort of in my lizard brain, the way you learn to ride a bike, that the sound of this instrument is my finger on the metal. i feel it literally in my body, i am also emitting that sound if you really want to get into it; I started getting really physical with the instrument, we often ignore this dimension i think. stuff like how it feels to play high up on the neck vs low down not just ergonomically but emotionally and so on, we focus on melody, the notes, western traditions/theory not the physicality of the instrument; finger on metal.

 I think a thought that got me started on this path was playing a little piano.

each guitar string is a piano. I started thinking to myself it's like i have six stacked keyboards and I'm in KISS.

 but then I started thinking about what a piano was, taught strings but no fingers. Pure machine almost, not really, but the physicality of that instrument feels much cleaner, there's more levers, more articulation and more options if you look at it through traditional schools of thought on all this.

 In fact I hear that all the time "if you can play piano you can play anything"

ok maybe not all the time but sometimes 

but what they mean is that you can play aesthetically pleasing music with western instruments not that you know all of instrumentation

 however the guitar is not purely a western instrument which is interesting in this discussion, but i am not qualified to speak deeply on that history, i do think it is worth keeping in mind as the sort of divergence point between the piano and guitar is the introduction of the banjo to europeans

 but what a piano player misses on guitar is this very physicality.

they play beautifully harmonious melodies but at a certain point they all sound the same, tim henson jacob collier, they do everything right, but they're not interesting. That's opinion, but that's like what I mean. They're talented, they're smart, they're creative, and they have developed their own voice, but they learned music the same way every other virtuoso does (I assume lol) through western music theory

 I can't name the notes in a d chord

I can't name the notes in a c minor scale

I could play a c minor scale

but I started thinking this early on, I don't want to avoid theory but I want to follow what excites me. I thought this would make my playing interesting, fun, something unique. I think all the time about kurt cobain talking about punk rock "it means freedom, playing what you want" and i feel that too!!!!!! uwu

 sorry

but yeah I think the scaffolding you approach learning with matters a great deal with the shape of your voice later on even if you don't super consciously choose it, and not that there's any greater or lesser value to uniqueness. Like i think tim henson is cool he seems swag, but like what i said is why i don't listen to his music, I do really like hearing him talk about guitar though.

ok sorry back on track yeah, so I realized that the guitar is a very physical manifestation of the piano essentially

a merging of a now deliberately erased history with our own

and honestly I think that's what the ache in the blues is

the weight of that violence, slavery and genocide

and that genre is studied intensely for it's "non-traditional" approaches to the acoustic guitar, a genre composed mainly of black musicians rejected from american society, and since that society won out and wrote the history that approach to the instrument is now something you learn after your scales after you put in your due diligence

 When i started playing again at 27 I found I enjoyed the physicality of the instrument a great deal, playing until my arms strained, chugging until i broke strings, testing out elaborate patterns for finger picking.

 my left hand is way behind my right and when i'm playing i primarily focus on the right since i can only focus on so much at a time while improvising. at first this was just because i found the feedback satisfying, hitting a string hard and hearing that booming sound feels nice, explosive, powerful, almost like a gun but not dangerous so kind of lame lol, quiet notes and all the other sorts of sounds on the guitar all have a unique physicality and that tactile nature is immensely satisfying to me

but yeah i followed that and then I found the music that did that and then i learned that tradition 

and this whole spiel came from the way i tune

way down, bgbbgb is my tuning presently, super loose

bgb on the low strings is so i can barre with my thumb and chug easily and for cool drones when i'm  playing melodies because i often don't have the thought or fingers to spare to play a full bassline and open strings on the melodies cause sympathetic resonance. and that's a physical thought. I did not want the notes or the harmony or the shapes. I wanted a way to use less fingers, and then i kind of tugged at how weird that felt and wrote this, interesting to me