You forgot to add the decisive qualifier "in my opinion" to your off-handed bash as "moderator." And as you implied, it's a, as you called it, a "trick"... It's not supposed to be "music"
read the text/explanation (before you listen and then jump to judge and categorize) where I stated, explicitly, what the point of it was and where things like this *might* have applications -- as as for "notes all running together, well, at least you didn't miss the most obvious aspect of it all. And the notes themselves don't care if they run together...the point is that it is only your subjective opinion that adds to them the determination that they are not "musical" in the first place, hence, necessitating the "in my opinion" qualifier.
Keep an open mind about things; there's more to life than Satriani and Yngwie and whoever else you see on the cover of Guitar World. Anyway, it's not supposed to be "liked" --that was one of the points of it. I rather enjoy the fact that people with narrow criteria of "music" and limited cultural horizons (No, not aimed at you just a general statement based on a lot of responses I've had in the past from young, inexperienced, orthodox, dogmatic, male guitarists that cling to tightly to heros) take offense and become hostile to it. It is a great compliment. It's a big, horrible world out there you can either step up to the plate swinging and be an echo of all that is horrible, or at least have the capacity to do that once in a while, or bow down and be a slave to fashion, hoe the same little patch of the garden that 10,000 other people have done repeatedly...
There's also a practical side to all this. Anyone with gigging/live playing experience will tell you that it is a real bonus having all sorts of flashy "non-musical" tricks up their sleves for all sorts of obvious reasons. You might not want to do it on a disk but playing for live audiences is a totally different world -- as an afterthought, I thought I'd just add that my ears are still ringing from a gig last night when the entire place was going nuts after I ripped off something very similar to that "lick" or whatever you want to call it. I played a seven min guitar solo doing a version of a Praxis song and it put some wild stuff in the middle and at the end. But all along the way I was playing more in a style similar to Hendrix + Frisell etc., with melodies, motific development, modal interchanges, etc. It's a good device for adding punctuation marks within "valid/legitimate" musical statements. Like it or not I know what works and I know how to make audiences take notice and get excited.
But, regardless, that's cool if you hate what I can do. I can do it. And like it or not, you can't listen to my music and confuse it for anybody else. On the other hand, at least 90% of guitar players sound like pale imitations of somebody else and are only doing things that "anybody" could do. And It's not all that I do -- it was a "trick" not some profound musical statement. Admittedly, it's not for everybody, I realize. I would probably cringe at some of the players you think are good because I see most mainstream guitarists as rather bland, boring, and just rehashing the same old things over and over. It's just a matter of taste and there's no objective criteria to use in judging things of this matter...
And it doesn't appear that the majority of people share your opinion because I get tons of email every week and people join my site every day because they love the sound and want to learn it for themselves. And I guess Chops From Hell, the premier shred site on the web, would not have featured me if they thought that it lacked merit.
Peace
[Edited by Bofatron on 03-12-2001 at 03:18 PM]
