It's tough being a guitarist

[pklima]

I realized that a guitarist's life is even tougher than I knew. Not only are there so many of them competing for spots in bands, they are also much more tempted to overplay.

I found myself telling a guitarist to "stop playing so that other guitarists can respect you for it, and start playing so that girls who've never touched a guitar will think it sounds nice". Then I realized that I'm really asking a lot. I mean, in a crowd of 100young people who are sufficiently interested in music to go see a band probably at least 20 people have played guitar at some point. 5 of them are probably the guitarist's good friends on top of that. Asking someone to not do anything their friends can respect is asking a lot.

Singers have the opposite incentive. No one really cares if they can hit high notes or pull off complex ornamentation (outside of a few genres like gospel), but they probably also have quite a few friends who sing, and those friends will notice instantly if they miss a note. So they have incentives to keep it safe and sound nice, and not indulge in excess. I've never had to tell a singer to stop overdoing something.

Bassists have it best. There might be one or two bassists in a typical crowd of 100, but more likely there are zero. I don't have any good friends who are bassists. There's no fear that a significant portion of the audience is trying to judge whether I'm a better bassist than them or not, and no need to play anything complex to retain the respect of my friends. If anything, people judge us on stage presence and looks.

[sonic assassin]

thats exactly why i like my current band. we all take risks. we play material that is in the comfortable to challenging area. certain parts of songs are hanging on by threads and could derail any second. keeps everything fun. my singer/co-guitarist is playing as much as a lot of lead guitarists in the genre are playing, all the while singing more complicated material than most people ive ever seen. bassist is at the top of his game and the secondary vocalist, drummer is keeping us all together, and im hanging out on lead guitar filling in all the gaps, running around and doing all the backing vocals.

on the verge of overplaying, all the while keeping our music fresh, challenging and entertaining.

as a guitarist i get this scrutiny a lot. the shred gods that are all chops and no substance scoff at me for playing so "slow" and having more feeling than they could dream of, and the lesser guitarists think im chiseled from stone, even if i dont consider myself particularly flashy. ive got an extremely potent lead singer to work around.

unfortunately i find myself (as a musician) criticizing other musicians from the floor. i never say anything. that would be awful. but im thinking it. competitive nature i suppose.