If I didn’t have to go thru the effort to pick up the record needle ten times over to learn my parts would I have learned my solid groove? Would my ear have become as well trained if I had endless YouTube instructional videos to rely on?... This sort of thing.
So all you guys that learned your chops before the advent of digital crutches came along... Would these gizmos and endless available information have made you a better musician?
IMO this is a two edged sword. You do indeed posses some of your chops solely because you had to hike barefoot through ten inches of snow, twelve miles to school, uphill both ways, even on Sundays.
I basically came in when this whole internet thing started, so I learned oldschool, but was young enough to embrace the new stuff like a native.
In my humble opinion, nowadays you have it a lot easier to learn specific songs. Watch someone cover them on youtube, download the tabs, and practice to a loop that runs in a lower speed is somewhat more effective than sitting crosslegged in front of the Hifi deck and resetting the needle over and over.
But you won't learn much along the way. Learning a song with the song on LP/CD/Cassette as your only source of information leads to a more complete understanding of the whole thing.
I might even venture as far as claiming that this has something to do with the slow death of jamming discussed in another thread here on tb.
I 'member back in the day, when we would approximate a song we liked. First by ear and memory in the practice room,
followed by some woodshedding at home with the Hifi. Every time we met to practice, someone had some part figured out closer to the original than it was and in the end, we were as close to the original as one can get.
Nowadays, when you agree on a song, everyone goes home and asks the internet how his parts in this song work, the internet explains it bit by bit and on the next band practice, the song is played. Just like that.
