Very well said.
I’ve been thinking many of the same things – I’m glad I didn’t post those thoughts, since you have done a much better job than I ever could!
I think playing guitar is like most hobbies: some people mostly want to really learn how to do something and some people mostly want to just buy stuff. Unfortunately, the latter group seems to be much larger than the former 
Thanks. I wondered at the wisdom of airing gripes just for the sake of it, but it felt good to itemise what I don’t like, almost as if I was collecting everything together in a box that I could tape shut and lose in a corner of the attic.
Great post! I didn’t agree 100% with everything, but i think you hit quite a few nails on the head! Especially your point about speed.
I highly doubt that they do but they do have more than one brush. Though I’m sure they make use of every brush. They may have different brushes for different strokes. Every brush likely has a specific purpose and gets used regularly.
As for the cost of the brush they use I suppose it depends on how it feels in their hands. Some brushes might feel great in one persons hands but not in another persons hands.
I’m not really one for listening to the likes of neo classical guitar etc but at the same time you can learn from them which you can apply at lower BPM for the music you enjoy.
My take on your thoughts:
You took up the guitar, joined JG and found the content useful.
You enjoy playing and learning.
Yay! 
Most of your niggles are other folks’ silly/wrong ideas/attitudes
There is a simple solution to this, and I will not insult you by spelling it out 
I’m with you on many of your thoughts on ‘gear’.
Having said that, I have ended up with 3 electrics, my brother’s acoustic, two amps and a PodGo that I haven’t even scratched the surface on.
Who knows, I might even end up with one of them Emerald Virtuos one day… 
I enjoy it when people question accepted ‘wisdom’
Talking about not scratching the surface…
I thought I was pretty good on my synth (Ensoniq ESQ-1) after nearly 40 years of ownership. I could fly around the buttons and conjure sounds and sequences without any hesitation. It was only after watching what others could do on YouTube that I realised I still had a long way to go. So, there’s no chance of me getting a new synth any time soon.
Learning from others… Way to go! 
Comparing yourself to others… Counterproductive 
If anyone was wondering why this learning log seems to have become more of a music blog than an actual log of guitar learning, the explanation is that there is nothing much to report on that subject. That’s not to say that I’m not playing the guitar - I am. It’s just that I seem to practice bits of the same old songs, and not much else. I sense my playing is improving, slowly but surely, but that’s hardly earth-shattering news that I feel compelled to tell you about.
These are the songs I draw from nowadays:
I’m On Fire
Moonage Daydream
All The Young Dudes
The Man Who Sold The World
Shake Some Action
Marquee Moon
Silvia
Don’t Fear The Reaper
Police And Thieves
White Man In Hammersmith Palais
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
Lay Lady Lay
Hey Joe
Ramble On
Hotel California
Maggot Brain
Songs that seem to have dropped out of the running lately:
Time
One
Holy Grail
Complete Control
Why Can’t We Live Together
Great Southern Land
Heaven
There are tabs for 63 songs in my Ultimate Guitar account; all of the above plus several more that are even less current. Indeed, I can’t remember how to play most of them, even partially.
So the above would be pretty much what I would be posting here month after month, the same old same-old, if I didn’t also air my occasional unasked-for music-related musings.
Without specific goals, I sort of drift along. I’m mostly OK with that; I don’t want to fabricate goals just for the sake of driving progress, but I sometimes question whether having mellowed with age is actually better than being obsessively focussed, as I once was. It is probably a pointless comparison, after all.
One of my oldest hobbies is collecting old video games, after a while I noticed that entire hobby is basically just a love of shopping. After I made peace with that it became obvious in other hobbies and other people, and i think its extremely prevalent.
I’ve always consciously avoided it in music, as browsing pedals to buy is a distraction from playing my instrument, but pressure from all the adverts/reviews we get shown is very real.
A few days ago I wrote:
Part of me wishes I’d waited a couple more weeks before posting, because the perfect example has just unfolded. I won’t provide links to these people, I’ll just quickly recap what’s happened. One YouTuber called SixStringTV, who has carved out a niche by criticising and exposing other guitar-related entities, whether they be shoddy manufacturers or unethical influencers was himself found to be both, and this news spread fast, several other guitar YouTubers, KDH particularly, taking it upon themselves to have a go at him. It felt like quite a pile-on. The opportunity for easy clicks does this to you, I suppose. Then one of these, by the name of Guitar Geek, joined the fray, but for some didn’t go far enough. He was chided by HP42 on this score. And got an awful lot of negative commentary to boot. Somewhere along the line he made a snide remark about what KDH would have to say on the latest news, and KDH sniped back with a short. I am willing to bet heavily that this is only the beginning of the vortex.
Peace, man. 
Sadly we live in this attention economy and people will say anything to get clicks etc. Even professional journalists in various fields seem to be guided first but what will stir things up and make a ‘story’, generate a ‘narrative’. Hence I follow less and less.
This is all so tiresome.
I consume more Guitar-Tube content than I probably should, because I like watching and listening to people talk about guitars.
I don’t like watching and listening to people talk about people who talk about guitars, though.
That’s it in a nutshell.
I am slightly abashed to admit that it was only a few years ago that I realised that classical music (say Bach, Brahms or Beethoven) and pop music (say Bachman Turner Overdrive, Badfinger or Bronski Beat) are essentially the same thing. I’d generally thought that pop music was based around blocks of chords whereas classical music did something cleverer, more intricate, something that I didn’t quite understand. I should have known better after a few decades of musical dabblings, but that’s what I thought. In any case, I was curious enough to investigate.
When I first started to create my own version of the well-known beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss, my initial suspicions were confirmed. On the sheet music, the harmonies involving the brass and woodwind instruments were really weird-looking - unlike anything else I’d ever seen. I thought maybe German music conventions were different (they are, actually, but in a different way). As I built up the music, track by track, and played it back, it sounded discordant, but I trusted what I was doing, and thought it would all resolve in the end.
It didn’t.
The problem was that I did not understand a peculiarity of how music is notated for some brass and woodwind instruments. A musician learns to associate dots on the page with particular fingerings. On a normal instrument, this produces a note that matches the written form. However, in bass or treble derivatives of that instrument, made larger or smaller in order to have different ranges, the notes produced for any given fingering are necessarily lower or higher, by a fixed interval. To compensate for this, the notes written on the staff are correspondingly higher or lower than what is intended. Thus, the musician is essentially instructed to make fingerings, not notes.
Once I had learnt what intervals applied to various instruments, and transposed the parts accordingly, everything fell perfectly into place. There were normal chords. Suddenly, what I was looking at seemed to fit right into the genre I knew best. Several parts might work together so that single-note instruments could combine to act like chord instruments; the string section taken as a whole almost looked like what a couple of guitarists might play together (Thin Lizzy, The Eagles). Bass instruments did fundamentally bass-type things. There were even power chords! Familiarity was restored.
Thus I learnt that classical and pop music are just different streams of the same musical tradition we call western; cousins in an interbreeding community.
If you are interested in hearing my version of Also Sprach Zarathustra, it’s here:
It was created in the free version of Cakewalk Sonar, using two free plugins:
… and country
Mark
Your linking of the musical styles is proved at the start of almost every Elvis concert of the seventies when Also Sprach Zarathustra would segue into C. C. Rider (originally a 1920s blues song): every time I hear the classical piece my brain is ready for Elvis.
Brian
Hah!
Thanks for the lead. I checked it out:
And actually, you triggered another memory. Do you remember Deodato’s version:
And here’s a more guitar-oriented version:
This is another post-script to my gripe post from three weeks back, Mark's Log of Learning - #162 by MarkPeters
Glenn Fricker, of the SpectreSoundStudios YouTube channel makes a career out of taking an Emperor’s new clothes approach to guitar gear, in what I think of as a hypertensive style. His latest target was active pickups, or rather, the people who swear they can hear them, the manufacturers who hype them, and perhaps also the prices they sell for. In a test that I’m sure hundreds will quibble with, he couldn’t find a music professional who could always tell whether a guitar tone was due to an active pickup, even with a $1,000 prize for those who could.
As I said:
Well, I’ve just had a rather enjoyable and informative discussion about generating Gilmouresque tones using my $65 Pocket Master effects unit. The results have far exceeded my expectations. 
A couple of hours ago I asked an acquaintance of sorts for advice on how to sound like David Gilmour using only the Pocket Master and my three single-coil noiseless pickup Strat. We ran though a number of setting combinations, all quite useful, and actually fun to play. As the discussion developed, the suggestions became more specific. Did I want tones for specific songs, for example? Comfortably Numb? Shine On You Crazy Diamond? Another Brick In The Wall? Advice on what to change between rhythm and lead sections? I kept saying yes, this was going great. I was also getting advice on how to pair pickup selection and tone and volume settings to particular effects. 
In this one session I think I got a better idea of what to do than I had in all my previous experimentation with the Pocket Master. I was amazed, and still am, at the range of sound quality available with just a few subtle tweaks of the settings - making my previous efforts seem crude and highly unfocused.
If you haven’t already guessed, my interlocutor was ChatGPT. In the end it was generating completely detailed recipes. Here’s an example:
This is the preset I’d use for the opening/verse-type Gilmour sound: articulate Strat, lots of air, but not brittle.
NR → COMP 1 → Scream → Dark Twin → Double 2x12 → GT EQ 1 → Analog → Plate 2
| Module | Effect | Setting |
|---|---|---|
| NR | NR |
THRE 3 |
| FX1 | COMP 1 |
Sustain 30, VOL 53 |
| DRV | Scream |
Gain 8, Tone 48, VOL 60 |
| AMP | Dark Twin |
Gain 18, VOL 70, Bass 48, Middle 57, Treble 57, Bright OFF |
| IR | Double 2x12 |
VOL 68 |
| FX2 | GT EQ 1 |
125 -2, 400 -1, 800 +2, 1.6k +1, 4k -1, VOL 50 |
| DLY | Analog |
Mix 23, Time 430 ms, F.Back 25 |
| RVB | Plate 2 |
Mix 25, Decay 55 |
The Pocket Master’s GT EQ 1 is specifically a five-band guitar EQ at 125 Hz, 400 Hz, 800 Hz, 1.6 kHz and 4 kHz, while Analog is its vintage rack-delay model.
Pickup: neck
Volume: 10
Tone: 8
The sound should be cleaner than you initially expect.
The tiny amount of Scream is there to make the note feel alive, not to sound distorted.
If it sounds too clean, increase Scream Gain from 8 → 12.
If it sounds too sharp, reduce Treble from 57 → 53 before touching the EQ.
I am no novice when it comes to using AI, but this is another of those moments when I feel almost nothing is impossible for this technology. Of course, someone more adept at guitar and pedal use would probably be less impressed, but still.
The important point is this: it is helping me quickly get to the moment where I’m thinking, ‘this sounds great, let’s try it out on this riff, these chords, that song’. Before, I would probably still be jerking the numbers up and down and watching the battery bars disappear. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve settled in for some guitar-playing and ended up just disappearing down rabbit holes of tone editing. 