More from my cousin David Fair:
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound.
Read the entire quote here:
http://users.wfu.edu/breckers/howtoplayguitar.htm
This is bigger than an in tune or out of tune guitar, it is about the liberation of owning your own creative output. If you evaluate your own creative output through the eyes of others, it is likely that will register yourself as a failure.
Time and time again, I would encounter college juniors who had hit a wall. Learning of the creative output of artists like Chris Burden, Cindy Sherman, Ai Weiwei or Maurizio Cattelan, students would shut down creatively. They judged themselves against those great artists and found their own work lacking. Often, I would they would veer off into extremely torturous, tedious work as a means of proving themselves worthy.
But what if we turn the tables and assume we are right and our work is right. What if you make artwork you want to see or write music you want to hear? You could argue that you don't make work in a vacuum or to say you're only making work for yourself is to ignore the audience. But what if what you make IS great and assume you are gathering gifts to share?
What if we assume we are worthy take up the flag and run with it? What a relief to let go of the burden of judging yourself?
