Hail

i'll take my garbage any day

but i enjoy it because that's what i gravitated to at some point and i enjoy experimentation. i'm not gonna tell a kid to throw away his guitar and learn tuvan throat singing - they can find their niches on their own terms. we're here to teach the fundamentals, self-sufficiency, and the ability to use whatever tools you want to do whatever you want with them.

scales will hinder this because it makes it very easy to miss the big picture early on. when you can make the call for yourself, and feel like you're most efficient thinking visually rather than aurally, you can do anything you want. art is art. but when you're still trying to play metallica in your bedroom, you don't have the room to express yourself because you don't understand music as an artform well enough to use it as a means of expression.

i'm not saying sit and pore for hours over a theory textbook because that's counterproductive to appreciating what you're doing. you can find out a remarkable amount by natural intuition by just locking yourself in your room and learning, writing, and playing music, and you'll learn to appreciate it beyond a series of sounds, and learn how to appreciate your music by that virtue.

"when you hear someone play something that they really really like, it's like, really compelling, regardless of what style it is" - elliott smith

learn your theory when you've learned what music is to you, and when you've learned to attribute a nonobjective meaning to it. then you can use any tool at your disposal, but exposing yourself to music and learning to function within and without it is the best way to develop a make-shift sense of logic and understanding, because you discover it on your own terms.

at that point you can debate semantics and shit, but my big thing isn't that one school of thought is better than the other - it's that there's a school of thought based on giving people the ability to respect and appreciate all schools of thought.

i might come off one-sided, but i view this forum as a medium of educational practices, and any pitfalls i may have had, i'll try and help a beginner avoid. they'll probably do it anyway and learn from their mistakes, and that's okay, but i do what i can for that sake. when it comes to listening to music, the important thing to remember is that there's a great equalizer - you can't necessarily tell what the composer was thinking at the time of creation unless they did it in an inauthentic or forced way.

i'll sit and talk shit about scales all the time, and the line of thought related to it, but if you make a great piece of music and tell me you thought in just shapes and patterns the whole time, i don't care about any of that cause you made a great piece of music and worked off of your own inspiration. beginners don't have that, and from experience i'd rather them learn the general, vague, bland, rinsed-pasta version of theory on their own terms rather than jumping into scale shapes to entertain themselves, because they end up like that guy who posted "I DON'T KNOW ANY SONGS BUT THIS CHORD PROGRESSION WITH ARPEGGIOS DOESN'T SOUND GOOD HOW DO I WRITE A SOLO TO IT WHAT'S THE SECRET??"

you should have fun making and learning music by making and learning music. no matter what you think of me or my opinions, if you don't think learning and creating music is the most important part of music, that technical runs and exercises supersede just enjoying that you have the ability to pick up an instrument and make music that resonates with yourself, that you can emulate your heroes and can have a good time with your friends in a run-down garage, you're missing the point

/neohippie rant, i don't know who or what it was directed to but fuck yall PUNK ROCK

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