Today's "Google" Guitar Player

Try this. Google "God". Just for laughs, go to Google and type in G-O-D. Now, pay concentration to the drop down menu below. This is where Google's intuitive machine suggests the most favorite sites that are most likely to match the crusade term you have entered.

When you enter a crusade for God, what is the whole one recommended match for your search?....GoDaddy!

Now don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of GoDaddy, and a customer as well - but if I'm finding for God, I don't expect to find him at GoDaddy.

Today's "Google" Guitar Player

And, yes, I know what the first three letters in GoDaddy are, but doesn't it charge you odd that this site comes up in the whole one slot before any God related sites?

This is a telling comment on life in today's ultra technical age. If a crusade for God can lead us directly to a domain registration site, how can we be sure that any data we are searching for will lead us to the "right" information.

What does this have to do with playing guitar? Do a Google crusade for the term "A chord". As of this writing, a crusade for "A chord" will return 5.3 million sites! Yes, that's "million".

Is it conceivable that there are 5.3 million ways to show you how to play an A chord? How can we perhaps know which one of those millions of sites will show us the "correct" way to play an A chord?

Have you heard the term "Google guitar player"? This endearing term refers to today's generation of would-be guitarists that hop nearby from site to site, grabbing bits and pieces of YouTube videos, free lessons and blog posts - all under the assumption that they are assuredly "learning" how to play guitar.

The question is, of course, that although this generation of "Google guitar players" often does learn how to play little snippets of songs, licks and riffs; they rarely gain a full grasp on guitar playing techniques and concepts that take them the level of truly becoming an closed guitar "player".

Those of us in the "baby boomer" generation have had the unique occasion to eye a world that has changed rapidly, maybe more so than any other generation in history.

We can still recall the Kennedy assassination, and a time when landing on the moon was a "distant goal". We remember only having the big three Tv stations, when we had to adjust the rabbit ears on our black & white sets. Back when our phones had rotary dials and were related with wires.

We can almost track our journey into the data age according to what medium we listened to our music on. In the 60's we had vinyl records and listened to scratchy transistor radios tuned to Am stations. In the 70's we saw the onslaught of 8-track tapes. Then cassette tapes took over and dominated, only to be trounced by Cd's. Now the impetus of Mp3's, downloads and ipod's are moderately sending Cd's the way of dinosaurs.

The guitar learning methods of our generation were dramatically dissimilar back in those days as well. In the 70's, when I first picked up a guitar, there was no Internet, no video lessons, Tab's were not in use, no curious guitar graphics, no on-line tuners, and no Dvd's.

We basically had two choices. Take lessons from a underground instructor, or learn to play guitar on your own. Most of us did the latter.

Back then you learned to play guitar hunched over a turntable, carefully placing the needle on a vinyl report to listen to a passage, then lifting the needle and trying to shape out how to play what you just heard. Then repeating the process - over and over and over - until you could play the song, or until the report was scratched beyond recognition.

Using this recipe we learned the licks of Clapton, Hendrix, Zeppelin, Beck and Santana - and we became closed guitar players by means of intensely "focusing" on one thing at a time. We had no choice, no other options and no distractions.

There are, admittedly, numerous advantages to today's data age. But how much data is "too much", and when do you cross the line into "information overload", which can supervene in the brain digesting no real information?

To today's "Google guitarist" - if you're feeling overwhelmed, if you've been trying to learn guitar by jumping all over the net, if you're feeling frustrated at the lack of improve - there's one word you should write in bold letters and tape to the wall...Focus.

That's assuredly the main inequity between the "old school" recipe of learning guitar and the new one. The sheer volume of data available at your finger tips makes the potential to "focus" on any one thing, for any length of time, a major challenge.

If you truly have the desire to become an closed guitarist, select your path, and stick with it. Whether it's an on-line lessons program, a home study Dvd course, underground study or music books - spend all of your time and energy focusing on that one policy of action.

Developing the potential to "focus" with tunnel vision, putting on blinders to the rest of the digital world - will take you down a sure path from being a "Google guitar player" to becoming a "real" guitar player!

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