Start a Revolution with Your Electric Guitar

(Warning: The following article is basically an unusual "philosophical" or "outside-the-box" thinking lesson).

You may want to start a revolutionary movement with your guitar. The methods and techniques you have learned in up to this point in your musical career could help you demolish the normal standards of guitar playing once you have worked through them, mastered them, and taken them to another level. One of the things you will have to do to start a revolution is learn to play with absolute conviction and confidence and be exceptionally aggressive - never be docile in your playing (unless the music truly calls for it). Attempt to take your music into the metaphysical realm and change the world with your solos and chord progressions. You will need genuine pugnacity and ferocity and perhaps even a little belligerence to accomplish this - to burst into the supernatural plane with your music.

Developing a strong urge to destroy the traditional boundaries of harmony with the sounds coming from your guitar will be propitious to your revolutionary movement. You could try to find the 5^th and 11^th dimensions with your lyrical and pointillistic improvisations and bring the dimensions back to your audience and reveal their esoteric qualities to them. You could be the first guitar player on the planet to capture an extra dimension and present it to the common people, which would definitely cause a revolution in music, and you would go down in history for it. We need more revolutions in the world.

Every musician and guitarist should attempt to make radical changes in music with their playing. They should create new music that drives people into ecstasy, causes them to riot in the streets and cities to crumble, make the planets to spin backwards on their axes. Your new music should be able to heal the sick and the elderly, and cause other individuals to turn into mystics who strive for the forbidden, and cause other people to have terrifying existential meltdowns. It wouldn't hurt too much and you would change the world in the end. Wouldn't you like to create anarchy in the streets with your riffs and feedback and other sounds coming from your guitar? Wouldn't you like to make the universe burn from within and bring about the apocalypse? Try it. No one will get hurt too badly.

Attempt to arrive at a level of reality that human beings rarely if ever witness, try to reach the mystical realm lying beyond the common veil of the universe, do it with your guitar and bring the ultimate level of reality back to us, show it to us - that incomprehensible level of existence and the blistering essence we all know is there but rarely get to experience. There is a curtain over it, a barrier, maybe even a brick wall. You must break it down, bust through it get to that other realm with your performances. It is possible. There is music there, hiding and flowing. It might be impossible for some players to find it, but I believe you can do it, so make the attempt to do so. The greatest music in the world probably lies in that metaphysical region. You simply have to capture it with your guitar and improvisations and bring it out. I am talking about the almost incomprehensible level of reality that resides just outside the barriers of our visual perception. You can feel it sometimes, a few people can. You should try to reach it, bring it out of its hiding place.

Just as superstring physicists believe we live in eleven dimensions or more, just as they believe tiny strings are vibrating to make up everything we know in the universe and all matter as we experience it, I would like for you to get the strings of your guitar to vibrate in perfect synchronicity with the superstrings of the universe, and bring out the music it contains. The true music, the genuine music, so that you will be at one with the superstrings of the universe. It is attainable. Bring out the clandestine music in the realms that are beyond our senses. Go into the pleroma and bring back the melodies residing there. Make us believe in the mystical transport that is possible through the music. The truly real, supernatural transport, bring it back to us. Use your guitar. Take us to another realm with your playing and cause people to create religious cults devoted to you and your music. One way to do that is to become provocative. Let your guitar become provocative. Your fingers, hands, and mind, all provocative. Your soul, ears, limbs, facial features, eyes, everything provocative. Try to express the ineffable with your improvisations and arrive at the sublime truth. Take us deep into the pleroma. Make us truly listen. Keep your strings in motion with the superstrings of the universe. How many superstrings does it take to make up the vibrating note of an F# played on your high E string? You tell me. Discover the answer.

Now, do the suggestions I wrote above seem supremely strange or totally out-there? Does it seem like I am only joking or off my rocker or have my tongue firmly planted in my cheek? Some of the things I listed may sound crazy or bizarre, but there is a reason and method behind the madness. You might think this lesson is entirely ridiculous, but the important thing here is that most of your guitar playing and improvisations come from your brain. So if you can change the way you think about your instrument and how you approach the performance of a piece of music, it will alter the way you play. Having certain thoughts or feelings in mind before you make music, having certain philosophical goals or psychological theories in your head beforehand will affect your playing tremendously and may even take you to a level you never thought possible. That is what you want. Strive for the impossible. Aim beyond yourself. Go into the beyond. Try to take your playing to places no one has ever dreamed of. Good luck with your attempts.

Source:

"Start A Revolution With Your Guitar," How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Jason Earls, Pleroma Publications, 2007.