Emulation is the best learning device

Any guitarists that may be struggling learning their favorite riffs will surely decamp to the couch in defeat after seeing this. If you didn't know it was 9 year old Japanese boy, and had closed your eyes, you would have envisioned someone 20-ish playing this.






In an interesting lecture on electronic media at the National Gallery of Art, "Are Books Making Us Illiterate?...", Virginia Heffernan posited that Asian cultures tend to approach music from a social/interactive perspective, rather than from an atomized consumer perspective. Some cultures put performance, rather than passive listening (lurking), at the forefront. YouTube has been instrumental in revivifying those social spaces, even if they are virtual or done over the internet.

This also says a lot about the different cultural and artistic contexts at play in the rock milieu. There is the layer of amazement at talent and ability, but also the fossil layers of rock music history that are not a part of the performance and not visible on the surface. Lots can happen from the initial spark when a musician divines the first few notes of an idea in the zeitgeist (or doldrums) of the present. As music matures, different generations can infuse different interpretations, using new electronic 'vectors' that allow ideas, processes, inventions to survive and thrive. But it remains to be seen if people really care about, or even know about Johann Pachelbel, let alone Baroque music--or in another 300 years, Ozzie Osborne.

Some cultures champion the making of the exact copy with no mistakes, whereas American culture, especially with 60s and 70s rock and metal, put a lot of slop in it. YouTube-era renditions have a bit of both: They are replicas of spontaneous and nostalgic moments, but are executed with a genuine spontaneity--giving us the somewhat uncanny feeling of being emotionally moved in a Karaoke-like way, or giving us the idea that these are talents we can easily acquire, and show them off via a web cam.

One has to wonder where such a talent may go when everything is achieved at such a young age. If a diva can sing like Lena Horne at age 22, where can the musical wisdom be found later on? If someone can croak a song like Leonard Cohen at age 25, can it mean the same thing?

Any talent takes at least twenty years to develop. Typically young musicians copy their heroes, then go on to develop their own sound. The same process was happening in the 17th Century, although the 'hero' was the discipline itself, the teacher, the repertoire, and so on.

For some mysterious reason, Pachelbel's Canon in D has stayed at the top of the charts, especially for guitarists practicing arpeggios. (We have a fetish for arpeggios for some reason).

But learning music has to start somewhere. For me it started with a cheap guitar with only the bottom 4 strings, playing along with songs on the radio. Don't let it end with fast arpeggios on simple chords, or Hendrix solos. Copy, emulate, make something new. Be recursive, curious and pioneering.