What is playing guitar? How do you define that? How should I define it? I believe that there are several ways to define “playing guitar.”
Should I define it as:
- Playing sheet music precisely?
- Playing pop-culture song as recorded?
- Playing a pop-culture song in my own way?
- Playing Scales?
- Making “noise” that I think sounds good? (or harmonic)
- [way more then I can list]
Truthfully, I’m not sure how I would define it. I do know that everyone might define it differently, and of course that is okay and even wonderful. Music is an art; playing music is an art.
I’ve only picked up a guitar in the last few days. As you can see from this blog, I was going hardcore with my guitar/music education and then it just stopped. What the heck happened? My work had to send me to St. Louis to take over a project from an employee that resigned. That is what happened.
Now, I live in Chicagoland (yes, it is like a theme park) so I actually had the ability to drive to St. Louis. [Map^]. Which I did end up doing (as opposed to fly, which is a royal pain in the ass.)
Even though driving gave me the ability to, I didn’t actually bring a guitar with because I didn’t think I’d have time to practice. Which for the most part I was right; I spent quite a bit of time socializing. Turned out the gentleman leaving the company was a lot like me…
Anyway, I spent two week in St. Louis and when I got back it was kind of hard to pick up a guitar because of how worried I was of how much my “skills” (I use the term loosely) might have declined. Finally about 3 weeks from when I got back, I started to pick up my guitar again. Yes skills have declined and fingers aren’t as “happy” as the used to be on the fret board. It’s okay, I will fix it.
But as I was tooling around trying to get my fingers to play scales like the used to and etc. I came up with the thought of “What is ‘playing’ guitar?” and I wanted to ask this question to the world!
Hopefully your efforts are proceeding better then mine at this point. 
