Why do you play guitar? · Luan's School Of Music

Why do you play guitar?

This might be a silly question, but it’s something I have been thinking about as part of my own “journey”. As my limited post history shows, I am struggling to actually learn songs. I would say I can decently play along to a track, but if I had to play on my own… it would sound terrible and would be barely recognizable as the song. It definitely does not help that I get bored / frustrated / annoyed with a song so then I just move on to some other song. But it also got me thinking about mindset and maybe the overall reason why you play.

For me, the desire to play guitar came almost from an “intellectual” point of view. I like getting to learn how things work and guitar provides an interesting challenge there. Combine that with the actual need to learn a physical skill for the first time since learning to ride a bike and you got a nice challenge on your hands (pun intended). But I never did this with the desire to perform, be a musician or be creative. Don’t get me wrong, I love music, love seeing live performances and I thoroughly enjoy seeing the videos of the community here. It’s really stupid, but it seems like I just lack the desire to make music, I just want to be really good at guitar.

Part of this might be some subconscious stage fright or maybe I am just in denial of my desire to be John Mayer (or Luan 😉), but I just cannot seem to get over that hurdle. I even ask myself “why be good at guitar if you don’t want to really play it” and I just do not have an actual answer. I cannot help but think it does seem kinda dumb to go through all this effort for no real reason.

Any advice or ideas there? I do thoroughly enjoy playing around with my guitars, but it seems like the lack of any “real” motivation is just keeping me stuck in a perpetual cycle of trying to find the next song that might make it click.

Thanks for listening to my TED talk 😅

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