In a video series called Guitar Moves, it featured the host Matt Sweeney, interviewing an iconic guitar player, Keith Richards from the world-famous band known as The Rolling Stones. At the beginning of the interview, Sweeney remembered that when he was about 18 years old, he watched an interview where Keith Richards displayed that what really matters when playing a guitar is that it is “all about the wrist” and how the guitar cannot play a tune unless you play the strings on the guitar. Usually everyone thinks that when they use a guitar, they always play like it was an electric guitar as seen from rock bands or any other bands of a particular genre. This is where Keith Richards brings up the line “There’s Two Side to Every Story.” The two sides meaning that there is one side strumming the guitar playing the rhythm, and the other side (the left) pick the tones for the guitar to play. He also implied that, “If one side doesn’t connect with the other (if the one hand doesn’t function well with the other hand), then you would get half of the story,” basically something resembling something more along the lines of a love story.

He informs that if anyone who is willing to be a guitar player (for either being in a band or just for playing the instrument just as a hobby), the acoustic guitar is one of the most important instruments to play if you are starting out. You can’t just immediately start from the top, you have to work from the ground-up, until you proceed to the point to where you want to be at. Everything takes practice over time. One of the examples I’d like to share is that I’m a drummer, I’ve been in a drumlins before, I’ve played on a drum set at my friends house and it was something I wanted to get better at. The predicament that I had to think about, is that you can’t just start by playing a song from Judas Priest or DragonForce, you have to start from the very beginning. Learning the fills, learn how to play with rhythm and timing, and learn how to use your feet when playing on a bass pedal (or the one I wanted to work on, a double bass pedal (and by the way, learning the double bass is about as difficult as ever, but I’m still trying to practice doing it)). Keith Richards didn’t start playing guitar like he was Yngwie Malmsteen or George Lynch, he learned about playing guitar just by his own grandfather.

The way we learn anything is when we go from the ground up, we get increasingly better as we grow up. The same applies to Visual Studies, once we take things step by step, we will learn so much things, even something that we have never seen and learned before from our teenage years.