Ox-bow Lakes
How weakness leads to individuality
What do you remember from Geography lessons at school? Personally, not a fat lot. What I do remember, is ox bow lakes.
A river starts at the source, typically up a mountain, and flows downhill, normally to the sea. Along the way, it might hit upon some particularly tough rock, so instead of plowing through, the river is diverted, it flows around until the rock is eroded away, and a new, straighter channel through the rock is formed.
What has this got to do with guitar?
The shortest route from source to estuary is a straight line, but rivers don’t flow in straight lines, they follow unique routes, because they have to flow around obstructions, at least for long enough to erode them away. The end result is then much more interesting than a straight line. Look at it as a metaphor for your playing, if there is a technique you are having difficulty with, then why not come up with a way to work around it. You can do this either until you improve your technique enough to do it in the way you initially intended, or until the way you work around it becomes ingrained in your playing, and almost becomes second nature. Eddie Van Halen used two-handed tapping to play big arpeggios without crossing strings, and it became a huge part of his individual sound. Or Isaac Guillory, who developed hybrid picking as a way to combine the sounds of fingerstyle and flatpicking. Both these ideas resulted in truly individual styles.
It is the obstructions, the difficulties we face, and how we face them that makes us individual.
If your aim is to develop an individual style, then finding the way around your weaknesses is where you will find it. Just as rivers must find a route around rocks to reach the sea. Fixating on the “correct” way to perform something, is to remove your personality from it.
