For me, the most difficult thing is that I am learning melodies on guitar from some songs whose melodies were not meant to be played on guitar. Ever. They were intended mostly for keyboards or melodic percussion.
But the reality is when you write a song, you should be able to strip away all the instruments and just have a song right there with an acoustic guitar and a voice, and the song should be good.
I mean, no offense, but I don't really see why, like guitar players from Creed, or something like that, are on the cover of guitar magazines. Almost anybody can sit down and learn to play those songs.
Well, Steve Vai joined my dad's band right around the time when I actually started playing guitar. So he gave me a couple of lessons on fundamentals, and gave me some scales and practice things to work on. But I pretty much learned everything by ear.
Had an awesome time. You tell me to show up and all I have to do is drink beer, play guitar all day and I can lift weights and you're going to pay me for this!
Unfortunately, most of the songs that I write I don't write them with guitar in mind. I just write it as a song and that was probably one of the ones that left an opening for it. The song's all right, I wouldn't choose to sing it now.
So it's more the musician in me that makes me stretch out and try different things more than anything. But, like a lot of guitar players, I have one certain niche that's my thing that I'm better at than the others.
So you do shorter versions of the hits, or you take out a long guitar solo or things like that to make time for the hits and new music as well. But I don't think any of us ever get to do as much new music as we would like to.
