Comment by username223
4 months ago
Interesting. I was a fairly serious amateur guitarist in a former life, and the physical skill was the hard part. Playing a Bach lute suite, or something like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQXvMWojs28), takes an incredible amount of strength and precision. With 1-2 hours per day of practice, learning that kind of material took weeks or months.
Funny I've always found the technicality of the guitar to be the easier part on the contrary.
Don't get me wrong, playing a piece like this cleanly and with such feel takes great skill and is probably not something I will ever be able to do but I mean easy in the sense that you can quite clearly see the path to take to get there (or halfway there). "Just" learn the piece slowly block by block, then repeat it for hundreds of hours without much thinking until it flows by itself (I'm simplifying but you get my point).
On the other hand, while theory can be grasped quite fast, applying it to your playing, composing, and improvising with it has always felt to me like a multifaceted beast that you have absolutely no idea at which angle to tackle from. You just stumble your way around it until the pieces start clicking together and it's really hard to find a clear path to follow which makes it much harder imo, or at least more frustrating/blurry.