Journey of the Hero

About Myself and The Guitar... I Am Guitar... I was born to the guitar... it is as if it was one of my parents. During the nine months preceding my entrance into this world, my mother played the guitar several hours each day. Less than one hour prior to her giving birth to me she had been playing guitar for several hours as she would do for hours on end. It is a matter of very clear understanding by many experts in numerous fields of medical science and other areas of study and there is no doubt I came into this life with a pre-disposition and awareness of the sound of music played on a guitar... and more than likely affected by this phenomena that the very essence of myself is intimately connected to that audio imagery... the unique sound of the guitar. So, it by this that I can definitively say "I Am Guitar"... or at least from the very beginning of my own existence... The Guitar Is With Me... Let Us Play. My name is Craig Smith... and I play the guitar from within the deepest part of my being. To me I hear and visualize within my mind the totality of all music, guitar or otherwise, just as if it were a physical object that I can see with my eyes. To me music is like a landscape we travel through as if one were on tour seeing three dimensional objects with all there characteristics and having the clear ability to navigate among them... knowing all the right moves necessary to avoid errors in making the wrong move, stumbling or bumping into something. When people ask me how they can hear the changes in the chords of a song... I explain how and show them the way to really be a part of the music... and to have no more difficulty doing this than walking around their home without mis-judging where a doorway is, or driving a car without seeing and knowing how and when to turn, slow down, stop and go... or parallel park. It's no great mystery once the truth is know as described even by the Greek Mathematician and Philosopher "Pythagoras" who understood that music is a Three Dimensional Audio Form... just as the world around us is a solid and visible one. My experience hearing music on the guitar before I was born was just a training ground for this world of sound. I just had the uncluttered privilege of experiencing The Way Music Works a little earlier than some others. Yet... it can be learned by anyone with a pair of ears that function reasonably well. All the aspects of the thing we call music are merely hearing and instinctively about making the right moves. The regular practices of reading and counting the values of music notes is of extreme value in the area of knowledge and education... but just like in daily activities when we walk, talk and interact with the environment and individuals we encounter... we don't have to calculate distances, measure or count steps we take or pull out a small guidebook to have a normal conversation with another person. We do these things just naturally. Of course it is helpful to be aware of the systematic elements of measurements of the physical world, and the rules of grammar establishing good speech and more... but we do not think or generally use these things in our millions of movements and such each day. We are instinctive by nature and act automatically to basically survive in daily life. All the structure of knowledge including that of music knowledge came thousands of years after human beings did anything they do as valuable ways of remembering and teaching others elements of better understanding and doing things, but we did things first and then created ways to retain and describe what it was we had done. No one wrote it down first and then said now I think I can do this or that. We have to regain confidence in our natural human instinctive behavior... a gift we have long forgotten we were given at birth as a right of life... along with it's counterpart creativity... the stolen human right. This is not to say we should not use the valuable lexicons we have on performing all activities, but if we over establish the premise that everything must follow the directions as if they are dictated on a map of some sort we can become too focused on the map and drive off the road into a ditch. We do not follow little guidebooks, maps or GPS directions in 99% of daily activities. We have to be extremely on guard to avoid too much so called help... and use our inner "gut awareness"... these abilities are a gift from birth... Instinct. Playing and hearing the true aspects of music is no different, we must be aware first... and then use the guidance available for assistance and refining moves and increasing our ability to survive better, with more ease... and a better outcome. The Music Is In You... Just Release It The sounds are in you... they are not out there. For your entire lifetime, however long that is... you have been accumulating designs in sound, patterns of both melodies and harmonies... from the millions of songs and fragments of songs you have listened to. We as human beings hear and store music movements and all elements of sound as we listen to any and all the music we hear. We compare, analyze and categorize these designs in sound just as we do visual images, the tastes of foods and all sensory perceptions. Our mind is a computer... and we keep within our mind billions of experiences in all areas of our five senses as a computer stores information... the only big difference is that within our human mind... our bio-computer... they are kept in an analog form... not digital, and therefore are first hand... real representations instead of just digital code to be retrieved as from the hard drive of a computer. What does this all mean? Craig Smith