What makes a good musician? Is it the speed? Is it the feeling? Is it something else?

Personally I consider a musician should be good in what he does from a technical point of view. I mean, if you put an electric guitar in the hand of a guitar player he should know his way around it. This is because I listen to bands that have skilled musicians. I like Joe Satriani, I like Vai and I like bands like Helloween, Dream Theater, Iron Maiden, Vanden Plas, etc and the music they play is sharp, clear, with elaborated musical phrases, with a lot of instruments and a lot of those speedy glitters that we all love.

But this is just a point of view. If you take Kurt Cobain for example and his almost famous out of tune notes and his proverbial lack of technical skills and judge him by this scale, then there would be have no place for him on stage, but if you judge by the fact that he was part of a movement that totally changed the music in only a few years then we should pay him the respect he deserves.

The only observation I could make here is that I am not convinced that Kurt Cobain was aware of his creative process, I just think that he did what he felt and it all probably came naturally to him, without thinking too much about it. I think that this is the essence of the music he made and of the feeling he transmitted. Actually if you think about it, the feeling is what really counts when you consider music such as Nirvana used to play. When you take a band such as Dream Theater there is so much you could appreciate so even if you find that a song doesn’t quite transmit a strong feeling you can always find some technical thing that makes you love it.

So, is Dream Theater better than Nirvana? Is Steve Vai better than Cobain?

I think there is no way to compare musicians. There is one for every one of us. That is what makes the music so beautiful, the fact that you find at any moment something that moves you, depending on your mood. Do you think that Joey DeMaio, the bass player of Manowar, well known for his passion for “true metal” and his disrespect for
”posers” doesn’t listen blues? My personal opinion is that he also has his moments when Steve Ray Vaughan or BB King put him in that state where nothing else counts but blues.

I posted this because I had a discussion with a friend of mine some time ago about a band here, Vama (Veche) is called, and about the lead singer which is an actor before being a singer. Or is he a singer before being an actor? Well, personally I think that exactly this duality gives him the possibility to express himself the best on stage; he has the potential and the training to express a large scale of feelings and this makes it easy to communicate with the public even if sometimes he can not control his voice very well.

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