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Why John Mayer worries about the future of guitar players
Eric Clapton once described John Mayer as an “extremely gifted” guitarist, stating that his “facility is phenomenal” and concluding that “he is a master, and he doesn’t even know how good he is”. That is pretty high praise indeed, and Clapton is not alone in lauding him either. Thus, no matter what you think of him or his music, what he says about guitar playing is well worth your ear and he has a word of caution to all future guitarists.
He might not look it, but Mayer is now 44 years old. As a kid, he first became enamoured with the ways of the guitar when he saw Marty McFly have a whale of a time in Back to the Future. So, when he was 13 years old, his father rented him a six-string, a neighbour gave him a cassette of blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the future began to take form for the virtuoso.
Speaking about how he learnt guitar himself while growing up, he said, “I played along to CDs and this was well before Garage Band and well before anything you could jam along to. In my day, and I know I speak for a lot of guitar players around my age or older, we played along to records and ignored the guitar playing on the records.”
Thus, Hendrix ended up shunned out of the way for a fumbling 15-year-old—but a fumbling 15-year-old who was learning his way around ripping chords with bravura and melding with a band all the same. Mayer, like many others, would pretend that the guitarist wasn’t there “and played over it”.
Rather comically he continued: “So, imagine the built-in cockiness of playing over B.B. King and pretending B.B. King and pretending B.B. King is not there.” Now, that’s an imposing figure to muscle out the way, but Mayer speaks for a “large number of guitar players who played over B.B. King like it didn’t matter that B.B. King was playing.” And it worked for Mayer, because he would go on to play alongside the blues legend and even have him admire his fills.
Thus, Mayer has a word of caution for modern “Instagram musicians”. As he explains: “Now, I see who can play alone on Instragram or they can play a looper—we never had a looper pedal and everyone has the ability to [create their own beat]. And you can get good that way, but the problem is you have to learn how to play with other people.”
Adding: “And I worry that these Instagram musicians who play in their own meter are going to have a tough time finding the universal beat with another drummer or another bass player or another guitar player.” In other words, you might have a generation of great guitar players who are virtuosos when a looper pedal is involved but stick John Bonham behind them or B.B. King alongside and they fall apart. And you shouldn’t need anyone to tell you that that is a problem.
