They say the best way to improve as a guitar player is is to record yourself and listen to it back. But it’s not easy. In fact, it can be all kinds of horrible.
It used to be worse. At least nowadays we can quickly record something, apply a little bit of digital voodoo to it, a nice IR, some reverb for space, gussy it up and make it sound all right, even if the playing stinks.
But if you’re at the stage where you are listening to yourself back and thinking of sticking your electric guitar on Reverb and giving up, then just take a moment, because you’re not alone. Even the pros feel this way from time to time.
Chet Atkins is one of the greatest to ever have done it – hero and mentor to Tommy Emmanuel, inspiration to a generation and all-round virtuoso. They called him ‘Mister Guitar’ – he’s the one and only Country Gentleman – and yet Atkins would hear himself play and his heart would sink.
Speaking to Guitar World in March 1986, he admitted that his playing made him feel sick. “I never like what I play – especially the old things,” he said, and there was one incident that especially stuck out in his mind.
“I remember going down the road one day and I heard a tune on the radio called The Love Bug Crawl,” said Atkins. “I can’t even remember the artist, but I was listening to this thing and I said, ‘Boy, that sounds good. Wonder who that guitar player is?’ Then suddenly I realized it was me and it sounded terrible.”
Atkins would have been forgiven for the lapse. The Love Bug Crawl was an old rockabilly standard from 1957, recorded by Jimmy Edwards. Atkins was just a young buck when he sat in on the session, alongside the likes of Floyd Cramer and Buddy Harman, aka the Nashville A-Team.
But then again, Atkins would later sign Edwards to RCA on a one-year deal, and got him to track y Otis Blackwell’s Your Love is a Good Love. So there’s that.
But anyway, the point is, our perception of our playing is now how others hear us. When Atkins was listening to this long-forgotten recording, it sounded good. It still sounds good.
But there’s a psychological switch that’s flipped when we know that’s us. For Atkins, it was a particularly violent and visceral reaction.
“It’s always that way when I hear myself,” he said. “If I don’t know it’s me I think, ‘Damn, that’s pretty good. Wonder who that is?’ Then when I realize it’s me I kind of want to throw up.”
The moral of the story? There’s a fine line between applying a critical ear to your playing and to trashing it completely, and if the great Chet Atkins feels like this, what hope do the rest of us mortals have?
Last year, Tommy Emmanuel – one of Atkins' proteges – revealed how he first met his biggest guitar hero by knocking on his door unannounced.
