Being a musician vs being a "guitar player"

If you were playing with friends, as in someone calls out a song and you can play along and not sh!t everyone's bed, I'd call you a musician. "Musician" also evokes multi-faceted for me. If you play guitar alone and do nothing else, you're a guitarist. If you play guitar, and can play bass, can sing a little, dabble effectively with keys or ukes or mandos if need be for the band's or the jam's sake, then you're a musician.

I can play a guitar slightly above average. I've written my own "riffs" but can't ever complete anything on my own. I'm nowhere near a musician.

I know someone personally who is on the songwriters guild. He can play just about any instrument. He is a musician.

quote:

---

If any thing, songwriting separates musicians from guitarist.

---

I don't know about that, I know some very successful songwriters that can barely play a guitar or anything else. All they needed to do was get their idea across. Being a better guitar player/musician does help to write songs that can be more interesting musically, but lets face it, most commercially successful music is pretty darn simple.

What does it matter anyway, what somebody calls you? Just do what you do.

quote:

---

What does it matter anyway, what somebody calls you? Just do what you do

---

It's more the nature of the discussion we were having.

Everyone agrees one guy in particular is a musician, he can pick up and start playing in a song he's never heard before, improvise over it, even improve on it. A couple of the guys wear "guitar player" proudly, they know only a few chords, we tell them the progression they mostly follow by watching someone's fret hand for changes.

The rest of us are in the middle. I kinda like FretShack's description (FYI I was wearing your shop T-shirt last night!)

quote:

---

i would add the ability to perform in front of a crowd as a criteria to move from "guitar player" to "musician." It introduces a whole new series of challenges, both musically and personally. and i don't mean a big crowd. Even being able to perform in front of a dozen or so people changes things.

---

That leads to another label "performer". There are lots of great studio musicians that don't really care for performing.

quote:

---

There are lots of great studio musicians that don't really care for performing.

---

the ability to perform in a studio while recording would fall under that same thing i was trying to describe. Essentially, the ability to play under pressure.

quote:

---

the ability to perform in a studio while recording would fall under that same thing i was trying to describe. Essentially, the ability to play under pressure.

---

I guess that's a matter of perspective. To me, the studio is the lowest pressure playing that there is, because it's so easy to fix mistakes. Recording at home by myself, and doing everything myself, that's pressure to me, because I've got too much going on that I'm having to think about. At the studio, all I have to do is play with the click track.

an instrumentalist is someone who can play an instrument, a guitar player being a subset of instrumentalist who can specifically play a guitar.

A performer is someone who is skilled at audience manipulation and attention retention in order to put on an engaging and entertaining repertoire for an audience.

A musician is someone who is capable of using a musical instrument to make something musical. What is music? That's mostly up to the listener and the maker, but it is an auditory expression of creativity for the sake of being creative, not merely a task performed for a utilitarian function.

There are two kinds of musicians: interpretive musicians, who are capable of taking the compositions of others and repeating them or expounding on them, and creative musicians who have the ability and aptitude to compose entirely new works of music.

Creative musicians are usually considered "artists". Among creative musicians, there are two forms: composers and improvisers, i.e. those who primarily create new works of music via a plan and much time and preparation before they perform and those who literally make up the music they are playing in the moment, often using frameworks and forms as a guideline or jumping off point.

Improvisational musicians are often known as "noodlers" or "soloists", since the most common form of improvised music in popular culture is the jazz or rock music solo, where one of the players (or a series of players taking turns) gets to highlight their own skills by taking sole responsibility for the melody of the song and improvising an impressive and entertaining bit of music on the fly to fit within the allotted space.

Those soloists capable of noodling on more than one instrument are usually considered to be virtuosos. They can sound awesome playing virtually anything.

There's also differences among different kinds of recording musicians and what not, but that's a discussion for a different day, imo.

quote:

---

the ability to perform in a studio while recording would fall under that same thing i was trying to describe. Essentially, the ability to play under pressure.

---

I feel less pressure in a studio.

By the time I'm there, I've got all the parts down. Probably at the best ill ever have thrm tbh. I control it in the studio too, live there are many different factors..human factors, acoustics, fatigue etc.