How can you tell if someone is playing a guitar well?
a) Listen to them playing.
b) Do they have concerts, CDs, fans, other symbols of “being a successful guitar player”? Do they write blogs or books about guitar playing? Do people write guitar-playing-related blogs and books about them?
The second option is less reliable and easier to fake, but it is an option that even a deaf person can use.
Speaking as a guitar and piano player. I can do things on guitar and piano that are fairly easy, but look very impressive to someone who doesn’t play the instrument. You actually need to play an instrument before you can judge how good someone is accurately.
(Obviously, it’s pretty obvious if someone is distinctly bad. But distinguishing different levels of “good” is hard.)
First question:
A good guitar player a steady rhythm and hit the appropriate notes with appropriate volume and tone. At a higher level, they improvise in a way that sounds good. Sounding good seems to involve sticking to a standard scale with only a few deviations, and varying the rhythms. At the level above that, I really don’t know.
Second question:
I really don’t know, at least that generally. I think I may use proxies such as the ability to find novel (good) solutions to problems and draw on multiple domains, then aggregate them into one linear value that I call “intelligence”. I am probably also influenced by the person’s attractiveness and how close their solution is to the one I would have proposed. I would definitely like your take on this as well.
Fair question, but difficult to answer in brief, I might try to do this later. For now let me answer with a couple of questions:
How can you tell if someone is playing a guitar well?
In general, can YOU tell the difference between someone doing things intelligently, and doing things unintelligently?
a) Listen to them playing.
b) Do they have concerts, CDs, fans, other symbols of “being a successful guitar player”? Do they write blogs or books about guitar playing? Do people write guitar-playing-related blogs and books about them?
The second option is less reliable and easier to fake, but it is an option that even a deaf person can use.
Speaking as a guitar and piano player. I can do things on guitar and piano that are fairly easy, but look very impressive to someone who doesn’t play the instrument. You actually need to play an instrument before you can judge how good someone is accurately.
(Obviously, it’s pretty obvious if someone is distinctly bad. But distinguishing different levels of “good” is hard.)
First question: A good guitar player a steady rhythm and hit the appropriate notes with appropriate volume and tone. At a higher level, they improvise in a way that sounds good. Sounding good seems to involve sticking to a standard scale with only a few deviations, and varying the rhythms. At the level above that, I really don’t know.
Second question: I really don’t know, at least that generally. I think I may use proxies such as the ability to find novel (good) solutions to problems and draw on multiple domains, then aggregate them into one linear value that I call “intelligence”. I am probably also influenced by the person’s attractiveness and how close their solution is to the one I would have proposed. I would definitely like your take on this as well.