Rating guitar playing ability

[Thom PC]

Thanks for that, Cobby - I like your approach

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Cobby

Well, I do want to know my world guitar player rank, precisely.

That's fine, if you're going to be happy with whatever you discover. It's silly if it's going to make you feel inferior to all those better then you.
Then again, you can always feel superior to those worse than you!

Hey, there's a whole lot people who can't even play guitar at all! You're better than them!

Originally Posted by Cobby

Unfortunately, the best I can do is estimate. The first thing is to figure out how many guitar players there are in the world. Here's a link to some highly scientific research on that very subject:

https://www.quora.com/How-many-peopl...ld-play-guitar

Although there is some variation in the data, I'm going to go with the average of the high and low estimates and say that there are 434,921,875 guitar players in the world.

Which is obviously ridiculous. Not because it's amusingly precise, because the upper and lower limits of the various estimates are so far apart, as well as not being based on any hard data. You can't assume the average or median figure is the most likely.

Just taking the informal guesses in the first post on that page

"Let’s say in order to play the guitar you must:
1. Be between 6–64 years of age."

I'm 70. Plenty of guitar players are a lot older than me, So you need to add at least 10 years to that upper limit, and maybe 20.

"So this lowers our number to 6.8 billion people."

I don't know how my adjustment would affect that, but let's bump it to 8 billion, to be on the safe side.

"2. Are in the economical middle class range to afford a guitar. So this lowers are number to 3 billion people."

Where does that figure come from? Is it saying that no working class person ever plays the guitar? That's clearly ridiculous. Guitars are cheap enough today, and people can still borrow or steal guitars. And of course plenty of poverty-stricken folks in the third world manage to find (or build) guitars to play.

"3. Are interested in music. So this lowers our number to 2.5 billion people"

All humans - or at least the vast majority - are "interested in music", to some degree. At least, they all like listening to it, at one time or another. Different societies and cultures do vary hugely in the proportion of people who might be interested in actually playing an instrument. In the west that's definitely a minority, although probably quite a large minority. It would be a smaller minority who choose guitar, of course, as opposed to other instruments.
And among those, there are lots who start and give up. Only a minority of those who start will continue - and for varying lengths of time.
So you need to factor in "people playing guitar now" and "people who used to play guitar but gave up". The latter do have some ability, even if they stopped decades ago, so shouldn't be excluded from your ranking criteria.

"4. let’s say if you have 5 friends then 1 of your friends also plays guitar."

Why? Based on what? Even for professional musicians, maybe no more than 5 of their friends play guitar, but all of them will be in a minority just by being musicians. For people who are not musicians, maybe none of their friends plays guitar. For other people, amateur or professional, maybe most of their closest friends play guitar.

This kind of "Let's say" is so vague as to be worthless. We end up with no better then the common sense assumption that a "minority" of people play guitar. How big is that minority? AFAIK, no one has the faintest idea. Personally I would guess around 1% of the global population (above the age of 4 or 5, but with no upper limit). But it might be 0.5%, it might be 1.5%.
In the west, the figure is almost certainly higher, but maybe still under 5%.

Originally Posted by Cobby

Now as far as skill level, let's say that they are distributed like the top half of the normal curve. That would mean that there are a lot of barely adequate beginners and only a few exceptional players out there.

That's a lot easier to say. Obviously skill is going to form a kind of pyramid, simply because it takes years and consistent dedication to become excellent. The more years and dedication it takes, the smaller the group of people getting that far will be. Those people are "exceptional" by definition! (You can't say there are huge numbers of exceptional players, because then they wouldn't be "exceptional" )

BTW, what is this "normal curve" you're referring to? I didn't find any graphs in that link.

Originally Posted by Cobby

I would say that I'm at least 1 standard deviation above an absolute beginner, but probably not two standard deviations.

Define "deviation".
Again, sorry if it's explained somewhere in that link, but i didn't see it.

Originally Posted by Cobby

So. Since for half of the curve, one standard deviation would be 68.2% (and two would get me all the way to 95.4%). So, just to be conservative, I'd say that I am currently better than 68.2% of all guitar players, which would make me at least the 138,305,156th best guitar player in the world.

Again, sources of figures please.
(I mean, this doesn't matter in the slightest, of course, but I'd like to play the game for a little while.

Originally Posted by Cobby

I can use that when introducing myself to an audience: "Hello folks, you're in for a real treat tonight. You will surely be hugely entertained by roughly the 138 millionth best guitar player in the whole world! And some say he's actually the 137 millionth best guitarist in the world!

This kind of comedy is the only good reason I think of for working out this kind of thing. Obviously the audience won't care either way, but at least that thought might entertain them.

[RustyAxe]

I use the "open mic" method of evaluating my playing. Sometimes I hear a performer and think to myself "that's awful, I sure hope he doesn't ask me to accompany him". Other times I hear a bonafide virtuoso play and think to myself "if this guy asks me if I play, I'll just say no".

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by RustyAxe

I use the "open mic" method of evaluating my playing. Sometimes I hear a performer and think to myself "that's awful, I sure hope he doesn't ask me to accompany him". Other times I hear a bonafide virtuoso play and think to myself "if this guy asks me if I play, I'll just say no".

I always say yes, in both cases! Occasionally I've regretted it, but only at the extremes. I.e., if the bad performer simply doesn't have a clue what they're doing (can't keep time, forgets where they are, etc), or if the good one simply leaves me in the dust.
But mostly, in the first case, they're grateful and complimentary, and always buy me a drink, and their set always goes down better than it would normally (and I share in that). In the second case, professional performers are usually extremely generous and accommodating - provided I know what I'm doing of course - and it's a real pleasure to play with people who know exactly what they're doing. It's much easier than playing with amateurs who either play with shaky timing, or overplay, leaving you no room. That's because they actually don't understand how to play with someone else - to share and listen. Pros always understand that, and leave room, allowing you to fit in.

Whenever I've played with people better than myself, 99% of the time it's been hugely enjoyable, even thrilling. It's been smooth and easy - rather like playing a beautifully made and set-up guitar in comparison with a cheap one; you don't feel you have to force anything or over-compensate. The 1% has been when they've been seriously good and have been relying on me to keep up in a support role, overestimating my skill and speed. Then it's like being on a roller-coaster that you're not properly strapped into...

The worst people to play with are those who aren't very good, but think they are, and then blame you for all their mistakes....

Of course, all of this is somewhat academic these days... Hopefully, in a few months, even if it's a year, we can get back to some semblance of normality. By then I might be grateful to play with even the dumbest idiot....

[Goodallboy]

Originally Posted by lowrider

It doesn't matter.

Timing, Timing, Timing

It's the most important thing. If you have good timing, you can do a lot of things wrong and still sound pretty good

If you don't have good timing, you can do everything else great and still sound pretty bad!

Timing is vastly overlooked in rating a player. It covers many things as you mentioned, and serves the song more than a more skilled played with marginal rhythm.

[Gordon Currie]

Originally Posted by Mr. Jelly

Academics suck the life and passion out of things. Music has shown that passion trumps all else every time. Jazz, blues, boogie woogie, rock and roll, and so on.

Yeah, there's absolutely no passion in an academically-oriented music such as classical...

[spock]

Man o man, what a hornets nest I seem to have kicked with this topic.

Truly, all I ever wanted to find among a forum full of guitar players was how folks might come up with an arbitrary list of those playing skills that could be loosely associated with a particular level of guitar mastery, or lack thereof, depending on whether you're a cup full or cup half empty kind of person.

For example, say you are a guitar instructor who desires to teach a beginner, intermediate, and advanced guitar playing class. You bring in 3 students and have them play a song that they feel is one they can play fairly well and is at or near the top of their guitar playing ability.

In your mind, you assess each one.

Player number one is holding the guitar upside down. Obviously a beginner.

Player number two fingerpicks The Boxer by Paul Simon pretty cleanly using an alternating bass, a thumb wrap over the top on a particular barre chord while playing some full bar chords in other places, throws in a couple of ascending and descending bass runs, and inserts a diminished chord int the chorus section. Hmm... looks like an intermediate player.

Player three launches into an extended solo run to kick off a spirited version of Classical Gas, a la Tommy Emmanuel style with hybrid plectrum/finger picking, percussive accents and exotic chord forms that extend 5 frets or more, all while never once gazing at the fretboard that he is traversing top to bottom and back up again at lightning speed and finally finishing with a frenetic solo run ending flourish that has you wanting to stand and applaud. Hey, this guy is definitely an advanced player.


Obviously you could add other players and include bluegrass flatpickers, jazz players, classical players , folk strummers, etc, but the basic premise is essentially the same. What skill do you look for to delineate players into various skill levels?

That's it, not trying to:

Compare you to anyone else

Measure heart, soul, or political affiliation

Be a definitive answer to why music exits in the universe

Really not much different that an NFL scout assessing a college quarterback based on various skills such as arm strength, ability to throw accurate out route, touch on soft passes, footwork and ability to scramble, etc. Yes, it's not scientific and doesn't measure an athletes intelligence and heart, but it's just an exercise in attempting to rate skills.

[ssjk]

Spock, you ignorant...... *


* early SNL reference. AKA a joke. Stand down.

[TBman]

Originally Posted by spock

Man o man, what a hornets nest I seem to have kicked with this topic.

Truly, all I ever wanted to find among a forum full of guitar players was how folks might come up with an arbitrary list of those playing skills that could be loosely associated with a particular level of guitar mastery, or lack thereof, depending on whether you're a cup full or cup half empty kind of person.

For example, say you are a guitar instructor who desires to teach a beginner, intermediate, and advanced guitar playing class. You bring in 3 students and have them play a song that they feel is one they can play fairly well and is at or near the top of their guitar playing ability.

In your mind, you assess each one.

Player number one is holding the guitar upside down. Obviously a beginner.

Player number two fingerpicks The Boxer by Paul Simon pretty cleanly using an alternating bass, a thumb wrap over the top on a particular barre chord while playing some full bar chords in other places, throws in a couple of ascending and descending bass runs, and inserts a diminished chord int the chorus section. Hmm... looks like an intermediate player.

Player three launches into an extended solo run to kick off a spirited version of Classical Gas, a la Tommy Emmanuel style with hybrid plectrum/finger picking, percussive accents and exotic chord forms that extend 5 frets or more, all while never once gazing at the fretboard that he is traversing top to bottom and back up again at lightning speed and finally finishing with a frenetic solo run ending flourish that has you wanting to stand and applaud. Hey, this guy is definitely an advanced player.


Obviously you could add other players and include bluegrass flatpickers, jazz players, classical players , folk strummers, etc, but the basic premise is essentially the same. What skill do you look for to delineate players into various skill levels?

That's it, not trying to:

Compare you to anyone else

Measure heart, soul, or political affiliation

Be a definitive answer to why music exits in the universe

Really not much different that an NFL scout assessing a college quarterback based on various skills such as arm strength, ability to throw accurate out route, touch on soft passes, footwork and ability to scramble, etc. Yes, it's not scientific and doesn't measure an athletes intelligence and heart, but it's just an exercise in attempting to rate skills.

Ok,

From a steel string guitarist perspective:

Can't play - non player.

Beginner - learning chord shapes, but cannot switch between them in a musical fashion

Low intermediate - can change most chords smoothly, has some problems with barre chords. Mostly a strummer with some rudimentary flat pick skills. If learning finger style than just beginning to understand using the thumb as the other fingers are used. Relies on "patterns" to gain dexterity in the right hand.

Intermediate - can play barre chords up and down the neck. Can strum, cross pick or play finger style in a musical fashion. Might know some theory. **Edit** - Theory can be learned at the earlier "levels" too, it is independent of playing skill imho.

Advanced - good question. The level(s) of advanced is a mixture of years of practice, gigging experience and musical knowledge.

This "chart" is more of a color wheel with the borders blurring from one to the other.

[mr. beaumont]

It's all too broad, really. I have stuff I'm good at, stuff I'm not. Theres no "skill" for guitar playing.

Basically, in any given situation, the question is, can you hang, or not?

Terms like "advanced beginner." Meaningless.

Only lever to ever be is LEARNER.

[Cobby]

Originally Posted by JonPR

That's fine, if you're going to be happy with whatever you discover. It's silly if it's going to make you feel inferior to all those better then you.
Then again, you can always feel superior to those worse than you!

Hey, there's a whole lot people who can't even play guitar at all! You're better than them!

Which is obviously ridiculous. Not because it's amusingly precise, because the upper and lower limits of the various estimates are so far apart, as well as not being based on any hard data. You can't assume the average or median figure is the most likely.

Just taking the informal guesses in the first post on that page

"Let’s say in order to play the guitar you must:
1. Be between 6–64 years of age."

I'm 70. Plenty of guitar players are a lot older than me, So you need to add at least 10 years to that upper limit, and maybe 20.

"So this lowers our number to 6.8 billion people."

I don't know how my adjustment would affect that, but let's bump it to 8 billion, to be on the safe side.

"2. Are in the economical middle class range to afford a guitar. So this lowers are number to 3 billion people."

Where does that figure come from? Is it saying that no working class person ever plays the guitar? That's clearly ridiculous. Guitars are cheap enough today, and people can still borrow or steal guitars. And of course plenty of poverty-stricken folks in the third world manage to find (or build) guitars to play.

"3. Are interested in music. So this lowers our number to 2.5 billion people"

All humans - or at least the vast majority - are "interested in music", to some degree. At least, they all like listening to it, at one time or another. Different societies and cultures do vary hugely in the proportion of people who might be interested in actually playing an instrument. In the west that's definitely a minority, although probably quite a large minority. It would be a smaller minority who choose guitar, of course, as opposed to other instruments.
And among those, there are lots who start and give up. Only a minority of those who start will continue - and for varying lengths of time.
So you need to factor in "people playing guitar now" and "people who used to play guitar but gave up". The latter do have some ability, even if they stopped decades ago, so shouldn't be excluded from your ranking criteria.

"4. let’s say if you have 5 friends then 1 of your friends also plays guitar."

Why? Based on what? Even for professional musicians, maybe no more than 5 of their friends play guitar, but all of them will be in a minority just by being musicians. For people who are not musicians, maybe none of their friends plays guitar. For other people, amateur or professional, maybe most of their closest friends play guitar.

This kind of "Let's say" is so vague as to be worthless. We end up with no better then the common sense assumption that a "minority" of people play guitar. How big is that minority? AFAIK, no one has the faintest idea. Personally I would guess around 1% of the global population (above the age of 4 or 5, but with no upper limit). But it might be 0.5%, it might be 1.5%.
In the west, the figure is almost certainly higher, but maybe still under 5%.
That's a lot easier to say. Obviously skill is going to form a kind of pyramid, simply because it takes years and consistent dedication to become excellent. The more years and dedication it takes, the smaller the group of people getting that far will be. Those people are "exceptional" by definition! (You can't say there are huge numbers of exceptional players, because then they wouldn't be "exceptional" )

BTW, what is this "normal curve" you're referring to? I didn't find any graphs in that link.
Define "deviation".
Again, sorry if it's explained somewhere in that link, but i didn't see it.
Again, sources of figures please.
(I mean, this doesn't matter in the slightest, of course, but I'd like to play the game for a little while.
This kind of comedy is the only good reason I think of for working out this kind of thing. Obviously the audience won't care either way, but at least that thought might entertain them.

What!? You think my numbers and methods are dubious? Well, maybe. But I am definitely standing by the part about me being the 4 billionth best singer in the world. (4,143,349,322nd best, to be exact)

[spock]

ssjk,

Too funny. I love it. I am seasoned enough to get the both the SNL and the Point/Counterpoint reference that inspired it, as well as one who can still laugh at a joke as well as myself. No offense taken, on the contrary, I laughed out loud. Thank you.

TBman,

Bless you. I like your assessment. Just the kind of thinking I was hoping for.

[Pitar]

Ratings are bestowed, not claimed. Asking someone to rate their own playing is an invalid question. All subjective, all relative to the audience's whims, all without any method or measure, it's really kind of a foolish inquiry.

To assess something in a more objective manner the player needs to demonstrate, rather than claim, a certain skill level. That would be conducted by assembling genres, music from each and then stacking their respective levels of (perceived) difficulty. These songs would represent a kind of grading standard that replaces an otherwise useless method of inquiry.

Assessing skill levels is a moving target to determine. But, the foregoing at least sets a baseline and a plateau for incrementing progress.

[spock]

Ratings are bestowed, not claimed. Asking someone to rate their own playing is an invalid question. All subjective, all relative to the audience's whims, all without any method or measure, it's really kind of a foolish inquiry.

In the immortal words of Charlie Brown, "Good grief"

I give up. I really do.

Moderators feel free to close or let it die a slow death.

[TBman]

Originally Posted by spock

ssjk,

TBman,

Bless you. I like your assessment. Just the kind of thinking I was hoping for.

No problem.

Live long and prosper Spock.