[David]

Originally Posted by madformac

I believe I can jam with the best of them, I really do, certainly in a blues environment. I'm not big headed or even a great technical player but I have the ear, the timing and the emotion to do it. I don't know any theory, I can't read music and I don't really want to, I'm not even great with chords. Noel Gallagher said recently that playing a guitar is like being an artist, you can't teach it, you either have it or you don't. it's in the feeling, the way you play a note.

I'm the opposite of you. I am all about theory, reading staff notation, etc., but I have absolutely no style & no emotion of my own.

Music theory can give you great discipline and understanding but it also stops you from being original.

I don't think this is true at all. The only people who say this (& they say this a lot, like Lindsey saying it about Javier Pacheco) are the people who don't happen to have a theory background or who don't read notation. I doubt that anyone with theory & reading ability has ever said anything like this, so that is an indication right there that the opinion is an extremely one-sided one. But it also just doesn't hold water when you look at the musicians & composers who do have such a background. Beethoven read notation for every instrument in the orchestra, wrote notation for every instrument in the orchestra, & was thoroughly grounded in the music theory of the era, including harmony, counterpoint, fugue, subjects, countersubjects, melodic elaboration, chorale, fragmentation, structural functions, inversions, Viennese Classical development, Baroque development, orative, non-orative, all aspects of polyphony & homophony, motives, supermotives, submotives, & on & on & on to practically infinity.

Beethoven had no trouble whatsoever being original.

Knowledge -- whether it be scientific knowledge, musical knowledge or moral knowledge -- opens doors, not shuts them.