Strenghts Vs Weaknesses Options

[Cosmin Lupu]

All our lives we have been educated and sometimes forced to overcome our weak points and get better at some things. There's an American dude, who's living here in Romania, old friend of mine and he aims to start a project based on career re-orientation for young people working in environments not allowing them to express their full potential, based on their real strengths and talents.

In a nutshell, his concept is based on the fact that in our society, folks are always forced to work on their weak points and in this way, they totally neglect their strong ones, ending up doing things which maybe they were not meant for, thus never achieving their full potential as human beings and of course, not being happy.

He is very fond of artists and he likes to talk to a lot of us in some of the bands here, as he thinks we are a good inspiration source for the people he aims to help.

Now, I took a test based on answering 180 questions, each of them having 20 seconds to be answered - this lead to discovering my top 5 strengths:

Cosmin's Top 5 Strengths

That doesn't mean that others not present, but these 5 are supposed to define you in a greater amount than any other of a total of 34.

I don't know how much I can believe these but, what I can tell you is that I was very honest with my answers in the test - for more insight, visit www.strengthsfinder.com

If i am correct, I remember a little movie with Steve Vai (posted here on GMC) underlining that we should work on developing our strong points not our weak ones as players and I think that now I understand what he meant and I can agree.

What do you guys think about strengths vs weaknesses?

Cosmin

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This post has been edited by Cosmin Lupu: Jun 12 2012, 10:13 AM

[JesseJ]

Yah for me my weakness has always been my ear. And although I think it is very important to develop your strengths , you cant just give up on something and be like oh that's my weak area so i'm not even going to try. For me personally I know I am going to be working on my ear for a long time and it is going to be hard but I am not going to give up on it . At the same time I am going to keep working on my strong areas because I want to be a good all around guitarist .

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[Arpeggio]

Yah for me my weakness has always been my ear. And although I think it is very important to develop your strengths , you cant just give up on something and be like oh that's my weak area so i'm not even going to try. For me personally I know I am going to be working on my ear for a long time and it is going to be hard but I am not going to give up on it . At the same time I am going to keep working on my strong areas because I want to be a good all around guitarist .

You're right it is hard, an uncovered and lacking part of many a guitarists skills including mine. When ear training there are all kinds of undiscovered nooks and crannies I find in my skill which I am lacking that I wouldn't have known otherwise.

I just bought a Techaffect USB footswitch and have it set to my left mouse click which I hover over the play / pause button on media player (there might be something out there specifically built for this but it was cheap and good enough for me). Without the pedal singing then repeating on guitar with backing tracks that use more than one chord doesn't work because once I have imagined / sang the phrase, by the time I play it back on my guitar, often the backing track has moved on. The pedal allows me to pause the track and play my phrase then carry on, obviously it doesn't sound great stopping and starting but I think it's the only way to do this particular kind of ear training with chord changes. Otherwise one chord vamps are usefull for this.

I start from the bottom and work my way up i.e. I, IV, V chord sequence I sing the roots of the chords only first time round, next time round it's the roots and 5ths, then roots and 3rds, roots 3rds and 5ths, b7ths. I could be a better Blues player or any other style than I am by now, but there are only 12 intervals and 12 notes in all music and I am going for long terms goals in less time rather than short terms goes in less time making the long terms ones longer.

I started with identifying the 12 intervals, most of the time you should use the guitar and play your answers so you connect muscle memory to your inner ear.

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[Cosmin Lupu]

You're right it is hard, an uncovered and lacking part of many a guitarists skills including mine. When ear training there are all kinds of undiscovered nooks and crannies I find in my skill which I am lacking that I wouldn't have known otherwise.

I just bought a Techaffect USB footswitch and have it set to my left mouse click which I hover over the play / pause button on media player (there might be something out there specifically built for this but it was cheap and good enough for me). Without the pedal singing then repeating on guitar with backing tracks that use more than one chord doesn't work because once I have imagined / sang the phrase, by the time I play it back on my guitar, often the backing track has moved on. The pedal allows me to pause the track and play my phrase then carry on, obviously it doesn't sound great stopping and starting but I think it's the only way to do this particular kind of ear training with chord changes. Otherwise one chord vamps are usefull for this.

I start from the bottom and work my way up i.e. I, IV, V chord sequence I sing the roots of the chords only first time round, next time round it's the roots and 5ths, then roots and 3rds, roots 3rds and 5ths, b7ths. I could be a better Blues player or any other style than I am by now, but there are only 12 intervals and 12 notes in all music and I am going for long terms goals in less time rather than short terms goes in less time making the long terms ones longer.

I started with identifying the 12 intervals, most of the time you should use the guitar and play your answers so you connect muscle memory to your inner ear.

Nice approach man you seem very determined!

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