I don’t know when I decided i didn’t care that much about guitar acrobatics, but it was high school at least. It can be fun but I don’t care that much, and I’d pick songwriting talent over instrumental talent every time.
playing in a band, I think we fed off of our lead singer’s insecurity - he’s a shitty musician and a shitty singer so he’d go crazy and climb the rafters and swing the mic and come out in a Halloween costume and OK that’s the deal - we’re putting on a show whether the music is good or not. I think we did have enough talent to come up with parts and duct tape them together into songs with very little idea of what we were doing. The first time we worked with a real producer who pointed out where our hooks were and applied labels to the different parts we repeated and made suggestions about why did things a certain way or why are we even doing this part (…. yeah we all hate it, it’s just that’s where we play it? We don’t have to?) was a revelation.
I’m all about the little tasty hook nuggets and getting the proportions right. Not saying I’m great at it, but I love little melodies and counter melodies and trying to find a way to always have something you could whistle happening somewhere.