The Key to Playing Guitar like Eric Johnson

Guitar Player Magazine heralds Eric Johnson as "one of the most respected guitarists on the planet". If you are an aspiring guitarist, you can certainly learn something from following Johnson's example. Eric Johnson grew up in Austin, Texas. His family was musically inclined and Eric Johnson began his musical interests by studying piano with his sisters. Johnson quickly realized that he was more intrigued by the guitar than the piano, so he left his sisters behind and switched to guitar. Here are some ways you can follow Eric’s example.

1. Listening to and learning from great influences. When Eric Johnson was just a kid growing up in Austin he listened to some of the greatest guitar players of his era. He continued to keep up with modern music and allowed himself to be influenced by more contemporary artists as he got older. But Johnson didn't just sit and idly let the music play, he actually learned from what he heard from Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Reed, Cream, Eric Clapton and Chet Atkins. Rather than become entirely wrapped up in his own music, he kept an ear out for what was happening in the music scene and learned what he could from his peers.

2. Perfectionism. Eric Johnson is thought to be one of the most technically skilled guitarists of all time. This came about through hours and hours of practice as well as a stiff perfectionism that sometimes haunted him. Johnson's perfectionism built him into an amazing technical guitar player, but sometimes got in his way when it came to producing albums. Johnson's musical biography is full of albums and projects that took years to create or weren't released for a long time after they were finished because of Johnson's intense passion for getting it right. However, because of his great guitar skill, Johnson became extremely well known for his live shows and kept his career going by performing concerts and blowing audiences away with his great accuracy and precision.

3. Patience. Since so many of Johnson's projects and albums were delayed by his perfectionism or by legal red tape, Johnson needed to have an amazing amount of patience in order to withstand the trials of his career. He kept going and working on his music every day and didn't allow setbacks to stop him from improving his craft and living his passion. Johnson gained recording contracts with major record labels and was quickly dropped several times when his albums failed to sell as well as predicted. He worked with various bands that disintegrated and had to wait years for some of his albums to be released to the public. Johnson may have felt discouraged at times, but he never stopped making music.

4. Overcoming obsession. While Johnson's tendency toward perfectionism allowed him great gains in his technical skills as a guitarist, it greatly hindered his career in many ways. He gained a reputation for being difficult to work with because of his impossibly high standards. Fans of Johnson's music had to endure a six-year wait between Ah Via Musicom in 1990 and Venus Isle in 1996. The huge delay between the releases of the two albums is attributed to Johnson's perfectionism, compounded by the fact that he was the producer, arranger, songwriter, vocalist and guitar player on the recordings. Finally, Eric started to work through his uptight ways when he participated in a side project called Alien Love Child. This group was well liked by fans and recorded a live album called Live and Beyond. Since the album was recorded live, Johnson was forced to accept a few flaws in the performance and realized that it was a very freeing experience to allow a work of his to be released with some minor quirks.

The character traits that Eric Johnson developed and decisions that he made in his life and musical career contributed to Johnson becoming one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Johnson always strove to be the best he could be and was open to learning and improving himself throughout his career. By mimicking Johnson's attitude of perseverance, patience and continuous improvement, you too could become a guitar great.

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