Legendary guitar player George Van Eps, in his book Harmonic Mechanisms for Guitar – Volume One, made a profound statement after calculating all the possible moves on the guitar. He stated:
“Spending one second on each of the possible combinations, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, would take 11,036 years—yes, that’s right, eleven thousand and thirty-six years—to reach the end of the order.”
And this doesn’t even account for stylistic variations, which would add countless more years to the total.
The moral of the story? You will never truly master the instrument. Instead, you embark on a journey where you do what you can, learning and growing along the way.
