One of the brightest summer highlights in our town is Quest for the Best. We bring company, a common love of music, and a spirit of encouragement. Applause resonates for new musicians finding courage, as well as harmony veterans still chasing their bliss.
From the crowd below the tent where we gather, it may appear as a prime display of talent nestled within a contest.
However, this is only part of the story.
With a guitar in one’s hand (and music burning like ignited white phosphorus within), the rest of the story can be told.
Why do guitarists appear to play on some unseen edge between escape and ecstasy?
How does Adrian Indian do what he does?
Why do we guitarists remain so passionate about our craft?
Why do all roads seem to lead us back to strings, soul, and song?
Never forgetting the gifts and talent of bassists or drummers or vocalists, this seeks to reveal why our six (and sometimes seven) strings help us conjure something beyond words and beyond measure.
There is a moment before the first note is struck where everything goes quiet as if the sun paused for a long moment during sunrise. A moment that’s special. It’s not silent – but suspended, warmly charged, and waiting. The weight of wood, wire, and metal suddenly feels like an extension of your bones.
Suddenly, the amplifier awakens. Decibels don’t merely sound loud from a stage – they move. A Mesa full-stack doesn’t politely project music outward. It pushes air like the physical force of a jet engine. Waves of sound hit the back of your legs and shoulders almost as if the spirit of music itself wants one closer and closer to the edge of experience itself. Exhilarating and dreamlike. Suddenly, you are no longer playing to the sound. Instead, you’re playing within it. Lost within it.
Long before a crowd, there was both a silent melody and the ache of trying to say something you didn’t yet have words to express. It’s impossible for some thoughts to fit neatly into phrases while some emotions resist language all-together. Instead, we speak with our hands. Fingertips find smooth strings to slide upon and strike while notes bend and palms mute. What cannot be said with word is instead sung through electricity and steel.
There’s fire. Anyone who has played guitar knows this. It’s not attention or ego, but rather an inextinguishable need to let one’s soul out. Sound becomes the escape route for an unconquered spirit. As notes ring true and melody hangs in the air, it feels like a sacred alignment when the inside and outside of you briefly agree.
Look closely and you will notice many guitars decorated like journals. Stickers. Scratches. Worn paint. This isn’t random nor are they flaws, but fingerprints. Sometimes images, words, or decals communicate the familiar to those with eyes to see. “667” adorns my black Ibanez (those around the Twin Cities during the Loud and Local groundswell of the 2000s will understand the reverence-containing reference). This is truly another layer of self added to an instrument that already feels unique. No two guitars tell the same story.
The fire within is not without purpose. Beneath uncharted passion, there’s structure. Guitarists feel the Circle of Fifths the same way migrating birds feel directions. Instinctively. There’s math in the scales. Symmetry in the modes. Patterns that rise, repeat, and evolve. Truly, it’s sacred geometry that is audible as order and chaos embrace and dance in a burning room. It feels inevitable like something discovered out of the ether – something that has been waiting for one to give it shape.
And then, the electricity. There’s nothing like plugging in and unleashing it. It is lightning without a storm-cloud, tamed just barely enough to hold, but strong enough to respect. You balance control and surrender. Precision and abandon. Each bend screams and sings and sustains.
This is why the gods mattered to the ancients – some forces deserve reverence.
Sound is its own poetry. Not written in ink, but vibration. A single note can carry memory, grief, hope, or defiance depending how it lands upon a heart. When soul and sound intertwine, something lifts. Sometimes gently. Sometimes violently. But always upward. We play because music once carried us there first. We play because a song once helped us escape a long chapter, moved us beyond another version of ourselves, or became a soundtrack to a precious memory that we can’t imagine our lives without.
By means of melody and harmony (whether to a crowd or a lone listener), we’re hoping (quietly, but fiercely) that someone ascends with us, even for a moment.
Thus, we shape the air. We tweak pedals. We stack delays. We thicken reverbs. We chase tones not for excess but for atmosphere. We want the room to feel different once the first chord hits. Darker, esoteric, charged. A place where storm clouds can gather. Where tension hums before it breaks. Where arcing electricity finally finds a home. When successful, the sound doesn’t just fill the space. It transforms it.
And in that weather, player and listener alike can disappear, carried somewhere far beyond words and riding the storm together.
So, when summer dawns again and we find ourselves by the waterfront watching Quest for the Best, cheer loudly. The guitar players hear you. But always understand that on that stage, amid the lights and swells of sonic air, something deeper is happening.
A conversation without words.
A fire finding oxygen.
A human being, standing in the storm current, playing with Zeus’ lightning – and loving every moment of it.
– Robert Horton is an educator, author, orator, and linguist. He is a member of Rainy River First Nations.
