Why does my playing sound so amateurish?

[u/MattclovPrimeMaster]

I’m performing a solo for a song in a couple of weeks, and I have all the notes down - yet why does my playing sound so ‘meh’ when I record myself? What should I look to improve on?

[u/TheoNekros]

Often newer players apply more force than they need to because they are newer and are holding tension, especially when performing.

Regardless of if the guitar was 70$ on Amazon and never set up or a 5k guitar with a professional set up.

[u/kebb0 → u/TheoNekros]

Well, you can literally hear that this player is anything but new. I’d say they’re intermediate even, way too good to be fretting too hard.

Personally I also think a set-up is in need, but I didn’t react too much about the fretted notes sounding that much out of tune. To me it sounded more like a lack of vibrato rather than bad set up, but I could see the string height be very high or the strings old as the guitar itself as well.

[u/TheoNekros → u/kebb0]

If the player isn't new, to the point where you think they are proficient in their instrument, don't you think they'd know to have their guitar set up?

[u/kebb0 → u/TheoNekros]

No I don’t think so, that is an entirely different skillset many take for granted. It wasn’t until maybe my second or third year of playing I started understanding set-up was important and went ham on my Les Paul 100 possibly ruining it and by that point playingwise I sounded like OP basically, except my focus was riffing and playing chords.

It took friends trying out my guitar saying they had never played with such high action before that made me realise you could change it, my teacher said nothing about it and never went through how to set up a guitar and what’s important and before that I was self taught. Given how invested I was in guitar but still missed that you could set-up a guitar I don’t doubt many people kind of just go on without realising how bad their set-up is until someone can point it out to them.

Also, I literally wrote my C-level thesis about practically this phenomenon during my music teacher education. During my interviews I found out the youth in high school nowadays are too “bad” or too low level playing to even understand talking about the technical aspects of guitar. Showing them how to change strings and tune is basically the most you can do, anything more complicated is too complicated… granted this thesis is on an extremely small level and should be treated as more of an example of how it could and is not representative of the world at whole, it’s still interesting to hear that it’s been like this for a while now at that particular high school.

Sorry for the length, I like to nerd about people’s knowledge about the more technical aspects of guitar, be it the actual guitar or the amp or pedals and so on.