20 Problems Only Guitarists Will Understand

9. G.A.S.

While not a medically recognised condition (yet), G.A.S, or Gear Acquisition Syndrome, is very real and effects guitarists and musicians around the land. Simply enough, guitar players become bored with their equipment, or lose the impetus to play with gear they've already experimented with the point of repetition. Instead, an unending need to get more gear builds and builds until one day you put £4000 onto your credit card without knowing, to which your partner then leaves you, taking the kids and the cat, and you can no longer afford to feed yourself. It's an affliction that there is no cure for, just £3 a month could prevent a guitarist from starving, just text DONATE to Save A Guitarist today...

8. Other Guitarists Using Your Guitar

There's an old saying that goes "no matter how good you are at something, there's always someone better". Guitarists, by their very nature, hate this saying, because the ego cannot grasp that others could be better players. That is, until you're having a jam with another guitarist and they ask if they can have a try of your guitar, then all of a sudden that guy you were pitying because you'd only ever seen him knock out a few power chords lets rip with some neo-classical sweep picking shred-fest on YOUR guitar, and you think "I can't do that", all the while marvelling and cursing him in equal measure. When the guitar is handed back to you it feels different - like it's been violated or something - and you never look at it quite the same again.

7. The Impossible Riff

Nothing can inspire rage in a guitarist more than trying to learn a riff or solo and not be able to play it. Whether it's through sheer inability or dodgy online transcriptions, guitarists the world over at some point will have dedicated hours, days, even weeks to perfecting a section of a song only for their fingers to inexplicably refuse to move in the way their brains are commanding them. Screaming at your hands doesn't make them any more inclined to nail that riff either, a tactic many have tried before and had fail every single time.