"I practiced for at least two hours every day for twenty years, before then I practiced maybe four to five hours a day, and before then 14 hours a day. It was all I had ever done"
About this Quote
The flex in Michael Schenker's math is the point: an escalating timeline of practice that reads less like a schedule and more like a life sentence he willingly served. He stacks hours the way guitar players stack amps, turning discipline into mythology. Two hours a day for twenty years is already intense; the earlier "four to five" and especially "14 hours a day" pushes into the realm where virtuosity stops sounding like talent and starts sounding like compulsion. It's not a humblebrag so much as a manifesto: skill is not granted, it's built, and it costs you something.
The subtext is a quiet refusal of the romantic story that rock guitar greatness is just vibe, swagger, or divine inspiration. Schenker came up in a scene that worshipped spontaneity and rebellion, but his claim smuggles in an almost classical ethic of apprenticeship. "It was all I had ever done" lands like both pride and warning. It frames practice as identity, not a means to an end. When you play that much, the guitar stops being an instrument and becomes the language you think in.
Context matters: Schenker is a bridge figure between late-60s British hard rock discipline and the shred-era obsession with technical mastery. His line reads like a corrective to anyone treating musicianship as content. Underneath, it's also about scarcity: if practice was all he had, then practice was how he made a world.
The subtext is a quiet refusal of the romantic story that rock guitar greatness is just vibe, swagger, or divine inspiration. Schenker came up in a scene that worshipped spontaneity and rebellion, but his claim smuggles in an almost classical ethic of apprenticeship. "It was all I had ever done" lands like both pride and warning. It frames practice as identity, not a means to an end. When you play that much, the guitar stops being an instrument and becomes the language you think in.
Context matters: Schenker is a bridge figure between late-60s British hard rock discipline and the shred-era obsession with technical mastery. His line reads like a corrective to anyone treating musicianship as content. Underneath, it's also about scarcity: if practice was all he had, then practice was how he made a world.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
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