Science & Tech Quote by Mick Taylor

There’s an accidental time capsule quality to Mick Taylor’s line: it praises an explosion of access while revealing exactly when that explosion first felt dizzying. “These days” points to a musician watching the craft of learning shift from apprenticeship and proximity - the rehearsal room, the mentor, the record you wore out - to a marketplace of instruction. The inventory list (“videos and CD roms”) is doing cultural work. It’s not just naming tools; it’s signaling a new relationship between musicians and mastery, where technique becomes something you can purchase, pause, and replay.

Taylor’s intent reads as partly generous, partly wary. He’s acknowledging an obvious democratization: you no longer need to live in the right city, know the right people, or have the money for endless lessons to study scales, styles, and solos. But the subtext is the quiet question veteran players often carry: what happens to feel when learning becomes frictionless? A CD-ROM can show you fingerings; it can’t give you the bruising social education of playing with a volatile band, or the taste-making that comes from being corrected in real time by someone you respect.

The context matters, too. Taylor’s own era was shaped by scarcity: information traveled slowly, and “how to play” often meant lifting parts by ear from records. When he marvels at technology, he’s also acknowledging a loss of romance - the mystique of the hard-won trick. The line lands because it captures a turning point: musicianship moving from lineage to interface, from scene to screen, with all the liberation and flattening that implies.