Possessed said:

Thanks man! I do try to play with some local acts when I can, but I just really don't feel it. None of them are very good...

I know how you feel. I've basically expanded my overall playing style to deal with the music scene. I started out as a blues player, but where I was living at the time, if you weren't playing the heaviest metal around, you couldn't get in a band. So I dedicated myself to being a metal guitarist, and I enjoyed it for the most part, but when I got hungry for playing metal, Emo was the new craze; and again, if you didn't play it, you didn't get in a band.

I was fed up with music scene in my area, and I wasn't going to play Emo music. So I just isolated myself from playing with other people for a while, and started focusing more on folk music, and that eventually spread out to country, and later jazz. Now I still have the metal chops, but I can basically work in any setting. I just focus on finding people who are at a certain level, instead of focusing on who is playing what genre.

It always helps to play with people who are at your level, or even better than you. I was in a band with a guy who could play circles around me on guitar, and it made me work harder to outdo him.

My problem now isn't so much that nobody is good at playing, nobody wants to take risks with music. Everybody wants to play their cover songs at the local bars, and nobody wants to create. I will not play in a metal band anymore, because everybody here is trying to be the next Pantera, and I think Pantera did a good enough job the first time around.