“There was one show I played where half the audience left. They took off yelling ‘You suck!’”: Kiki Wong on her early guitar career struggles
The Smashing Pumpkins’ Kiki Wong wants guitarists to embrace failure, as she’s reflected on her own early guitar career battles.
Wong joined The Pumpkins following an open audition call shared in January last year. She was selected from over 10,000 applicants, and went on to join the band on the road. Prior to her audition though, Wong had already played with a number of other bands, and was successfully sharing guitar content online.
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But as any musician will know – on a large scale or small – nobody is immune to a bad gig, and we all have to live through them as a right of passage. Sharing her five top guitar tips with Guitar Player, Wong advises musicians to openly “fail like you’ve never failed before”.
“I’ve failed more times than I’ve succeeded. I’ve almost become numb to failure,” she confesses. “But there’s an upside to it: I’ve learned to look at the benefits of failure. I know that sounds strange, but I started to realise that I gained some type of strength or experience from each opportunity I’ve had – even the ones that didn’t pan out.
“I don’t know anybody who’s had success after success and never experienced any stumbles. Nobody’s that lucky. People might look and think that I’m just this TikTok personality. They don’t know that I’ve been playing since 2010 and have done these crazy bootleg tours with three people sleeping in the back of a trunk. I’ve played gigs to nobody. There was one show I played where half the audience left. They just took off, yelling, ‘You suck!’ Believe me, I’ve been beat down a lot.”
She finalises, “But that’s the thing: A lot of people quit when they experience those failures. They’re like, ‘I’m just gonna put the guitar down and do something else.’ I get it – this stuff can be tough. But I think there’s a turning point where failure can eventually lead to success, and that’s when the magic happens.”
Wong has been – pardon the pun – smashing it on stage with The Pumpkins, and has previously shared that being in the band has allowed her to diversify her playing. “I would consider myself a one trick pony prior to joining this band,” she told Revv Amps on YouTube.
“I just love metal, I love chugs, I love unnecessary shreds, I love noise and just high gain shenanigans, so that’s what draws me to instruments… but this band has actually opened my eyes to a lot of like new sounds and new effects, I didn’t use a lot of effects in my own personal musicianship, but having this full pedal board and learning to like it was almost like going back to school for me.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
