Gentlemen, have your PUA (pick-up artist) techniques been lagging as of late? Has the once solid pick-up line “nice shoes, wanna fuck?” garnered you more testicular injuries and vodka-cran face washes than sweet lovin’ lately?

If so, it might be time to return to the old sure-fire, cliché pick-up line: “I play guitar.”

But good news gentlemen, you don’t actually have to learn to play guitar and you never have to see the girl again (unless she’s really dumb and thinks air guitar is a legitimate instrument), because real guitarists don’t have time for those shenanigans anyway.

Brian Gore is one of the most talented and renowned acoustic guitar players in the world.

He is referred to as a guitar poet more often than a guitar player – an accurate description considering his strikingly emotive acoustic style that blends a variety of genres and techniques, and makes you understand why he’s a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic.

And, although he’s settled down now, even he’s tried to use his guitar skills to score with the ladies in the past.

“I wrote a song for a woman once, went to her office to play it for her with a dozen roses. Her boss, who turned out to be her boyfriend, asked me to leave,” Gore divulged in an email last week.

Gore is the founder of International Guitar Night, a premier touring guitar festival that features some of the finest, most innovative composers and players from around the world.

Gore will be joined by fellow guitarists Clive Carroll, Alexandre Gismonti and Pino Forastiere as the tour makes its way to the West End Cultural Centre on Sunday, Nov. 21.

And while the four of them are all happily married, guitarists aren’t necessarily pick-up savvy, Gore observed.

“ I wrote a song for a woman once, went to her office to play it for her with a dozen roses. Her boss, who turned out to be her boyfriend, asked me to leave.

Brian Gore, founder, International Guitar Night

“The guys who always get the girls in the end are the managers, in my experience, because the actual guitarists are too busy,” he said.
He thinks it’s a fairly convoluted way of scoring with the ladies because guitar playing is hard work – and just like a relationship, it’s not for the “commitment-phobic” either.

“Finding a gal willing to settle down with a musician is not an easy thing to do, so we are lucky,” he said.

IGN, which started 15 years ago as an underground operation at a bar in the San Francisco Bay area, is an interactive public concert touring Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

IGN has gained immense popularity from audiences who can enjoy the intimacy of the event, while participants can enjoy the non-competitive opportunity to blend different styles of guitar together.

Gore endearingly describes the feeling he gets while playing guitar as “coming home.”

“For me, music has been a way to make certain emotional senses I’ve experienced more palpable, to put them in perspective, make sense out of them and get some meaning out of them,” he said. “It’s been a very intuitive process for me and a bit therapeutic at that.

“Music is really at the heart of how we experience and perceive things, so it’s a way of getting closer to one’s feelings and beliefs as the song can capture those.”

Published in Volume 65, Number 12 of The Uniter (November 18, 2010)