Finger Robotics

Remembering forgotten pieces

For the record, I am basically a lazy person. When I get busy working a full time job I have very little energy or motivation at the end of day to play guitar. I would sometimes not play anything for weeks. When I do pick up the guitar after an extended period of playing nothing I make many mistakes. This can be be expected but the techniques required to play my mistake filled pieces, while not 100%, are still solid and reliable. Practicing basic movements and going through a series of exercises and fret board drills helps enormously, naturally enough. But I have learned through experience that there is another, equally important benefit to practicing basic skills. I found that the more flexible and warmed up the fingers get because of the exercises and drills, the better I remembered the pieces.

But it wasn't me remembering the notes or where to put the fingers, it was the muscle memory in the fingers that kicked in because they were simply covering familiar territory as they progressed through he pieces. So I learned to let the fingers remember and did not consciously think about the sequence of notes. The second I applied conscious thought by trying to remember what came next with my brain, my fingers got confused and stumbled to find the right notes. It was almost as if my brain was attempting to give the fingers instructions contrary to what they had previously been trained to do through past repetition.

When I was backpacking in India in 1975, I did not have a lot a sheet music with me but I had previously learned a lot of classical music. When I tried to play some of the stuff I rarely played, I fumbled and struggled with my conscious memory. The more I tried to remember something consciously, the more elusive the memory of the forgotten music seemed to be. I almost became convinced that without the sheet music in front of me I would not be able to play some of this music. But I'm a pedantic little bugger so I just kept trying to remember bits every day.

To my surprise I was able to remember new snippets each day. That's when I realized that it wasn't my brain remembering but my fingers. These newly remembered passages came when I stopped TRYING to remember and just let my instinct do the remembering. In other words, I handed over control of the piece to my fingers and stopped tying to tell them what to remember. This process of remembering pieces instinctively worked best when I warmed up the fingers first with scales and other fret board exercises.

<< Previous    1...   5  6  [7]  8  9  ...11    Next >>