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wild thing is happening in my brain so i've been playing more guitar lately (like, this year vs last year), playing by ear, giving my mistakes space to breathe and correcting them gently, rather than flinching at them and i'm listening to some super-fast guitar solo rn and
I can sort of feel my "brain fingers" playing along to the solo, somewhat it's not perfect, it's sort of muddy and foggy but, for eg, when there's a bend, I can *feel* the bend in my brain fingers and even the fast passages I can "hear" them with my "brain fingers" 🤯
and intuitively this makes sense to me in a different domain: in text. I can type words without looking at the keyboard, without even really thinking about the alphabet. i just think, and words come out. and I can become a better writer by just reading other people's writing
but i'm feeling v emotional witnessing my brain do the same thing with guitar music, bcI really struggled for the first decade of my guitar playing. in retrospect it feels like I was playing "blindfolded". technically it was my ears that were being deprived of taste & sensitivity
I used to feel like I had hit some kind of plateau as a musician, like I would never be a ~good~ musician, that was just as good as I was physically/aesthetically capable of getting and that I should make my peace with that. I remember feeling constrained, limited, trapped
see the theory of constraints is, only improvements at the bottleneck will make a difference. and if you're putting more burden before and/or after the bottleneck, you actually make the whole thing worse, if it's a complex system https://t.co/8Vlk9Pxj2l https://t.co/K4nDTZLys0
there's a parallel here with mistakes, fear of mistakes, flinching from mistakes... if you don't have the space and time to make mistakes, you cannot LEARN. and if you cannot learn, you cannot improve. and if you cannot learn and improve, you'll just keep making more mistakes
but as victor wooten teaches us, if you make music with the wrong notes, they're not wrong anymore!!! a sufficiently intimate knowledge of failure is indistinguishable from mastery but you have to KNOW. you have to FEEL it, HEAR it, give it SPACE https://t.co/TiWqCkpUpk
Now here he is demonstrating what it's like to play the chromatic scale, *musically*, over music. Just witnessing this blew my mind. It's like someone reciting the alphabet in a moving, poetic way. Harder than that, since some notes are "wrong". Wooten doesn't believe in "wrong" https://t.co/gxAoUEgbYW
this above video changed my fucken life man idk if I can convey it. it made me really, truly, properly appreciate that "mistakes" are contextual, and that artists "make fewer mistakes" by being more fluid, open, welcoming. it's the FLINCH that turns some spice into a Wrong note
and buried in this philosophy of learning music via patient, intimate knowledge of mistakes, is a philosophy for life itself. to flinch less, to be more fluid, to be like "ah, that is a thing that happened, and it's my job to adjust to it artfully", and to do so
inside every bad idea, or next to it, is the seed of a good idea when you really truly appreciate this, you will not flinch at any "bad" ideas, but instead look for what is interesting and as a result, everything you do becomes interesting, good this is what great artists do
and there is a humility in that a kindness, a grace, an acceptance of what is while also being playful, eager and excited for what could be https://t.co/3CcNgEVrSz
at a meta level, my threads about these things are helping me see how I can be of value to the world by being an internet nerd busker. i''l do for others what wooten did for me. it's a worthwhile thing to do, helping people unflinch. it's like fixing back pain but for the psyche
@visakanv lovely thread Visa, I don't know if you've nailed it so precisely before, it's the flinch that matters I played with this today, mostly focusing on vibrato and noticing how I can grip too concretely, just keep coming back to relaxing https://t.co/zcmGpviAvS
@visakanv because I was recording I could feel the flinch of every "mistake", I had an implied audience in mind and I was ashamed every time I did something "wrong", I wanted to quit over and over. but I'm having a good day so instead I relaxed over and over until I found the groove
@visakanv I agree, the key to my development in all of life is to not flinch at the parts of myself I'm disappointed by. I find this so hard to do alone, eg by introspection and contemplation. but with the guitar I have access to a method that's slightly outside of myself.
@visakanv I've known for years that the best solos come when the player is willing to lose their composure I didn't click until today that "composure" is like, worrying what people will think if you get it wrong, or the fear of revealing your own technical limits
@visakanv you been listening to Julian Lage? look at how loose he is. no flinch there ser https://t.co/9PPQSiBgul