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Q. Part of my life has been focused on being a musician. I have been playing guitar for many years and the playing style I use most is called shredding. That basically means that I play complex scales and licks at a very fast speed. I use a metronome to time my progress and I have gotten to a point where I can sweep a 9 note arpagio per 1 second and I don't just slop through it. Each note is pronounced and articulate. How is the brain even able to acomplish this?
Also this is strange, If I think about what I'm doing, I almost can't do it ,I start to screw up left and right and if I don't think about it I nail it almost every time. Why?
I also don't mean this in a show off kinda way. I really want to know?
Also this is strange, If I think about what I'm doing, I almost can't do it ,I start to screw up left and right and if I don't think about it I nail it almost every time. Why?
I also don't mean this in a show off kinda way. I really want to know?
Answer
muscle memory my friend... combined with the most powerful weapon known to man... the brain. your body takes in memory in a variety of ways. you have short term and long term which can be used in auditory modalities, visual, cognitive, written, spoken etc. manners. if you were to pick up a guitar and someone said "play this" and handed you some music, you may be able to play it quite quickly, but chances are, not at 9 notes a second. what happens over time is the brain processes information (i.e. a scale or arpeggio) into a chunk of quickly accessible long term memory. when you go to play that, as you practice (or rehearse in memory terms) the scale, you're actually putting it deeper ingrained into your brain. the body also remembers what it feels like through the physicality of playing it so it's even quicker to access. it becomes almost automatic. think of this... you're driving your car slowly down the road... you're cruising. you're in autopilot in your brain. this is a second nature activity after enough practice and it doesn't seem like much. but let's say a deer jumps out... it doesn't take you minutes to formulate a plan, in fact you don't have minutes. maybe only fractions of a second. but in those fractions of a second, your body tenses up, you take a defensive posture, your hand grips more firmly on the wheel, your eyes stay open, your heart beat quickens, your foot slams the brake, you make adjustments with the wheel and you scan instantly for all of the obstacles around you other than the deer, you instantly recall the location of yourself and your surroundings, etc. a ton happens in a huge scale in miliseconds. if you're only talking a smaller scale, i.e. the fingers of your hands, even though you're not in a crisis situation, you're still accessing the information that you've learned previously at an alarmingly fast rate. therefore it may even be more difficult then to slow down the pace and concentrate on playing it. if you play it super fast, it's just a muscle memory function, but if you think and try to analyze it while playing, you may get lost trying to "do too much". i play piano so i know there are pieces that i could set down, close my eyes, and play extremely quickly without thinking, but if i really had to break them down, i probably couldn't do it too easily without at least stumbling. if you need to know anything else, let me know!
jm
muscle memory my friend... combined with the most powerful weapon known to man... the brain. your body takes in memory in a variety of ways. you have short term and long term which can be used in auditory modalities, visual, cognitive, written, spoken etc. manners. if you were to pick up a guitar and someone said "play this" and handed you some music, you may be able to play it quite quickly, but chances are, not at 9 notes a second. what happens over time is the brain processes information (i.e. a scale or arpeggio) into a chunk of quickly accessible long term memory. when you go to play that, as you practice (or rehearse in memory terms) the scale, you're actually putting it deeper ingrained into your brain. the body also remembers what it feels like through the physicality of playing it so it's even quicker to access. it becomes almost automatic. think of this... you're driving your car slowly down the road... you're cruising. you're in autopilot in your brain. this is a second nature activity after enough practice and it doesn't seem like much. but let's say a deer jumps out... it doesn't take you minutes to formulate a plan, in fact you don't have minutes. maybe only fractions of a second. but in those fractions of a second, your body tenses up, you take a defensive posture, your hand grips more firmly on the wheel, your eyes stay open, your heart beat quickens, your foot slams the brake, you make adjustments with the wheel and you scan instantly for all of the obstacles around you other than the deer, you instantly recall the location of yourself and your surroundings, etc. a ton happens in a huge scale in miliseconds. if you're only talking a smaller scale, i.e. the fingers of your hands, even though you're not in a crisis situation, you're still accessing the information that you've learned previously at an alarmingly fast rate. therefore it may even be more difficult then to slow down the pace and concentrate on playing it. if you play it super fast, it's just a muscle memory function, but if you think and try to analyze it while playing, you may get lost trying to "do too much". i play piano so i know there are pieces that i could set down, close my eyes, and play extremely quickly without thinking, but if i really had to break them down, i probably couldn't do it too easily without at least stumbling. if you need to know anything else, let me know!
jm
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