What My Hands Know. (Even when I don’t…)

Here's something nobody tells you about when you start learning an instrument. Eventually, if you stick at it long enough, your hands stop asking permission and just start to crack on with it.

In my current incarnation consulting to the mighty Scan Pro Audio, I don’t get to play anywhere near as much as I used to. For the majority of the 90s. I was the international demonstrator. For Takamine and Parker guitars.

My job was to play the guitar well.

Even more daunting was to have to go out to do clinics and shows in front of hundreds of audience members. Primarily all guitarists. With a look on their face saying “impress me”.

I had stock favourites that I knew would shine, and a lot of my own original finger style pieces mixed in with contemporary finger style guitarists of the day.

These days I'll sit down to play something I haven't touched in years, and halfway through I realise my fingers already know where they're going. Not because I remembered it. Because I never actually forgot it in the way my head thinks of forgetting. It just moved somewhere else.

Somewhere that doesn't need me to be paying attention. Like some weird musical mind palace that stores everything.

If I struggle to recall, I have to let my mind wander elsewhere whilst my hands get hooked up to that place, and I have literally giggled out loud before now, as my hands take over and find the positions and finger strokes.

That's not magic, and it's not really talent either, whatever people want to call it when they watch someone play fast. It's just repetition, done so many thousands of times that the decision making got handed off. Your conscious mind is slow. It has to think, weigh things up, decide. Your hands, after enough years, don't. They just go.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. If my hands can play something I can't consciously recall learning, who exactly is doing the playing?

I think that’s the reason so many musicians describe the best moments as ones where they "got out of the way." That's not a nice bit of stage patter. That's literally what's happening. The thinking part of you, the part that gets embarrassed and self conscious and tries too hard, steps back, and something older and better trained takes over.

It's also, I think, why you can't rush this. There's no shortcut to your hands knowing something. You can practise cleverly, sure, be efficient about it. But the actual knowing, the bit where your fingers stop needing you, only comes from doing it enough times that you stopped counting.

I find that oddly comforting these days. All those hours I couldn't account for, all that time that felt at the time like it might be wasted, it wasn't lost. It just went somewhere I can't see. And it's still in there, waiting to be needed for when I over reach myself and need to get back into safe water…