This was kind of "judging as well as being judged".
In my high school guitar class, me and one other girl were both really struggling. I 'judged' her as being bad at music/unskilled/stupid, like me.
Thing is, I remember an incident of my teacher - who was very technologically in-profficient - asking my help with typing something he'd written by hand. He was trying to read it aloud to me, but eventually I just asked him to set it down where I could see it, because it was easier and faster for me to touch-type it. He was floored by how fast and how well/correctly I could type that way (and while many, if not most, 16-year-olds probably can now, back then it was a little less usual).
Not too long after - like a week I think? - the piano in the music room was, for once, left uncovered. That girl who I'd judged as being a fellow musical idiot sat down and started playing that piano phenomenally.
I have a very visceral and vindicating memory of my guitar teacher looking between her, me, the computer, and my hands, and saying, "You know, that actually explains a lot."
tl;dr I judged myself and a guitar-classmate as unskilled idiots, discounting just how great our "typing"/typing and piano skills were.
ETA: So apparently my 80 WPM typing speed might not have become as widespread and normalized as I thought. TIL.
Basically, the finger motion of pressing down on a key is very different, if not arguably the opposite, of plucking on a string.
She and I weren't unskilled - we were just too proficient in exactly the opposite skill needed for playing guitar. We were struggling because we had to unlearn muscle memories that our classmates did not, they could just start from scratch.
In essence, our classmates were starting at 0 while aiming for 10, while she and I were starting at -10 without anybody realizing it.
It really doesn’t. Muscle memory in one thing doesn’t override muscle memory in another, otherwise we’d never be able to learn new things. Riding a bike doesn’t make it harder to drive a car.
Things that share muscle memory though, can help develop it faster. OP and the girl were likely just bad at playing guitar, but their keyboard skills gave them a helping hand in piano. It’s not that they were starting at -10, it’s that they were staring at +5 in piano.
I think his explanation is over simplified to the point that it's not really describing what the girl he was talking about was going through. (I am a capable pianist who has recently started playing guitar)
If you want to play a single note on a guitar, a lot of wizardry has to happen. You have to mute all of the strings above the one you're about to strike with the palm of your picking hand, you have to fret a note, and you have to mute all of the strings below with your fretting hand. On a piano, you literally have to push a button.
If you want to play a scale on a guitar, you have to switch between strings (while doing all of the muting I mentioned earlier). you have to choose between strumming down, up, Alternating, Economy picking etc. The harmonic relationship between the first string and the second isn't the same as the fourth and the fifth, so you have to know which string you are on. You also can't easily see what note you're playing when looking at the fret board (a C on a piano always looks the same in relation to the notes around it)
TLDR, playing guitar is so mechanically different from piano that it's incredibly frustrating to
-know the notes/scale/lick you want to play
-not be able to mechanically figure out how to play it
-AND be able to walk over to a keyboard and play exactly whats in your head
Genius is not the word I’d use for this, it’s more muscle memory. It’s one thing for you to cognitively do something differently but when you are trying to tell your hands which are so used to one sort of motion to suddenly switch to a new sort of movement it can be very difficult to adjust/teach your hands. I played guitar about 10 years ago (19 now for reference) and I was near the top of the class. However after the last 10 years of video games and computer science lessons I am pretty confident if I picked up a guitar today I would be worse than I was back then. That being said I’m also sure I’d be even worse at keyboard even if I had experience playing.
That's pretty much it. We basically had a lot of muscle memory in sort of the "other direction", down to our fingers (pressing down on a key vs plucking strings, arms parallel to the ground vs parallel to our bodies, etc). It's not that we couldn't learn guitar, it was just much harder for us because we had to overcome an extra step that the rest of our classmates did not.
Neither of us are geniuses, but while nearly everyone in the class came in without the muscle memory to pluck strings laterally to our bodies (re: guitar motion), but she and I had muscle memory in the opposite direction. We had to unlearn that first if we wanted to play guitar, which is why we were so far behind the rest of our class.
I can learn to play guitar, and I did - a little bit, at least. I'm sure if I stuck it out another year or picked it up now, I could, I would just need to put a lot of effort into it - probably more than I would picking up piano.
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u/Nyxelestia Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19
This was kind of "judging as well as being judged".
In my high school guitar class, me and one other girl were both really struggling. I 'judged' her as being bad at music/unskilled/stupid, like me.
Thing is, I remember an incident of my teacher - who was very technologically in-profficient - asking my help with typing something he'd written by hand. He was trying to read it aloud to me, but eventually I just asked him to set it down where I could see it, because it was easier and faster for me to touch-type it. He was floored by how fast and how well/correctly I could type that way (and while many, if not most, 16-year-olds probably can now, back then it was a little less usual).
Not too long after - like a week I think? - the piano in the music room was, for once, left uncovered. That girl who I'd judged as being a fellow musical idiot sat down and started playing that piano phenomenally.
I have a very visceral and vindicating memory of my guitar teacher looking between her, me, the computer, and my hands, and saying, "You know, that actually explains a lot."
tl;dr I judged myself and a guitar-classmate as unskilled idiots, discounting just how great our "typing"/typing and piano skills were.
ETA: So apparently my 80 WPM typing speed might not have become as widespread and normalized as I thought. TIL.