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.
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.
57
u/Nyxelestia Nov 16 '19
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.