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> Musicians have known this since the beginning of time. The only way to play a fast passage flawlessly is by not thinking about what your hands do. Once you st

> Musicians have known this since the beginning of time. The only way to play a fast passage flawlessly is by not thinking about what your hands do. Once you start thinking, you're screwed. Thanks, as a new piano learner that intuitively makes sense to me. However, my friend who's a much better piano player than me told me that you can't master a song unless you've memorized it. After a piano player has memorized a song, don't they naturally look down on their hands and think about what they're playing? I'm wondering how your conjecture jives with memorized pieces, so any insight there would be awesome.

m0zg 7y ago
You don't memorize (or think about) individual finger movements or notes, you memorize chunks of movements/notes. Watch the video, it's not a "conjecture", it has a solid grounding in science and it's not specific to the guitar. Looking at your hands is pointless anyway when playing at speed because what you see with your mind has happened 100-120 milliseconds in the past, and by the time you react to it, all hope is lost. So you're better off not looking. This is also the reason why you can't stabilize coffee in a cup if you look at it carefully when carrying the cup: it simply can't be done latency-wise. Likewise hearing and touch have their latencies as well, although they are lower than that of vision, but even so, 60ms of proprioceptive latency (+whatever decision and motor latency you need to incur to close the loop) limits how fast you can realistically play. So the way fast things are played is you only control "key points" and let your motor memory sort of interpolate in between. Key points form a closed loop, stuff in between is fire-and-forget.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  There's a good example outside music which is related to this: standing upright while your eyes are closed (to make it more complex you should keep one of your legs off the ground e.g. as in yoga). If you start thinking about what you should do - you will most certainly start falling, since you begin to overcompensate for your micro movements.

m0zg 7y ago

You don't memorize (or think about) individual finger movements or notes, you memorize chunks of movements/notes. Watch the video, it's not a "conjecture", it has a solid grounding in science and it's not specific to the guitar. Looking at your hands is pointless anyway when playing at speed because what you see with your mind has happened 100-120 milliseconds in the past, and by the time you react to it, all hope is lost. So you're better off not looking. This is also the reason why you can't stabilize coffee in a cup if you look at it carefully when carrying the cup: it simply can't be done latency-wise. Likewise hearing and touch have their latencies as well, although they are lower than that of vision, but even so, 60ms of proprioceptive latency (+whatever decision and motor latency you need to incur to close the loop) limits how fast you can realistically play. So the way fast things are played is you only control "key points" and let your motor memory sort of interpolate in between. Key points form a closed loop, stuff in between is fire-and-forget.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
There's a good example outside music which is related to this: standing upright while your eyes are closed (to make it more complex you should keep one of your legs off the ground e.g. as in yoga). If you start thinking about what you should do - you will most certainly start falling, since you begin to overcompensate for your micro movements.