Muscle Memory and Playing Instruments

[charlie]

It feels like songs are easier to remember on guitar as opposed to piano.

I’ve been playing both on and off for about 20 years at this point, and of course there’s times where I might go a couple years without playing one or both. But it always seems like I can “find” old songs I knew on guitar more easily than I can on piano.

Maybe it’s because my hands are doing two different things on guitar, but they’re trying to do about the same thing on a piano so it’s harder for the brain to compartmentalize the movements.

Also, I’ve had much more formal training on piano and almost none on guitar, so maybe the way that I learn them is different. Perhaps I rely more on the muscle memory when I’m practicing guitar.


Have you ever experienced this? Maybe with other instruments?

It’s kind of interesting how you can know a song and forget it in such a short period of time… perhaps this plays to Bill Evans point about improvisation
https://spasm.cafe/forum/index.php?threads/essential-viewing.6/post-18

 

[Mezz Mezzrow]

About the only thing I do that involves muscle memory is typing and gaming. I played guitar a bit as a teen, but I was limited in what I could do.

Weirdly enough, I have this synthesizer program called sunvox that lets you input keyboard keys from a typing keyboard if you don't have a midi controller, and I found that there is some synergy from being a typist. But it only makes sense to input single note sounds like that, otherwise your fingers are doing too much at once in too atypical of a way. I'm sure someone crazy enough could learn it though.

Anyway. It's really common to wrongly assume that input configurations are objectively easier to do than others but if you take some time to do an alternate, you'll see that it's not true. This is common among gamers, too who think things like, "You can't play FPS without a mouse" or "This game came out on the original NES, there's no way you would play that as well with a keyboard"

But it's all learned. It's been over 20 years since I played Mario with a SNES controller, and now I can't remember what it was like to use that controller. I play the hardest kaizo levels imaginable with a keyboard.