I have to go now, but will carefully read and teply to you as well Radekā¦have a good day!
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Muscle (or tactile) memory ā fingers flying around while weāre zoning out ā is the least reliable form of memory.
This is wrong, if this is happening, itās not muscle memory, just memory which is flakey.
Breathing is a muscle memory. This is never affected unless itās by neural diseases.
Muscle memory is slow to learn, longer to change and takes many months for the brain to hard wire it.
So if your forgetting itās just memory not muscle memory.
Also itās possible to TEMPORARILY briefly inturupt a muscle memory, which resets immediately.
R.
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Hi Rachel, when I read your comment I first thought āI think I read somewhere she learnt to play the violinā, and I remembered well.
This makes a big differenceā¦the violin has no frets and from the very beginning itās your ear that is most involved all the time, you just donāt have the chance to practice mindless repetitions and your muscle memory develops slowly and turns out to become one of your greatest tool under your Musicianās belt. The risk with the guitar, especially for self-taught students, is to practice repetition without focusing on the sound, and I can tell you from experience that your fingers get to know the piece really really quick without you being able to follow, nevertheless you can play the piece, it sounds good and sweet and thatās the āoh I can do it already!ā trap. If you have never experienced this is very unlikely you get the meaning of it, and thatās because you always practiced in the correct way using your ears, using them meant slowing your practice and delaying the process of muscle memory: in this case it takes a lot to build muscle memory being all the process vey healthy.
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My own view is that itās not possible to learn music by muscle memory.
You can learn techniques and pieces of a song that way, including chord changes, or picking or strumming patterns, or even runs of notes.
But I think knowing what needs to be played at a particular point in time, where you are in the song, what the up-coming chord change or song section is, is not muscle memory, but ābrain memoryā which is a complex and poorly understood thing.
So, you are right: if you lose your way part way through a song, or forget how the next bit should go, thatās not muscle memory. But I donāt think it ever can be.
Cheers,
Keith
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Hello Radek, I can well relate to your learning experiences! It drove me mad, being able to play sweetly but being so vulnerable at getting stuck, feeling lost, have no clue where to restart from and above all feeling anything out of control. It made me feel really bad so I stopped it.
I think that when youāve learnt a piece correctly in the first place, itāll be yours forever, you will need to revisit it in order to play it, but youāll never forget it. Check this lesson from Justin.
I think what accomplished Musicians do is constantly looking/ aiming for and building a deep connection with their instrument, I donāt think they would bother to learn a piece just to record it on YouTube, unless they have teaching purposes, I remember Justin wrote he canāt play from memory all the songs he teaches, it would be insane. But when a piece or a song is close to your heart, we need to put our ears at work in the first place and learn it in a way that it will remain forever.
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Hmm. Interesting topic. And about a subject - the mind - that we know so very little about, despite all our hubris.
I prefer the term ācompetencyā in relation to these pursuits, in any field. It combines a knowledge of a particular subject, or subject area, along with any necessary skills to apply this knowledge. The knowledge and skill eventually combine to become competency.
Muscle memory may help in some ways, it may even get you there, but it wont keep you there.
I have always been of the belief, and it has certainly been borne out in my experience, that conceptual knowledge of a subject is an accelerator to practical competence under all conditions.
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Do you work on the Education field? As a teacher Iā ve been trained to think of these aspects in my educational programming, that means that when I think about an activity for the children I need to think about the knowledge required, their actual skills and how these two combine to build competency. Thanks for reminding me of this, anytime I remember I can apply the good principles to my own self as a learner then I feel quite confident to be on the right track!
This is absolutely true in my experience as well.
Well, some really do, for publicity, likes, subscriptions, to grow influence circle etc. Some acoustic covers start emerging after two days after popular release. I would like to learn a thing within two weeks just to have some fun and record it. There are pieces I will be playing constantly but some songs are just short affairs 
.
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This is a good thread to bring up the book āThe Laws of Brainjoā.
It is about learning. I think a takeaway is that muscle memory is for automating tasks, like picking patterns, strumming patterns, cord shapes and so on that are the basis for playing guitar. We then learn to string these tasks together in modified ways to play songs. The whole song isnāt muscle memory, we just want the physical components of playing to be pretty ingrained so we donāt have to think of them every moment, as we do in the beginning.
I definitely am a slow learner of physical things and really struggle with the aural learning. I would think by now I would have some ability to identify notes by ear, but not really.
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Thanks for the book suggestion Joshua, itās one Iāll be reading soon! I have been struggling a lot with the aural learning as well, but Iām happy to say that Iām improving, it just takes a lot of time and developing some self-confidence that we can do it, I think this is what actually is helping me the most. I do ear training only when Iām relaxed and Iām able to go very slow and be very focussed on the sound without get into panic (as I used to!).
One thing that I discovered is that the same note can be repeated very often many timesā¦I donāt know why I would look for a different note and couldnāt hear that it was the same! Now when I canāt find the next note I try to repeat the previous one and more often than not it worksā¦why I struggle to hear it straight away is a mistery!
Anyway this is absolutely something I feel I should persevere with, only I have to keep my expectations low and enjoy the little progress along the way.
I agree with this but I would add learn āin a proper wayā. I definetely learnt a piece of music by muscle memory, in the wrong way through mindless repetition and it sounded pretty good as well.
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Absolutely. You are learning music slowly and through repetition youāre reducing the amount of processing needed to instruct your hands to perform that particular activity.
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I think people underestimate the differing effects of various memory pathways.
We have the āmemoriesā that we store in what we think of as the mind, but we also remember how to walk - a seriously complex bit of processing.
I can recall a documentary on the neural processing required, and IIRC it was around about 1/3 of our attention - doing mental maths or even just thinking of the answer to a question has an effect on our ability to walk.
It isnāt that we forget how to walk, but figuring out the cubic root of a 10 digit prime whilst climbing everest is probably not recommended.
If we can get our fingers to remember where to go for a song, we can then adjust those positions to try and achieve perfection, whilst at the same time thinking āwhat if?ā should I add a finger down here, does a different strum pattern work etc. etc. all without completely stopping and having to start again.
Having the underlying knowledge of which chords or notes go with which is a huge advantage, as we can then learn a song musically, whilst still having the muscle memory (we use it to get all the chords!) allows us to translate that to something approaching music.
ā¦I say āapproaching musicā as my theory is still as dodgy as most of my chords 
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