About a year and half I ago I decided I wanted to start learning an instrument.
Initially I was thinking keyboard because keyboard means you can play any instrument you want… kinda. This approach was too logical. Music isn’t about logic, but about feeling. So I asked myself what do I feel I want to play. What instrument, intuitively, without the need to rationalise the decision, do I want to play? What instrument does the child within want to play?
I chose the guitar.
The Science
Playing an instrument has many positive effects on the brain. It’s a full-brain workout. As a result, it also works out the parts of the brains that join parts together such as the Corpus Callosum, that enables coordination of the left and right hemispheres.
Learning an instrument combines many cognitive skills:
- Auditory – a large part of playing music is listening to music, of others and of ourselves
- Motor – we must move our bodies to play the instrument, be it moving fingers on a fret board or using the diaphragm when hitting a big note with vocals or the trombone
- Visual – we’re often looking at where we need to put our fingers, or we’re visualising a scale, visualising the sound – after all, we use the terms “higher” and “lower” to describe pitch
- Memory – learning songs requires memory, what’s the order of the chords, what’s the rhythm, when do the vocals start, are all things we must remember to play songs all the way through
All these scientific benefits surely contributed to my own subjective experience of learning guitar.
Why I Continue Playing Guitar
Before I started learning guitar, I spent my smart time either looking into new programming paradigms, reading a book on psychology or listening to a philosophy podcast. If I didn’t want to finish a day of programming with more analytical activity, I’d watch Netflix or Youtube (probably still non-fiction here a lot of the time). Now, I still do both of these things. I still enjoy diving into a topic I don’t know anything about, and still enjoy and value downtime. However, when I have energy, yet don’t feel like more logical thinking, I’m no longer lost and guilty as I watch another episode of House of Cards – I can play guitar.
Simply, playing guitar offers me three things:
- A sense of productivity
- A creative outlet
- A meditative feeling of presence
Being Productive
If I do nothing for too long it bothers me. It feels like I’m wasting my time. When I play guitar I’m learning a skill. I can see the learning occurring each day. Perhaps only a couple of days ago I was struggling to make the chord shape, but today I can change to the chord fairly easily.
Creative Outlet
While I’d argue that programming is a creative endeavour, it’s not the same kind of creativity as music. The only rule of music is that it should sound good (listen here Rebecca Black). There are scales, keys and rhythmic patterns that are widely considered as sounding good together, but sometimes playing the “wrong” note, a note out of key for example, in the right place, adds a unique texture which elevates a piece from plain to engrossing.
There’s also the whole world of song-writing and music production, expanding even more avenues for creative exploration.
Presence
When you’re playing an instrument, you’re not just moving your hands or breathing, you’re listening. You start to develop a new appreciation of music through this presence. After playing a million C chords you start to notice when the B string is slightly too low. You become attuned to your instrument. This newfound attention applies to when you’re just listening to music too. You start to hear more details and layers of the music.
If you’re improvising a 10-minute backing track can go by in what feels like 2 minutes as you begin to sing with your instrument becoming an extension of yourself. Or literally just sing. It’s just you and the music, and perhaps not as two separate things, but as one whole experience.
Learn an instrument!
I encourage everyone to learn an instrument! It was definitely the best decision for myself I made last year.
