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Disobedient Fingers
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Subject: Disobedient Fingers From: Jon Freeman Date: 26 Mar 01 - 07:41 PM I have just been trying to learn a simple tune - The Knocknaboul Polka and my fingers are aching. The problem I have is that my fingers (and perhaps mind) want to play the last few notes of the first part differently to the way the tune is written - starting from the low G, I want to play G,B,D,G,F#,D,C,A,G and the music says G,B,G,E,F#,D,C,A,G - only 2 notes different and still very easy fingering but the fight to tell my fingers where to go is giving me what feels like muscle pain on the backs of my fingers. Does anyone else have this problem? Jon |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Jeri Date: 26 Mar 01 - 07:47 PM I screwed up the B part of Drowsy Maggie once, and can NOT play that bit to save my life. I'm going through the same thing with Morgan Megan. The problem is, your fingers have learned the wrong way and it's stuck in your head now. I think the only way learn the correct was is to slow it down and play that bit over and over until it becomes instinctive. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Naemanson Date: 26 Mar 01 - 08:13 PM I only have that problem when i pick up my guitar. If I leave it alone then my fingers don't cause any trouble at all... |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Jon Freeman Date: 26 Mar 01 - 10:42 PM OK Jeri, I can see some of that but I didn't learn that tune the wrong way - whatever is stuck there comes from another tune(s) I know and I seem to want to use what is familiar and similar rather than do what this melody does. So then what is the process? Does my mind sort of go into autopilot and send the signals to my fingures to go where I don't want them to go a fraction of a second before my conscious brain says "no go this way" and over rules the instruction and does that cause the fingers to suddenly withdraw from where they were looking to go to and reposition or what? Another one, thinking of autopilot, I am out of practice now but there were some tunes like Harvest Home that I played so often that I could happily hold a conversation with someone while playing - do the fingers have minds of thier own? Jon |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: CarolC Date: 27 Mar 01 - 12:06 AM Hi Jon. I have the same problem with my accordion playing from time to time.
I'm not an expert on the brain, but I'm guessing that muscle memory happens in a different part of the brain than some other functions, like speech, for instance. I'm also guessing that the part of the brain that is aware of itself thinking is also a different part than the part that does things like make music. That's my theory, anyway. I could be wrong. Carol |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: CarolC Date: 27 Mar 01 - 12:15 AM ...and the part of my brain that is responsible for redundancy prevention is apparently not working tonight. Carol (dept. of redundancy and repetition department) |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: GUEST,Les B Date: 27 Mar 01 - 12:37 AM Jon - I have that trouble too. It seems like every fiddle or mandolin tune I start to learn these days has a "sticky" part in it that I really have to work on, while the rest of the tune falls in place fairly easily. And I can never predict where it's going to be. Sometimes the simplest sounding lick is the stumbling block. This seems to happen more and more often as new tunes are learned -- I suspect the brain's memory banks start deleting duplicate phrases so as to be efficient. I have learned to be patient and eventually the mind and the fingers agree (sometimes after months) to cooperate. As suggested above, playing them over slowly seems to build the nerve paths that lets you go to autopilot. Sometimes humming the phrase over and over seems to help. This is like writing out the words longhand to a song you're trying to learn. The more you can involve the various senses the better. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: wdyat12 Date: 27 Mar 01 - 01:22 AM Jon, Be thankful that your problem is just a mental one. I suffer from arhtritis and dead fingers on bad days due to a pinched nerve in my neck. I also suffer from brain cramps from time to time. I still get mail from AARP which I haven't opened yet. wdyat12 |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Jon Freeman Date: 27 Mar 01 - 03:07 AM wdyat, I'm more curious as to the "why's" in terms of what goes on in brain/finger relationships than worried about this one. As for you, I have the cure, I'll put my "squiggle" hat on more often and get you dancing on the wood stove more! ;-) Jon |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Peter K (Fionn) Date: 27 Mar 01 - 04:00 AM Sounds like you're being led astray by a mental assumption about which way the tune turns - for instance mentally wanting to stay with the Gmaj chord where the tune goes to (say) Emin (don't know the tune and can't pick it up from what you've provided, so I'm guessing). I think you yourself once said that once you can do a tune in your mind, you're well on the way to doing it on the instrument. So that's where to start, I'd guess. As someone who uses a (qwerty) keyboard a lot for work, and who has to practice for hours to get any sense out of pipes or whistle, I'm well aware of something called RSI - repetitive strain injury. At work I am pretty well conditioned to knock off every 20min or so, but if I'm practising some new tune I sometimes stop only when I feel fatigue in the fingers - and hope I'm not too late. I thought your thread was going to be about another phenomenon I experience where sometimes my fingers play so well they could be someone else's. On others they make hard work of everything. Which mood they are in on any given day is totally outside my control. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: bill\sables Date: 27 Mar 01 - 04:01 AM Jon, I presume you are talking aout tenor banjo, The problem is that when most tunes are played they follow a patern and your fingers learn to use the familiar paths but sometimes the path changes and your fingers get confused. This is where you need to concentrate a little more to get back on the right path and "blaze a trail" for the next time. You will find this happens more and more as your playing progresses, not because your brain gets bogged down with new tunes, but because the tunes you choose to learn will be more involved and intricate. You will find that the easier tunes do not have to be learned but just play naturally, so you will always be learning new challenging tunes and therefore following new paterns and training your fingers to do the same. Bill |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Ella who is Sooze Date: 27 Mar 01 - 04:02 AM YUP I do... at the moment I am having a go on the flute (not this particular moment) Well I usually play the whistle, and whilst the fingering is `almost' the same, the F sharp on a whistle is different to that on the flute (it's a classic b flat concert flute) and so my fingers keep insisting on playing the whistle fingering for an F instead of the flutes... This would of course be solved if I bothered to go get a wooden flute... But in the meantime, my fingers are really confused... And in sessions I keep playing a duff F. Ella Funny how your fingers get trained... |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Wolfgang Date: 27 Mar 01 - 04:21 AM Jon, Carol is very close in her description of the brain functions involved and Jeri is on the spot with her advice. The motor parts of the brain are much older (in terms of evolution) than the other parts of our brains and they work different. For that reason people with e.g. Alzheimer do still recollect how to walk or play an instrument when they've long lost the ability to recollect the faces even of the nearest relatives. The motor parts of the brain usually work in an automatic mode that is with no point to point control, with nearly no effort and conscious control (once you've learned the bits). If you are really good in some motor program you can do many other activities (unless the same muscles are involved) with no interference. You can solve e.g. mathematical puzzles while doing the dishes. Most probably, the error you are making is what is usually termed 'capture error' that is when the beginning of two motor programs are identical then the more often used 'takes over' and you are finding against your conscious wishes you are snared into the wrong program. Same as on a more 'global' level when you cycle a way and find after some minutes you've cycled from one point on into a very familiar, but on this special day wrong, direction. The only remedy known to help has been described by Jeri. The idea is that you learn it in the conscious, attended, slow mode of information processing. That'll after some time enable you to play it also in the unattended fast mode the way you want it played. On a more general note: Humans are extremely efficient in information processing but this efficiency has a price: slips, errors and mistakes are unavoidable, since most of our daily functioning is done without conscious control. If you'd be error free, Jon, in the respect you've described, you'd have to be always in the controlled mode of information processing and you'd be very sssssssssslllllllloooooooowwwwwwww. Wolfgang |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: KingBrilliant Date: 27 Mar 01 - 05:14 AM This unconcious unattended control thing is really weird. I touch-type, and when I lost the ring-finger on my right hand I was told I'd have problems & have to learn to compensate. Not so! In some bizarre way the little finger just took over the jobs of the ring-finger all by itself & I could type as fast as ever almost immediately - the words were converted to fingermovements as unconciously as ever. Now, if I could only play an instrument the way I can type..... Kris |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Jeri Date: 27 Mar 01 - 07:48 AM A bit of thread creep, but... We mess up parts of tunes because they sound like parts of other tunes we already know. We start playing the A part of Harvest Home and our fingers auto-play the B part of Boys of Blue Hill. We somehow find ourselves playing a bit of Kid On The Mountain when we think we're playing the Butterfly. I think this is the very same thing that makes us able to pick up tunes quickly by ear. We hear a new tune, and our brains recognize a pattern and we can play it without analyzing what notes are included and where we must put our fingers. Our brains just access the the known pattern from the other tune. I think it's quite possible to get to a point where you learn enough tunes, you start making a lot of mistakes because the patterns are in your head. I think if you keep playing past that, you'll learn even more patterns and your brain will more easily accept the smaller differences, or maybe just recognize a greater number of patterns. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Marion Date: 27 Mar 01 - 08:11 AM I had sort of an interesting experience with autopilot... I played the fiddle for about four months at first, and I always played Irish Washerwoman then followed it with Merrily Kiss the Quaker. Then I stopped playing all together for more than six months. Then I started again, with a slightly different approach - I made a much shorter list of tunes to master before I moved on to others. Irish Washerwoman was on the list, Merrily Kiss the Quaker wasn't. So one day I'm playing Irish Washerwoman, and my mind is wandering, then I start paying attention again and I realize that I'm not playing Washerwoman any more... I had automatically switched into Merrily Kiss the Quaker, after going seven months without playing it! Muscle memory is really a strong force. Marion |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: LR Mole Date: 27 Mar 01 - 08:47 AM Well, yeah, and maybe the following has already been discussed and/or solved (another whole problem, really), but it takes a bit of time for a tune to get from my head to my fingers even if there's no reading involved, and I can't speed it up, even if I really, really have to know it THAT NIGHT. Also, I remember the first time I saw Arlo (seem to) talk and sing "Alice's Restaurant" independently of his hands. Wizardry. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Mary in Kentucky Date: 27 Mar 01 - 09:02 AM Jeri, Carol and Wolfgang (IMO) have touched on the essence of what I learned long ago when trying to memorize long, intricate piano pieces. One year I totally blanked out on a Rachmaninoff piece (my finger memory failed me under stress), so my teacher made me memorize the next piece (a long Brahms) in two different ways. 1) finger memory 2) cognitive memory Jon, I think the answer (and solution) to your question is somewhere in these two ways of learning to play music. Wolfgang describes finger memory as motor memory. I always thought of it as right brain. Now I think it must be both. Anyway, it's the autopilot you speak of, Jon. Much like touch typing, practice over and over to instill this in your brain. It helps to practice very slowly with an enforced metronome beat and gradually increase the speed. Sing along with the tune in your brain. Also, use accents, exagerated motor movements, anything to make your fingers play the passage again. And practice the difficult passage at least ten times to every one time you play the whole song. The other method, cognitive learning, involves the left side of the brain and being able to verbalize what is happening in the music. I would have to be able to start the piece at any point every four measures. It's amazing how many times we have to start at the beginning of a piece whenever we only learn it by finger memory. Also, analyze the actual note names, chords, patterns, etc. As far as mixing tunes...I dunno. I wonder if there is some kind of transfer here. I never had that problem. Actually I found learning patterns extremely helpful for sight reading. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: radriano Date: 27 Mar 01 - 10:52 AM Hi Jon, A lot of good points have been brought up on this thread already but here's another slant. Is what you can't seem to help playing neccessarily wrong? The "folk process" involves changes to a melody as different people play and process the tune. Do the different notes you're playing sound awful or are they just different? Maybe this is the way your ear hears that part of the tune. Remember, there really is no definitive version of a traditional tune. On the other hand, if you just want to play those certain notes perhaps the problem is that you're trying too hard. I'm a fiddle player myself and I have struggled for what seems like years with the reel "The Fisherman's Island." The version I want to learn has a certain sequence of notes near the end of the B part that my fingers just don't want to do. After abandoning the tune for quite a long time I came back to it and found that I can play the sequence most of the time now. Naturally when I try to play the tune up to tempo I still screw it up but there seems to be some progress there. Hope this helps you in some way. Richard |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Jon Freeman Date: 27 Mar 01 - 11:22 AM Wow thanks everybody. A few comments: I can play the tune this way at a good speed, I have experienced this problem before and I do know the go slow approach but I wanted to know why it happens and whether I was unique in this as I had never heard anyone else talk about it. Fionn, thanks for mentioning the dangers in trying to push too far or for too long. This pain is not bad and it comes on pretty quickly - it feels like the muscles in my fingers are getting a sharp tug to go where they should go. I don't push for long in one go and I think I am fairly cautious regarding the risk of permanent injury. I watched a friend doing that to himself - he turned something small into a chronic condition which pretty near prevents him from playing banjo/ mandolin. Radriano, I'm just trying to get myself to play the notes as written on a version of the tune and maybe, as others have suggested, I will learn another pattern in the process. I think that either way of playing the tune would be acceptable and that there are probably people playing both versions. I wonder how many slight variations of the same tune get played together in sessions. Marion, I do experience the switching of tunes. An examlpe would be: The first few notes in the B of the Tailors Twist are the same as those in the Manchester Hornpipe. It is quite common for me to start off playing one and finish up playing the other. Fionn, I have experienced the phenonminom you mentioned - it is weird. Jon |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Wolfgang Date: 28 Mar 01 - 08:08 AM Mary, it is sometimes termed motor memory, but it is still located in the brain. Wolfgang |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Jeri Date: 28 Mar 01 - 08:28 AM There's something else related to muscle/motor memory - just like in the song The Wee Kirkcudbright Centipede. I can play some tunes very fast. If I start thinking about what notes come next, I mess up. I have to play those things without thinking. I believe what happens is I shift from motor memory to cognitive, and cognitive takes longer to process into action. I've had entire tunes get away from me when I've done this. This is perhaps the biggest reason I mess up when I know people are listening to me. I'm nervous and pay very close attention to what I'm doing so I don't make a mistake. It has the opposite effect. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Art Thieme Date: 28 Mar 01 - 12:00 PM I suspect that all of you have Multiple Sclerosis.
I've got MS and what you describe is exactly why I can't pick now. **BG** Art Thieme |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Mary in Kentucky Date: 28 Mar 01 - 02:46 PM Nah Art, they're just getting old! *BG* |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Justa Picker Date: 28 Mar 01 - 03:28 PM Jeri, I can completely relate, and I was mentioning comments similar to yours, to a friend of mine a week or so ago. I think new neural pathways and connections are being made when a person is learning new techniques, songs, etc. There are a few things and techniques that I fingerpick which are somewhat complex (and I've practised them enough to be able to do them in my sleep), usually really up tempo tunes that require sections of cross picking interspersed with Travis styles, and two-fingered flat-picking single string runs. Yet, when I go to record some of these things, I screw them up every time, because I'm concentrating precisely on what I'm doing, instead of just relying on intuition and knowing that my subconsciousness KNOWS where my fingers are supposed to be. The remedy I've found to get around this, is to deliberately distract my focus away from what I'm doing while I'm doing it. (i.e. stare at the ceiling, or constantly look around the room while playing, or think about something else entirely, and just let the fingers go on auto pilot.) And it works. There's an old expression "You do it. You don't think about it." |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Richard Bridge Date: 28 Mar 01 - 03:33 PM Does anyone have the same problem learning tunes to songs? Sometimes a line just wll come out different and I can play the correct tune over and over and still sing the wrong one as soon as I try. Spencer the Rover does it for ma every time. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Bernard Date: 28 Mar 01 - 04:08 PM I once saw a documentary which explained that the memory works by certain 'circuits' being used so frequently that they eventually 'burn in' just like an EPROM. It really is an electrical process. As a result, learning something the wrong way, then trying to correct it, is a much more difficult process than learning it correctly in the first place. I certainly find that I go onto 'autopilot' with things I play frequently. Sometimes I wake up and forget where I am!! I've always taught my pupils to learn things slowly, and only build up speed as accuracy allows. Any fool can play fast - the listener often can't pick up the duff notes - it takes a real expert to slow down. |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: DonMeixner Date: 28 Mar 01 - 10:40 PM I am acutelly aware of finger nerves miss firing and fingers going not where they were planned to go. After my reconstructive surgery my fingers needed to be completely retrained. In esscense I had to learn to play all over again. I knew where they should go but the now permanent bends in them made them hit the right fret location but the wrong string. I'd intend to play a "B" on the "G" string of my fiddle but I'd hit "F#" on the "D" string instead. Twelve years later it still happens unless I am watching what I do. I have given up the fiddle again after a few months of frustration. But I'll try again in awhile, I'm sure. I always do. Don |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: Jeri Date: 29 Mar 01 - 08:15 AM Art, I do have some brain abnormalities (and the rest of you can just shuddup right now! :-) that make my fingers a little clumsy at times. I don't think people notice that, because I don't play that well anyway. But there's a big difference because the other mistakes are in some way intentional - my fingers are doing exactly what my brain is telling them to (or not to) do. I lopped off the end of my left index finger when I was 3. I had a cyst removed from it in 1998, and they took off another 1/4". This made playing feel really weird, and I doubt I'll get over that. For one thing, the finger is shorter, but that's not too much of a problem. The thing that drives me nuts is, they pulled up the skin of what was the front of the finger so it's now on the top. When I put the finger down on a string, it feels like I'm using the pad of it, not the end. This finger makes it difficult for me to properly fret a guitar or any instrument with higher string tension, because the end is not as protected as my other fingers. I'm think about trying left-handed... |
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Subject: RE: Disobedient Fingers From: GUEST,Annie Date: 29 Mar 01 - 10:28 AM You, too, Art? One of the first hints that my synapses were leaking was that my right hand took on a life of its own at the piano. I remember watching it play stuff that my conscious mind didn't seem to have any role in. Weird. Cool. Now, they both do it, and it's really restful to be able to just kinda space out at a dance and let them earn their keep.... |
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