Muscle Memory (new song)

It's not something that we think about very often. It just happens. I can go out and dribble a soccer ball around a field like it's second nature, but I haven't played in years. Or I can get on a bike and just take off, yet I haven't ridden a bike in years either.

I recently started climbing again. Sophomore year I climbed 3-5 days a week, but since then I haven't been out more than once a month. I was never amazing at it, but I had a lot of experience and was learning a lot of technique. When I joined Reading Rocks climbing gym last week, the only thing that was holding me back was being out of shape. My fingers knew how to move and how to interact with the holds as if it were second nature. Over the past week, as I've started to build my strength back, my ability is improving every single day. The hard part has already been done.

It's a lot like music. You write something and you play it over and over again. The more you play it, the more you remember it.

But it's more than oh I played a this chord and then this other chord. It's about your fingers remembering how to interact with the strings (this applies across the board, not just with guitar), how to maneuver themselves around to produce the desired sound. It's muscle memory.

That's how, years later, you can go back to a piece and quickly relearn it.

The band, Dream Theater, has been together for over 20 years, but the way they plan their sets allows them to have any material from their entire 20 years on only a few days notice. They have to relearn material that they may have not played in years!

Personally, I've never had the patience for learning music. And it totally sucks, because that screws me when I want to relearn an old piece that I wrote.

Like today. I just got copies of recordings I did with Jeremy Bentley at MR.STUDIO a while back. I had totally forgotten about them. They sound great, but there's one song that completely eludes me. I remember playing it once upon a time, but the muscle memory isn't fast enough to keep up with my fleeting attention span. It's a shame, because it's really good... Hopefully I'll convince myself to sit down for the half hour, or however long it takes, and relearn it.

Because I really like it.

Ironically, when it was recorded, it had no name. I don't think it ever got one, so it's going to be ironically named, Muscle Memory (tuning is D-G-D-G-A-D if anyone else wants to try it out).

It's on my website, here.
And also on this nifty little reverbnation player (but you should check out my website too)