I spent over thirty years practising the guitar, until my last significant recordings using guitar in 2018. Practising is the operative word here. Unemployed in the early 90s, I put in a lot of regular hours building rhythm, muscle memory and technique.
Unlike my current systems for making music, the guitar forced me to sit in uncomfortable positions for extended periods of time, it ruined personal relationships, it was a unicorn I pursued until suddenly I was freed from the quest, and I moved on.
One of my regular collaborators during the height of this obsession once observed that I played the guitar like a piano, and indeed I fully revised my technique after a week in 2009 spent misunderstanding a piano in Provence. And although I occasionally use a keyboard in my current musical strategies, I have no need nor desire to become a keyboard player.
I sometimes spend many hours a day working in my studio, but I am not practising, I am not developing muscle memory, and hopefully I am not ruining personal relationships. Certainly I am familiarising myself with the capabilities of the equipment I am using, but there is very little realtime interaction. My ears have become more important than my hands; I often doze for a half-hour on the studio futon listening to how material is progressing, watching paint dry, until I hear what needs altering.
The guitar is a sort of a dance. It’s played as much with the hips and the id as with the hands, although the nerve-twitch is also tremendously important to playing the instrument with any feeling. Riding the edge of nerve-twitches is a young man’s game, and that’s something that feels like a blessing to have realised I shd walk away from before it becomes an embarrassment.
If I can avoid Beethoven’s tragedy, I shd be able to continue following my ears into obscurity for many years to come.