<\/a>pursued until suddenly I was freed from the quest, and I moved on.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOne 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I can avoid Beethoven’s tragedy, I shd be able to continue following my ears into obscurity for many years to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":586,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-entropy-circus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":587,"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions\/587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.iotacism.com\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}