An Injured Music
A musician’s attempts to bypass injury
About two years ago, I injured my left index finger from over-practicing. It was quite crushing, to say the least. I was practicing playing the flute too much (the metre-long Indian bansuri) and the resulting injury prevented me from being able to play the guitar for more than a year. I had just quit my job a few months earlier to pursue music and this was a big blow to all the things I had planned.
I had just started my YouTube channel, Trianglehead, and had only managed to upload 3 videos before being injured. Adding to this, my problem was misdiagnosed twice and the advice from both those doctors, which I followed meticulously, worsened the problem over the next 3 months.
It was actually a muscle that I had partially torn, and not knowing anything about finger injury, I tried to play the guitar now and then, only to be met with pain each time. I searched for help online but anything I tried only worsened the problem, so I stopped all my attempts at self-diagnosis and stopped playing all instruments entirely.
I wasn’t ready to give up though. Thankfully I found a doctor who identified the exact problem and recommended a great physiotherapist. Only then did things begin to look up. I still couldn’t play guitar though. All those months of not following the right regimen had made the problem worse and it would take almost a year for my finger to function well enough again.
I wanted to somehow continue my music practice though. I had quit my job because I wasn’t getting enough time to improve my musical skills. Being sucker-punched by an injury couldn’t force me to discontinue music. My primary interest was the guitar and I didn’t want to switch instruments either. I had already given up on the other 3 instruments I was practicing because of my finger. I was quite hopelessly lost by this point.
After 2 weeks of physio, my finger was getting better but I knew it would take many months for it to heal. So I went back to improving my basics. I knew that I could improve my sense of pitch by just listening and though it would be nicer to put it to practice on the guitar, at least I could do something sitting around.
I had to make some money too. I couldn’t rely on performing and earning anytime soon. I had already made a teaching plan so I put that into action to cover my expenses.
With enough to keep me afloat, I started off with my melodic skill training (How I learned to speak with notes: Melody). I could spend hours doing it without much fatigue. That was good, but I knew I needed to do more.
That led me to picking up something else — rhythm. The beauty of konnakol was not lost on me and I began practicing earnestly (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 3).
I followed this routine for a couple of weeks but I was itching to get back to the guitar. I tried exploring ways to improve my skill on the guitar without actually needing to play it. It felt like a silly thing to do but I really had no other option at the time. Beggars can’t be choosers right?
I found that I didn’t have a good enough picture of the guitar fretboard in my head. I wasn’t as fluid and comfortable as I’d have liked to be.
Let me explain that a bit further. If you’ve played chess, you probably know that there are 64 squares on the board. Each of these 64 squares can be identified by following a naming convention. The most popular one names the columns A to H and the rows 1 to 8. Moves are specified by mentioning the piece being moved and its position on the board.
Chess masters don’t really need a board in front of them to play. They picture the entire board in their minds and can “see” the positions of all the pieces blindfolded (and blindfold matches are very popular in chess). They need this kind of visual/logical imagination to plan moves even when they’re playing a regular game. They need to see ahead many moves at a time, in order to decide the best move based on all possible moves their opponent could play. This is a crucial skill in chess. You really need this to win against a good player.
While they might not need to name squares in their mind, when moves are specified to them, they can instantly translate names to their positions. It’s helpful to have this skill but I wouldn’t call it necessary to be great at chess.
Please don’t fret (pun intended). There’s a point to that long-drawn analogy. On the guitar, or any instrument that you play, you need to know how to play the notes in your head. If you imagine a melody, you need to already know how to play that on your instrument without really figuring out and calculating the positions of notes.
To play an instrument well, and to improvise especially, this is a very fundamental skill that you need. Instruments other than our voice are generally external to us. Knowing how to get the exact sound you’re imagining out of your instrument, whether it’s percussive or pitched, is essential for expressing yourself musically.
For this, you need to be able see the notes on your instrument.
I did not have this skill on the guitar. Plain and simple. I knew I needed it for many years but I kept finding ways to avoid it and relied on a sophisticated system of nonsense instead.
My pitch and rhythm skills were already improving so I had a better idea of translating them to the guitar. To cut a long story short, I figured out that focusing on the sound of each open string held the key to improvement, and within a few months, even if I couldn’t play the guitar, I could imagine playing exactly what I wanted. While naming is not essential, doing it certainly helped me with developing a strong connection with the guitar. All this helped me create an entire guitar learning method from scratch - the same one I teach my students.
This seems like all words and no play, theory but no result. In a way, it was. I could listen to music with a much more trained mind. I could teach students better and correct their mistakes sooner and more efficiently. But I was not expressing myself using music. I was not using my creativity to translate myself into the music I made.
On the other hand, while it was certainly frustrating not to be able to play the guitar for so long, all the musical learning that I did in those months made me a dramatically better guitarist and more importantly, musician, once I was able to use my finger again. Where I once relied on hacks and a bag of rather pointless tricks to wow the audience with skill, I now saw things quite directly. Everything was simple. I could focus on music, purely and unabashedly.
I understood two things from this:
- There is so much that can be learned mentally without actually needing to carry it out physically
- Learning, which is not put to practice, feels hollow and incomplete
The second thing that I’ve mentioned here took me a while to understand. A few months into this routine of learning music while hardly making a sound, I started to foolishly think that maybe I could just continue this process for a long time and avoid playing an instrument for many more months.
When I realised, though, that all the music that I love is made my musicians putting their heart and soul into making music and not idly talking semantics, I saw how I needed to change my perspective. It certainly felt wonderful to know that my skill with understanding music had become many times superior, but the effort it would take to actually make music from those skills, and apply my creativity was another matter entirely. Reality hit me.
It takes a tremendous amount of effort to perfect a single song. It takes loads of creativity. Multiple hours spent on fitting it to what you have in mind. Many attempts to perfect how you play it. Tweaks that you make multiple times to get it just right. And this is how it is even if you aren’t composing the song. You might just be playing someone else’s creation and it’ll still take hours to get right.
I really needed to get back on track with making music. It isn’t wrong to be an academic, but if your goal is to make music — and mine is — then you have to focus on that first and foremost.
With my newfound understanding of music, I was hardly moved by gimmicks any longer. I wanted to learn and create, straight and to the point. So I packed a bag and went on a solo hike across northern India to find my guru. After a few extraordinary strokes of luck, my quest was over. I had found my guru (I probably shortchanged you there with such a short description. Don’t worry. More to come soon in future articles)
Learning from my guru, I realise that there is no separation between mental and physical. It is all one. You learn to express yourself as one person with one process. If you’re injured, maybe you can’t express yourself in the same way, but it is always one process. I stopped seeing the separation between the two and instead started to see the bigger picture: expression itself, born from the creative insight of one individual.
There are probably many musicians who’ve had the misfortune to be injured like me. One word of caution I give to everyone nowadays is to not over-practice. It gets you nowhere. I had been fed the notion: no pain, no gain. Now I subscribe to the opposite camp: slow and steady wins the race (corny, I know).
Most of us want to play music long-term. We don’t want injury to cripple us and stop us from doing what we love. It takes time to grow a plant. You need to water it everyday. Patience and constant endeavouring will bear fruit.
Even then, something might go wrong. You don’t need to stop your musical journey though. Find ways to improve and even make music while you’re handicapped. Don’t let anything stop you from striving towards your goal — always within the limits of your ability, but always creatively exploring new ways to move forward. Follow the path of least resistance to achieve what you want. The creativity need never die.
And when you’re better again, don’t forget your goal of making music — of expressing the artist within. You are not a book that can be read unless you open your pages to the world.
The way I think of it, if you become really good at understanding a language but never manage to say one word of your original thought, then all you’ve done is read and listen. Speak! There is something unique in you that you can share with the world. There is something only you have that nobody else does — you! Share that idea of yourself and let your music be the voice that makes you heard.
_/\_
Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.
Improve your sense of rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) as you read about my journey through the world of rhythm. How’s that for combining a lesson and a story into one? :D
Get a better grasp on notes with my 3-part How I learned to speak with notes series: Melody, Harmony and Connection
You might even find these interesting:
How I use music to remember phone numbers, The Mirror in the Music and The Voice of a Story
You can have a look at all my articles here: Anirudh Venkatesh
