Is It In Your Head?

There is a saying that goes, “If the tune is not in your head it will never come out of your fingers.” It means you have internalized the music before you can perform it at your best.

I recently learned this the hard way. I was struggling to play one section of a song. I thought it should be easier than I was finding it to be. No matter what I did there was one spot I kept stumbling over. I could not understand what my problem was. I would work with a metronome at a slow tempo. I still had problems at a regular speed. I tried different fingerings. No help. It was driving me crazy. It made no sense. The part was not any harder than other songs I played. Have you ever had this happen to you? What was going on?

Finally, I thought, “Why not try to hum the melody?” I sat there humming the melody and found that I had the same problem when humming the song as I did when playing it. I realized that this tune had different variations of the melody and I had not committed to memory the version I want to play. When I tried to play the section with the variations, my mind would pause to figure out what to play. I forgot to get the song in my head before trying to play it.

I re-learned a lesson I thought I already knew. The first step when you practice is to make sure you have what you are trying to do captured in your head. That is the only way you can get it to come out of your fingers. Give it a try the next time you are struggling to play something.