The tab is right there.
Three seconds
and somebody has already
worked it out for you.
Take the long way anyway.
Put the recording on.
Play four seconds of it.
Guess.
Be wrong.
Guess again.
That fumbling
is not the waste of time
before the learning.
It is the learning.
When you read the answer,
you get the notes.
When you find the answer,
you get the notes
and the ear that found them,
and the ear comes with you
into every song after.
There is a moment,
maybe the twentieth attempt,
where the interval stops being a mystery
and becomes something you recognise,
like a face in a crowd.
Nobody can hand you that.
It is only ever earned
by being lost for a while.
The page lies, too.
It tells you which fret.
It does not tell you
that the note is bent into,
not landed on.
That the chord is voiced
with a thumb over the neck.
That the whole feel of it
lives in a strum
nobody bothered to write down.
Your ear hears all of that.
The page never does.
I am not against the shortcut.
Use it when you are stuck.
Use it to check yourself
after you have tried.
Order matters more than purity.
Struggle first.
Verify second.
The same trade shows up
everywhere else in a life.
The answer you look up
solves today.
The answer you work out
changes what you can hear
tomorrow.
Nobody watching
can tell which way you learned it.
You can.
It shows up two years later,
in a song you have never heard,
when your hand goes
to the right place
before you have decided why.
The long way gives you
one more thing.
Patience with being bad at something
in a room where nobody is watching.
That is rarer than talent,
and unlike a song
it transfers to everything.
So sit with the mystery
a little longer
than is comfortable.
The song will still be there.
You will be different
when you reach it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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