Line up everything you have written.
They are in E and A.
Maybe G, on the day you used a capo
and felt adventurous.
You did not choose that.
Your hands did,
and you have been calling it
your sound.
Here is what is actually happening.
You write by reaching.
A shape arrives under your fingers,
it suggests the shape next to it,
and the ones next to it
are the ones you have played
ten thousand times.
The vocabulary of the instrument
quietly became
the vocabulary of the song.
That is not composition.
That is your muscle memory
making the decisions
and handing you the result
with the feeling of an idea.
Watch what it costs.
Every song sits in the same range,
so the singer strains
in the same place every night,
and the one note they cannot reach
keeps turning up
because your hand goes there.
Every song has the same colour,
because a key on a guitar
is not just a pitch.
It is which strings ring open,
which voicings are possible,
how bright the top sounds,
and you have been getting
the same gift every time.
And the day somebody asks
for it a tone down,
you are a beginner again,
in public.
So take your hands off it.
Sing the melody into your phone
with nothing to hold.
Whatever comes out is yours,
not the instrument's,
and you will find intervals
your fingers would never have offered.
Or decide the key first,
before you have touched anything,
and pick one you do not like.
Retune, or capo high,
or write on a piano you play badly.
Playing badly is the point.
An instrument you are clumsy on
cannot run ahead of you,
so you have to hear the thing
before you can play it.
And when you do go back
to the instrument you know,
bring the song with you
instead of standing there
waiting for it to hand you one.
Your hands know three songs.
They will write all of them,
forever,
unless you interrupt.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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