Serguey Asael Shinder – IT Professional

For a long time I could play things
that still sounded wrong.

The notes were right.
The timing was close.
My hands had learned the passage.

And yet.
Something was off,
and worse, I couldn’t hear what.

That was the frustrating part.
I could tell it wasn’t good.
I just couldn’t tell why.

An older musician explained it to me.
“Your hands got there,” he said.
“Your ear hasn’t yet.
And you can’t rush the ear.”

He was right, and it was annoying.

I could drill my fingers.
Force the speed, grind the reps,
push my hands faster than felt comfortable.
But the ear grew on its own schedule,
through hours of just listening,
and there was no shortcut for it.

So I stopped trying to force that part.
I kept playing.
Kept listening.
Kept playing badly
in the direction of good.

And then, over a year I barely noticed,
something changed.

I started hearing things
that used to be invisible to me.
The note that was slightly flat.
The rush in the timing.
The space a phrase needed
that I’d been trampling.

The hands, I realized, had always been the easy part.

The ear was the whole game.

And the ear takes exactly as long
as it takes.

– Serguey Asael Shinder