by Serguey Shinder
I learned a particular song off a recording when I was young, before I had any real theory, sitting with the track and my instrument and simply hunting for the shapes until what I played sounded like what I heard. It took days. When I finally got it, the satisfaction was enormous, and I played that song for years afterwards, confidently, in front of people, without ever once checking my work against anything but my own memory of it.
Then someone who knew the song properly heard me play it and told me, gently, that one of the chords was wrong. Not dramatically wrong. A single note different, a substitution that changed the colour of one bar and nothing else, close enough that it had never jarred, close enough that I had lived inside it for years without a flicker of doubt. And once he had said it, I could hear it immediately, and could not stop hearing it.
The frustrating part was not being wrong. It was how thoroughly the wrongness had set. I had played that chord several hundred times, and every one of those repetitions had made my hands more certain about a thing that was not true. Fixing it took far longer than learning it, because I was not learning a shape any more, I was arguing with a reflex, and the reflex had years of practice on its side while the correction had days.
What I took from that goes well beyond one song. Practice does not care whether you are right. It only records what you did, faithfully, and it hands it back to you later as instinct. The confidence I felt playing that song was not evidence of accuracy. It was evidence of repetition, which is a completely different thing, and I had been reading one as the other for as long as I had been playing.
Since then I check early and I check against something outside myself. Not constantly, not neurotically, but at the beginning, before the shape has had a chance to set, when correcting it costs almost nothing. A wrong note caught on the first day is a small piece of information. The same wrong note caught in year three is a demolition.
I have found the same thing everywhere else in my life, which is why the story stayed with me. The mistakes that hurt are rarely the obvious ones, because the obvious ones announce themselves and get fixed. The expensive ones are the ones that are almost right, comfortable enough to live in, quiet enough that nothing ever forces a second look. They do not stop you. They just quietly become who you are, one confident repetition at a time, until someone kind enough to say something finally does.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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