Interestingly, for the most seriously accomplished musicians, the aim is to get beyond muscle memory, because that's where the really interesting stuff is. A saxophonist I work with regularly spends hours upon hours playing etudes from a book that are really just random intervals. It sounds horrendous, but it's brilliant for knocking yourself out of the old, familiar pathways (what a guitarist would call his 'trick bag', and that I think of as escape routes).Xamonas Chegwé wrote:It was one of the things I used to stress when I taught guitar. It is not your brain that learns to hold the chords but your fingers. All new chords feel awkward and wrong at first - but practice changing between the new chord and those that you already know and then, suddenly, you can play it without thinking.
Muscle memory is certainly a valuable didactic tool, though.
