If you want your talents to pave a path towards a career, you have to put in due time and diligence to master a certain skill of your choice. I’m sure some of you have heard the saying, “It takes 10,000 hours to master a skill.” Though I do not believe this rule to be the case.
It is amazing what you can accomplish in a single day with effective and efficient practice techniques whether you are an artist, ballet dancer, or even a construction worker.
In this article, I'll be discussing the joys of my passions and my obsession with muscle memory and hand-eye coordination.
The Joy of Music
Elementary school was when I began noticing a joy in music. My father, being the musician that he is, always sang and played guitar around the house. He also ran a music store where I spend the majority of my time after school.
I soon picked up instruments like the bass and drums, but it didn’t quench my musical thirst. One day, my grandfather mailed my father and I a CD containing the Vivaldi Cello Concertos featuring amazing cellist, Ofra Harnoy.
Randy in Nepal playing a Nepali Guitar.
It was at this moment that I discovered the beauty and timbre of this instrument. Nothing to me sounded so pure and human coming from this finely carved block of wood.
I was given the chance to begin my never-ending journey with the cello in fifth grade. The cello held my hand through the South Carolina’s Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, the Cincinnati-College Conservatory of Music, touring around various cities within Italy, and opened my eyes to singing, songwriting, and teaching.
The Joy of Gaming
During this entire time of playing and writing music, I was an avid video gamer as well. I feel so lucky to have grown up in the 90’s – a truly innovative decade in technology and gaming. I’ve literally owned every console during this time starting with the Super Nintendo to the Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo 64, you name it.
I spent countless hours playing and beating every video game I could put my hands on. It seemed to just come naturally until I realized very recently, some crucial similarities within my gaming and musical practice regimes.
My Silent Obsession
As a cellist and gamer, I discovered many similarities between these two fields of “study,” if you will. The two biggest subjects I obsessed over, for years, are the similar motor and cognitive skills like muscle memory and hand-eye coordination when it came to my music and gaming.
Obviously, there are many factors within these functions we could discuss but I would like to break down what, in my opinion, proves to be most noteworthy.
Muscle Memory in Music
According to
Wikipedia,
Muscle memory is a
form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific
motor task into memory through repetition, which has been used
synonymously with motor learning.
In music, we have something called scales. Scales are an order of musical notes through
certain pitches or frequencies. They are absolutely fundamental to
determining good musicians from excellent ones.
Learning scales not
only builds your overall theoretical knowledge of music but with
enough efficient practice, they become second nature.
An effective way to
practice scales that can assist in developing solid muscle memory is
to repeat them in variations. These variations may contain a change
in rhythm, note structure, or both. In the music world, we called
these Etudes. Etudes are exercises that address certain problematic
areas in your technique. Practicing and repeating these said Etudes,
is a giant leap towards good muscle memory on any instrument.
Muscle Memory in Gaming
Furthermore, let’s discuss what determines average gamers from professional. Professional gamers are, without a doubt, mechanical masters of their keyboard and mouse. Muscle memory plays an enormous role through repetition and fine tuning to gain the winning edge over your opponent.
What is fascinating to me, as a gamer, is how subconscious these mechanical tasks are.
Because of muscle memory, you no longer have to think about how you are moving your mouse or using your keyboard. You just do it. Allowing for the majority of your thought process to make the next strategic move.
Most gaming genres like first-person shooters – contain built-in training grounds for their players. For instance, games such as Counter-Strike is a first-person shooter that has a built-in training system for their players. These training simulators offer variations of different targets that attempt to dodge your shots. With repetition and time, you'll start hitting those headshots every time without even thinking about it.
Hand-eye Coordination in Music
It’s pretty much impossible to discuss muscle memory without bringing up hand-eye coordination. The two are just so closely linked together.
Let’s go back to our topic on musical scales. While practicing scales is essential as a musician, you can’t really practice them at first without actually reading the music as you play it.
I believe playing the piano is an excellent example of this. Pianists are amazing at multi-tasked hand-eye coordination.
In addition to reading the music, pianists read two separate lines of music simultaneously. You have the higher pitched line called treble, and the lower pitched line called the bass.
The coordination between reading and playing with both your left and right hands still baffles me when you really break it down. As a string player, our hand-eye coordination deals with mastering the use of the bow, which, in a nutshell, is a wooden stick with horse hair attached.
Hand-Eye Coordination in Gaming
While using the bow as a string player, I notice a similar connection with the mouse as a PC gamer. The hand-eye coordination between your mouse and the monitor is just like using your bow to play the notes you read.
Off the top of my head, I think of games such as OSU when it comes to pushing the limits of extreme hand-eye coordination. OSU is a rhythm-based video game that challenges its players to capitalize on very fine accurate mouse movements combined with rhythm.
Here’s an example clip from Youtube of a guy live streaming his OSU gameplay. Tell me if this doesn’t absolutely blow your mind.
History of Live Streaming
Live streaming today is taking the internet by storm. The first live stream in history was by a garage band known as Severe Tire Damage in 1993. In addition to being musicians, they were killer computer technologists that were basically the pioneers of the digital frontier.
Afterward, live streaming became surprisingly progressive. In 1995, the first baseball game was live streamed. Then later in 1999, President Bill Clinton was the first president to take part in a webcast. I told you, the ’90s were awesome.
Today, technological advancements have come to a point where you can live stream from anywhere at any time on many different platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitch.
A Twitch Streamer
As a musician and gamer, I’ve decided I wanted to showcase my various talents for people to watch on Twitch. Twitch is a live streaming platform for gamers, musicians, people who want to just hang out and chat, video game competitions, you name it.
I started preparing this process about a month ago and it has been an insanely fun experience. The effort I put into my music and gaming is finally paying off in a tremendously unique way. It is fulfilling to a point where being me, is good enough to be just me.
Although Twitch streaming as a career doesn’t always mean complete stability, it pushes me to strive towards a goal each and every day. Years of musical performances have also deterred my stage fright so live streaming is a piece of cake and has most definitely become my new playground.
All in All
Randy in mid-performance.
Who knows what the future holds for me as a streamer. When I look back at my life growing up in the ’90s, I never knew things would turn out like they have today. The access and opportunities are all there for us to grow from. You just have to know how to execute your goals. Just like executing a mindset towards understanding the growth of your specific skill sets.
By no stretch of the imagination am I a spectacular gamer or musician even. Once you realize that there will always be someone better than you, you have to accept that fact that only you...can be you. So just own it.
For me, my growth required that I take a step back and hone in on my fascination and ability to master certain aspects of muscle memory and hand-eye coordination. Without the conjoined forces of the two, I daresay that my cello playing and PC gaming skills would be quite lacking or even non-existent.
All of this being said, you don’t need to pull your hair out feeling like you need to be the best. In whatever talents you want to pursue, understand that efficient practice techniques are very important.
Find a way to love practicing. Study the best of the best and research all that you can. Set goals for yourself and don’t expect anything to be incredible in a day, or two days, or even a year. I literally obsessed over people who, in my mind, mastered the use of hand-eye coordination and muscle memory in their own right.
Maybe you could find something different to assist in inspiring you to master your own talent or skills. But always remember, practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes progress.
