What is muscle memory?

by Jessica Spieser-Landes with help from physical therapists Jason and Fabrisia Woollard

MUSCLE MEMORY WHAT!? “Muscle memory has been used synonymously with “motor learning,” which is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition.” (Wikipedia.com) What are some things that you may already do that require muscle memory? Riding a bike or drawing a picture are tasks where we use muscle memory to control the way we use our muscles. This is different than, say, the type of memory you use to memorize a fact like “a square has four sides.” In most cases when you understand that a square has four sides you can forget about it yet recall that memory in a moment when you need to weeks later. Muscle memory is very different from this.

WHY DO WE NEED MUSCLE MEMORY TO PLAY AN INSTRUMENT? “(Motor learning) often involves improving the smoothness and accuracy of movements and is obviously necessary for complicated movements such as speaking, playing the piano and climbing trees…” (Wikipedia.com) Muscle memory is what helps us control the type of sound we create with our instrument. The more control we have over our muscles (i.e. the more we have worked on committing these motor tasks to muscle memory), the more beautiful our playing will be. If you want the sound you make to be just like the very first sound you ever made on your instrument, you don’t need muscle memory! But if you want your sound to be like those musicians around you who inspire you to play better -- people who have spent hundreds of hours and years of work to teach their muscles to be able to produce beautiful and diverse sounds -- then you need muscle memory.

SO HOW DO I GET IT? “When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems.” (Wikipedia.com) The good news is, everyone can do this! The trick is daily repetitive accurate slow practice and little by little your sound will change.

MAKE IT GO FASTER! Sometimes progress will seem so slow you won’t notice it. But eventually the tasks that you commit to muscle memory will become so automatic you won’t be able to play without them and you’ll be able to look back and say “wow, things HAVE changed!” (This is one of the reasons it is important to always practice slowly and correctly – once you commit something to muscle memory it is VERY hard to unlearn.)

LUCKY US One of the reasons listening to a good musician live is such an amazing experience is that playing an instrument requires a million muscle memory tasks. Okay, a million may be a bit of an exaggeration. But it is a lot! We know this because we play! Though it may be overwhelming to imagine learning a million little tasks, if one by one we memorize each new muscle memory task that our teacher teaches us, they all add up in the end without us even realizing it.

ONE STEP AT A TIME The Suzuki method takes each muscle memory task needed to play our instrument and breaks it down into small assignments that are manageable to master. It is imperative that these segments (and later pieces) be thoroughly mastered before attempting the next step, so as to engineer a “built-in” success for each step in the learning process and produce accurate muscle memory.

DAILY REPETITIVE ACCURATE SLOW PRACTICE makes accurate muscle memory!

WANT TO READ MORE? Check out Learn Faster by Playing Slower by David Motto and Muscle Memory on Wikipedia.