Do you play from the Head or from the Heart?

[Nailpicker]

I work to play from my head, with heart, using my hands.

[Shades of Blue]

I wish that my head could explain what my heart plays...

[PorkPieGuy]

I think people should "let it out from the heart, not from the fingers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YzMqUZmyaw

[ziapack]

Learn it in your head, practice from your heart, play it from your soul.

[Al Acuff]

Head playing and heart playing are two different kinds of playing. I used to play a regular bar gig in Santa Monica as a duo with an A list studio guitar player.

One time I asked my buddy why he was playing bars with me for chump change when he had a high six figure annual income from his session work. He answered that during the day he had to play like a "studio musician". In other words he had to play the notes on the paper that was in front of him. He explained that when he played bars with me he could do what he called "heart playing".

Horses for courses.

[SoCalSurf]

Anatomically speaking, it's all in the head. The more accurate question would be, do you play with the amygdala (emotional center) or the motor cortex (motor control center)?

Let the tomato throwing commence.

[JeffreyAK]

Originally Posted by mmasters

I thought this article where Ritchie Blackmore comments on Joe Satriani's playing was interesting:
https://www.guitarworld.com/artists/...omething-wrong

I definitely play from the heart and am always searching for the right note or combination of notes. But I do notice some people play from the head where everything sounds polished and formulaic.

It's interesting coming from Blackmore, who's playing, at least in the 70's and 80's when I was listening to him a lot, is pretty formulaic and pentatonic. He does bend strings well and often, and players like Satriani don't so much, so perhaps "heart" to him means bending strings and not quite nailing the next note most of the time.

I tend to agree with a comment above, there are great players, bad players, and everything in between, and it's really as simple as that. Great doesn't always or even often have much to do with speed, but it's an aspect in many genres - particularly for non-musical audiences, who are more impressed by a flurry of notes than an audience full of guitar players would be.

[jaymarsch]

Originally Posted by ziapack

Learn it in your head, practice from your heart, play it from your soul.

I like this ^^^^^^^.

Best,
Jayne

[Bob Womack]

You know, the question of the elements has bugged men from very early days and has been documented from the Golden Age of Greece onward. Having studied both Philosophy and the Philosophy of Music, I think I can answer.

Ontologically speaking, the monist says man is made up of one substance.
The Dichotomist or Dualist says man is made up of body and soul.
The Trichotomist says man is made up of body, soul, and spirit
The Quadrachotomist says man is made up of body, mind, soul and spirit.

All of these positions observe certain things within mankind and try to assign them to certain perceived but intangible parts of man according to their characteristics. It's all part of trying to understand the being that is man, but the thinner you slice him the less comfortable it tends to become.

Where do I sit in all this? For me the musical question is merely a question of what attracts me to music. What attracts me to music is an appeal to or calling up of certain feelings within me. As a result, when I play, what am I attempting to do? I, in turn, appeal to or call up those same feelings in my audience. If the feelings are of sadness or joy, those feelings music be either baked into the music or must be conveyed by my playing. To convey those concepts I have to be in touch with those concepts within myself. If I am trying to convey something more mechanical I may need to be more formal and less emotional.

In the studio it plays out to what is laid before me: Yesterday I was overdubbing, strumming multiple takes of a chord powerfully as a voluntary: Duh-duh-duhhhhhhhhh!!! Duh-duh-duhhhhhhhhh!!! Was I trying to impart every bit of emotion I could to the voluntary? No. Well, nothing except BIGNESS. I was attempting to hit the silly dotted-note chords on time and smoothly. A short while before I was improvising a melodic solo over the coda on emotional song. In that case, before I hit record each time I was stopping for a second and trying to get the focus and emotion of the song so I could convey it. That required analysis and felling. So heart and head work hand-in-hand.

Bob

[rick-slo]

The article was more about playing musically versus mechanically. The head versus heart idea is a verbal analogy
and I am more into biological synthesis than dichotomies. Posing playing the correct versus wrong note thing as a
general indicative is rather silly.

[devellis]

The heart pumps blood.

Both thinking and feeling reflect activity of the brain.

Not just trying to be glib here. Thinking and feeling are very much intertwined in people whose brains are functioning normally. If it were otherwise, we'd have the same emotional reaction to music when we were asleep as when we were awake.

As Bob Womack pointed out, over time, a lot of arbitrary distinctions have been made up that posit separate realms within the human experience. This goes back to a categorical (and often binary) way of thinking (e.g., good, bad; right wrong; mind, body; nature, nurture etc.). As knowledge expanded, people came to understand that most things are more nuanced and examples of things that are all about a single factor to the exclusion of all others are exceptionally rare in our daily experience.

Even the distinction between emotion and cognition is an artificial convenience to make discussing various processes somewhat simpler. Playing and even listening to music is going to involve us in integrative and complex ways that involve both our thoughts and emotions. For me, this is an important part of what makes music (and much of art) such a powerful experience. It hits us figuratively in the gut and in the head.

Certainly, our attention can shift as we learn or listen to a piece of music. We may go through a flip-flopping pattern of reacting to the song the first time we hear it primarily emotionally, then focusing on the mechanics of it (relatively devoid of the original emotions but perhaps fraught with others like frustration) as we learn it, and then return to a more emotional focus as we try to convey a particular feeling with it. But none of these are pure states.

I get the intent of the original post and I'm not trying to undermine that point. But I think it's useful to acknowledge that our feelings and our thoughts work together. It's probably especially important for songwriters to recognize that so that they can exploit the cognitive stuff to deliver the affective stuff. But it's also true for pure players. As an example, is a hard-to-play passage worth the work? Does it pack some kind of punch that's important to the tune or is it just a connection between two other parts that the original performer came up with? That sort of analysis can inform how we approach a challenging tune and ultimately how listeners experience it.

[steve223]

I wished my hands could translate what my heart is saying