Go a bit further and use pencil or charcoal so you can smell the wood and lead and feel the texture of the drawing surface, helping your brain make more connections.
It also allows you to make more mistakes, which can lead to surprising directions.
And the team who makes the most mistakes usually *wins*!
See also:
The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture
By Frank R. Wilson
Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain by Betty Edwards
Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by John Wood
You Matter More Than You Think by Karen O’Brien with illustrations by Tone Bjordam
Love reading and writing on paper, but do read and write quite a bit on computer screens, too. Phone screens are too small and uncomfortable for me.
No TV at home, either. And even videogames, which I love, have held less and less interest unless they have good coop modes, an unusual mechanic, or excellent sound and story.
Leaning more and more towards playing music, which has felt like a present from the gods.
Having read McLuhan — https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-ASW-848 — and Lanier (You Are Not A Gadget), I worry about the future, but am hopeful young people will indeed rebel.
Making a strict hour and a half of no-interruption a day has worked well for me. Learned this from John Cleese (feel free to ignore the word “management” in the title of the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
Still occasionally get interrupted because of life, of course, but marking off an hour and a half and closing a door and putting all chores/calls on silent during that time is very helpful. And I understand that for many it is simply not possible. Private space is a luxury in much of the world.
A sense of play and no obligation also helps. For more on this I recommend Rubin’s The Creative Act.
I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.
I'm surprised they didn't test another northeastern U.S. folk remedy: only put a maximum of 239 beans in whatever you're cooking (otherwise ther'll be two-fahrty!). Hyuk hyuk hyuk! :-D
Hmmm, I disagree, having played electric and acoustic guitars for over two decades and begun learning piano and synths for the first time in 2025.
For one, you can’t easily play two melodies simultaneously across several octaves, using both of your hands, with an electric guitar.
Stringed electronic instruments do have their advantages, but so do the others. Each music making thing has its place in the spectrum.
Two books that have helped me greatly in my musical life, in case people haven’t heard of them, are The Listening Book, and Bridge of Waves, by W.A. Mathieu.
There are certainly guitarists who can play simultaneous melodies.
If you're limiting to a 6 string guitar the distance between the two melodies would be limited compared to a piano but guitars don't have to be limited to 6 strings.
Classical guitar is full of this kind of thing.
Having taken piano lessons but being more into guitar I think the thing is almost all people who play piano are introduced to this and it is a core concept in far more piano music than guitar music. But it is not impossible on guitar, and many works for piano that get adapted to guitar require the player to do so.
E.x. there are plenty of players who have studied and played the Well Tempered Clavier on guitar.
You can play with both hands on a Chapman stick, right hand can do the bass, the left the melody/chords or vice-versa (Chapman stick is played tapping the strings with both hands)
Guitars certainly have a more intimate connection between the touch of fingers and the sound, including the bending of the tone, one of Hendrix’s virtuosities.
Keyboards can approach that with polyphonic touch keys like the Hydrasynth (lean into keys, pressing them harder, for bending the tone in a configured patch), sustain pedals, and pitch bend/modulation controls, but not the nuanced touch of skin on a vibrating string.
I think synth guitars exist, too, but don’t know anything about them. The pedalboards are enough, maybe :)
My favorite part of the video is when Stéphane “makes a mistake” and shows it, like enlightened people, such as Cliff Stoll — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUZTTLpDtk — do :)
It also allows you to make more mistakes, which can lead to surprising directions.
And the team who makes the most mistakes usually *wins*!
See also:
The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture By Frank R. Wilson
Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain by Betty Edwards
Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by John Wood
You Matter More Than You Think by Karen O’Brien with illustrations by Tone Bjordam
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