Intuition
Last night while not sleeping due to our incessant heating, I started to think about intuition. At first I was thinking about Jimi Hendrix. There is a way to play the guitar where you learn chords and scales and can generally follow directions. This is how I play. Then there is the way Jimi Hendrix plays. Where he anticipates and feels the way the music is working. Or Jimmy Page, he fucking creates a whole new taxonomy of guitar playing, mimicking other worldly sounds. Now how does this happen? What did it look like for Jimi Hendrix to learn the guitar? Did he just play and play? I deeply tried to picture him sitting cross-legged playing and playing. In the Beatles anthology they talk about liking George and having him join the band because he could play all the popular songs flawlessly. Maybe that is what it was, a voracious appetite. Learning as many songs as possible. Is it at that point where you start to have an innate feeling of how to resolve that melody?
Oh, melody! Going back to the Beatles, there is something to be said about melody. Consistency in mind blowing melodies. Melodies that maybe you don’t notice the complexities of because you don’t need to. They resolve right in front of you so damn eloquently that it takes a concerted effort to figure out what just happened. How does that happen? It is like great design, you don’t noticed the type, you don’t notice the page, you only fluidly read the words. It gets out of the way, it presents you with what you need to know, it feels right. The design is the absence of distractions. And how you get great design, I wouldn’t say that it is innate ability, it takes refinement, lots of it, and it takes practice, lots of it. Like Mandy Brown talked about in her A List Apart article, the more you work and work it becomes “secondhand, something we could do without thinking.” So while I think intuition is real, I don’t think it is innate or comes easily.
And yes, I did just finish the Steve Jobs biography.
