This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those early days, especially if you learned very young.

I learned piano starting around age 6, and I vaguely remember the first few years were spent largely on learning to control my fingers, stretch to play larger chords (as a child with fairly small hands, I couldn't stretch my hand to play an octave until around age 10 or 11), and so forth. I was learning to do this at the same time I was learning to write cursive, or hold a paintbrush, use a kitchen knife, etc - all kinds of basic childhood learning stuff.

Learning a new skill as an adult is like going back to grade school or even infancy in some cases. You can tell a small child not to grip their pencil so tightly, but until you've practiced handwriting for several years, your fingers simply don't have the control necessary to avoid using a heavy grip.

"Use a lighter touch" is fantastic advice for an intermediate or advanced student but incredibly frustrating for a beginner. Over the course of several decades of playing keyboard in bands I picked up the bad habit of playing with more force than necessary, which started to cause me problems. I had to practice playing with a lighter touch and that was actually a big help.

> This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those early days, especially if you learned very young.

Every time I learn a new instrument I'm reminded of the fact that many things just need to be drilled into your brain stem. I know how to play piano and sight read music for it but I can't do either because I haven't put the seat time in to do it in real time. I'm learning (electric) upright bass right now and there are a dozen technique issues I've noticed that I have to fix but I can only focus on a few of them at once.

Putting forth zero effort is how one ends up sloppy and stagnant. You instead need to be aware of your cognitive and parasympathetic bandwidth and how to utilize each to practice to a meaningful end.

Might be a neurological process. First phase involves low resolution control of direction and intensity. Second phase allows for tweaking. (Third phase being abstraction, where you can reflect on how to blend different ideas and movements to create a whole new pattern)