String bending and visual navigation on the guitar
Just realized that I want to try to think about the “destination” note of the string bend when playing it, rather than the starting note, which I usually do.
What do I mean about “visualizing the destination” of the bend? Well, pretty much what I mean by visualizing any fret on the neck. But because I bend to the destination note and not fret it directly, I tend to focus on where my finger is at, instead of where the note is at.
When I look at any fret, I see one scale projected around it, with that fret being a part of that scale, at a certain step in the scale. The scale I see is dependent on the context, on the key. Not all the time, I’m an amateur guitarist, so all my mental models of the guitar neck are mash-ups, stitched patterns of variable “coverage”. Sometimes I’m led to an area that’s plain shooting in the dark. Most times I stay in well ingrained “maps”.
But I realized that over time, over the years, I became more tolerant of “bad notes” as well as “unidentified notes”. So the 2nd thought in this was that maybe some “censors” are relaxed. Most probably off, the phenomenon is more complex, but it was fun to be reminded of Marvin Minski’s concepts of Correctors, Suppressors and Censors in his model of the mind.