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| Thread: Three words better than "I love you" |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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Salamandre
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posted September 18, 2023 11:16 PM |
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JollyJoker said:
1) Exceptions confirm the rule.
There is no rule. Hands, feet, ass, whatever, they all match your body mass, you can play any instrument 27 hours a day, if you're fat, your hands will look fat.
On the other side, top musicians, no matter what they play, guitar or flute, need to follow a strict diet and mental discipline, sleep enough, physical train, otherwise you don't make it - performing 100+ times a year is destructive for your body and spirit.
So naturally you will find less fat people among them, and if their hands are thin or sexy, it has nothing to do with them playing guitar or whatever, but taking care of their life style. Or simply good genetics.
I also know tons of people with amazing good looking hands but they can't play snow 
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NimoStar
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posted September 19, 2023 06:37 AM |
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Quote:
And indeed, all women I've ever known mentioned hands in determining attraction
You know very weird women... (and I say that as someone with well proportioned clean hands)
Actually I'm with Sal here, pianists don't magically get other types of hands, they have the same hands they would have were they not pianists, since bone structure can't change much.
That being said some greasy fat short-fingered guy with sausage hands will find it hard to play the piano and most other manual operated instruments.
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JollyJoker
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posted September 19, 2023 08:42 AM |
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You see that the wrong way round and that's not what I said at all. it's not that you magically get to be "beautiful" when you decide to become a model - you already HAVE something without which you would never even start or, if you did, fail. In 99 of 100 cases.
So if you ARE a virtuous musician you don't get "attractive" hands magically - you had them to begin with, otherwise you might not have become what you are. Look at Steve Vai's hands and fingers who is a guitar virtuoso.
So, with all that said, I now take it I was wrong and you have ugly hands, Sal? Unelegant, plump ones?
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Salamandre
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posted September 19, 2023 09:31 AM |
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You don't need particular hands to become a virtuoso, you need a particular brain. Of course don't caricature what I say and bring big sausage type hands into discussion. Normal hands will make it.
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artu
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posted September 19, 2023 11:11 AM |
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Salamandre said:
On the other side, top musicians, no matter what they play, guitar or flute, need to follow a strict diet and mental discipline, sleep enough, physical train, otherwise you don't make it - performing 100+ times a year is destructive for your body and spirit.
So naturally you will find less fat people among them.
Except singers. Somehow you have many many fat singers. There is even a specific term called "big fat blues mama" for lady singers with such look and of course, I can think of many fat opera singers, Pavarotti being the most popular example. Maybe, it has something to do with being able use the diaphragm?
@JJ
A guitarist friend of mine once told me, although one may assume the opposite, having too long fingers is a disadvantage when playing the guitar and this was the case for Hendrix. So he was kind of like Django Reinhardt (who only had three fingers on his fingerboard hand), he was a virtuoso despite his physical disadvantage, maybe even because he tried to overcome that so hard. (I must add, my friend was a patological liar who sometimes made up things just for the sake of it, so I dont know if this was one of those cases but it didnt sound like it.)
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JollyJoker
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posted September 19, 2023 12:02 PM |
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Nah. If you look at Steve Vai's Hands and fingers, they are as long as Hendrix', and I don't think there is anything Steve Vai isn't able to play on the guitar.
Let me get back to what I originally said, about women finding attraction in hands since they are something that you can see like they are. I would compare that with decollete for men in "determining" whether someone is attractive or not. What EXACTLY it is that makes a hand attractive ... who knows, but the thing is that certain types of professional musicians have a certain dexterity with their hands and fingers and usually have what I would call elegant hands (drummers, for example, don't need that, but I would be kind of surprised to see a violin player with plump hands and ungainly fingers.
On the other hand it is definitely not true that callused, rough workmen's hands are ugly or something. We have someone in our neighborhood, which I call by myself the gypsy woman who sells the homeless magazine in front of the supermarket (yes, the homeless have their own magazine in Germany). Sometimes I give her a Euro when I pass her, and after I had noticed that she had completely callused worker hands, and after that I touched her hand when I gave her money - it felt pretty good, actually. Like the sole of a cat's paw which is leathery on the surface, but extremely soft under that. That's definitely not unattractive.
Keep in mind I was talking about attractive, not beautiful, and even ugly can be attractive in its own way.
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Salamandre
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posted September 19, 2023 12:33 PM |
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The singers being better the fattest they are is another myth. The main argument they exhort is that you need a big rib cage and bigger lungs to perform vocally. This is scientific nonsense, actually is the opposite but we let it go, to avoid calling them just fat persons.
You can eat tons of food, your rib cage and lungs won't get bigger, the only thing getting bigger is your adipose tissue. "Big mama blues" is just a politically correct naming in the black community, as black people - particularly in the USA, have a much bigger percentage of obese people.
Pavarotti was fat, Placido Domingo and José Carreras were thin. Montserrat Caballé was fat, Maria Callas wasn't. There is no specific physical advantage in music (other than being handsome which is btw one of the keys for success in any artistic field), but in the end, being fat might negatively alter your performances, for obvious medical reasons.
Then there is Petrucciani, one of the most complete, mesmerizing and charismatic piano players ever. Ugly, fat, small, yet...
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Galaad
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posted September 19, 2023 01:02 PM |
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Salamandre said:
You don't need particular hands to become a virtuoso, you need a particular brain.
You just train your brain. If you are gifted you just progress faster. Many top musicians, past geniuses, had a very wrecked way of life, so the physical training and all that seems to be another myth as well. Or you can even be handicapped, like the amazing Petrucciani you just shared.
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JollyJoker
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posted September 19, 2023 01:08 PM |
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Petrucciani seems to support my take on it - if you look at his hands, that is. Which was what we were talking about.
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Salamandre
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posted September 19, 2023 01:20 PM |
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Galaad said:
You just train your brain. If you are gifted you just progress faster. Many top musicians, past geniuses, had a very wrecked way of life, so the physical training and all that seems to be another myth as well.
You need indeed a particular brain (if you are gifted you said) then train it. Without that particularity - which we are far from explaining the specifics, you can practice all your day, you won't become a virtuoso.
The comparison with past geniuses is an anachronism. I was talking about performing 100+ a year, for that you absolutely need a physical and mental discipline and a minimum of training. Chopin didn't have to perform every day, on 5 continents. Different challenges, different eras.
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Galaad
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posted September 19, 2023 01:25 PM |
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Nah with hard work you can do. Many musicians attain virtuoso level yet are far from being Kissin or Lang Lang. Actually, these two don't seem in top shape either.
About past geniuses, I was more thinking about jazz musicians, who were (almost) all on drugs and alcohol. And they were performing more than 100+ times a year. Charlie Parker was practicing 15 hours a day at some point (not sure if he counted the gigs inside that or not).
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Salamandre
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posted September 19, 2023 01:33 PM |
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Actually there is an interview of Kissin on youtube where he says he walks 25 km every day. Lang Lang said several times he has basically a robotic discipline, 9 hours of sleep every day, nutritional diet and a hot wife to train with - tout est bon dans le cochon, right?
Look, generalizations can always be countered with specific exceptions, we agree. But when you are constantly on a high stress level, either you have exceptional genetics or you have to pay attention to your way of life, if not your body collapses.
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Galaad
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posted September 19, 2023 01:39 PM |
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Well I don't know if Kissin walks 25kms a day but this doesn't look like super strict diet!
Also I heard Argerich took some cocaïne before going on stage sometimes... She didn't collapse yet.
But overall, don't misunderstand me, I obviously agree having a good physical condition is better!
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Salamandre
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posted September 19, 2023 01:42 PM |
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Galaad
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posted September 19, 2023 01:45 PM |
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Salamandre said:
Actually there is an interview of Kissin on youtube where
Man this interview must have been so hard for him. He really is autistic. Once I met him in a museum, we had a chat, it was super hard for him to make sentences. Yet he could recite Shakespeare perfectly. Go figure.
Salamandre said:
Argerich should never be done as example, as she obviously comes from another galaxy.
Lol, fair enough.
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artu
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posted September 19, 2023 02:31 PM |
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When the phrase "big fat blues mama" came around, such political correctness didint exist and obesity wasnt a regular health issue. The diaphragm thing might be a myth of course, but there still seems to be significantly more fat singers compared to fat guitarists or sax players etc., So, even if it is not an advantage, it may at least not be a disadvantage unlike in the case of being an instrumentalist, like keeping your instrument in position and so on...
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Salamandre
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posted September 19, 2023 03:19 PM |
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I just looked at a list of famous classical singers, starting from Feodor Chaliapin, Caruso etc. until today, up to Roberto Alagna, Ramon Vargas and so. The ratio obese/moderately fat vs normal is around 1 out of 10. For women it is even less. Give me a list of 30 famous guitarists and let's find 3 "fat" among, are you sure there aren't any?
There is this list, but as I am clueless in this field, I can't know how pertinent is.
So my theory is that we have been overexposed to Pavarotti in the medias, thus we have been impregnated with such image. Some of his unique performances are overplayed again and again, when is the last time you saw on TV, let's say, Placido Domingo or Fischer Dieskau? We are formatted.
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JollyJoker
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posted September 19, 2023 04:05 PM |
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They don't have FAT fingers, they have thick ones.
Fingers must fit to the hands. If you have big hands with thick (and most importantly, sufficiently LONG )fingers and start practising when 4 years old - no problem. Thick fingers pose no problem whatsoever in the lower frets because they are pretty wide. To play there you need long fingers for reach (when you want to play more complex things) and of course you must be able to spread the fingers wide. The higher parts of the board, beyond 12th fret are pretty small and need the right technique to play with thick fingers, but you won't see playing a thick-fingered guy an E-barree chord on fret 15 or so.
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Galaad
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posted September 19, 2023 04:45 PM |
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Idk, I've seen someone playing flamenco with 3 missing fingers... Would have never guessed just by hearing. We have amazing resources inside us.
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artu
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posted September 19, 2023 06:58 PM |
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Edited by artu at 21:13, 19 Sep 2023.
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I meant fat instrumentalists, not fat-fingered instrumentalists but yeah, looks like its more of a preconcieved idea rather than a statistical fact.
Oh, and before Pavarotti, there was Giovanni Jones:
1949
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