This week, I finally suffered either a minor injury or just stressed my finger muscles to the point where they're in quite a bit of pain. On Tuesday, I made a breakthrough with my playing while learning Radiohead's Street Spirit. I realized how to keep playing a series of lower register notes ringing while playing a shifting melody with the higher strings. The result is gorgeously dense while being melodic at the same time.

Of course, the downside is in holding the hand cramping chord shapes in place while moving one or two fingers to sound the melodic notes and the string skipping with the right hand. Complicated to say the least, but also physically difficult. At first the first finger on my right hand began to get sore and ache and yesterday my left hand was a bit sore. This morning, I couldn't even play an A-chord with my left hand without wincing a bit in pain. Or any sort of a barre, really.

I'm hoping laying off the practice for a bit will help and maybe some ice packs, but it sucks to be stuck here just as I learned to play one of my favorite songs and am really starting to get a hang of running bass lines with my chord shifts. I'm also worried I might have pulled or injured the muscles since I don't really do any warm-ups or cool-downs, nor am I very good at moving from the typical guitar player way of playing - mostly small movements with small muscles rather than group movements with large muscle groups.

Proper guitar playing depends on pulling the strings into the fretboard with your arm and back, rather than using your knuckles to push them down. Sounds insane, but apparently that's how you avoid the sort of pain I'm in right now.

Not to mention the fact that this could also be a sign of carpel tunnel or some other sort of repeated use muscle injury (because its not like I spend my whole day typing or anything....) Thankfully, as my guitar instructor put it, "Good thing about carpel tunnel is that it's painful but not restrictive of the motions your fingers can make."

Right. Maybe I should've studied the piano instead.