Ok, so some days you just have to whine and complain and you are feeling all down and like you can’t accomplish ANYTHING…
Well, turning to this story may help…
Billy McLaughlin is a well-known new age fingerstyle guitar player recording on the Narada label. {Fingerstyle is a technique of playing where the guitarist plucks the strings directly with their fingertips, nails or picks attached to the fingers. Most commonly, the guitar is played by strumming or by flatpicking – picking notes with a plectrum.}
McLaughlin is a five-time Minnesota Music Award winner and has a catalog of 11 CD releases and has appeared on the Billboard Top-Ten Charts.
But then…he began having problems controlling his left hand, not hitting the right notes and not understanding why this was happening. Audiences thought maybe he was partying a bit too much in the dressing room. It got so bad he couldn’t even perform his own compositions.
Turns out, McLaughlin has focal dystonia, a mysterious ailment that affects about 10,000 musicians around the world.
In McLaughlin’s case, the pinkie and ring finger on his left hand — the hand a right-handed guitarist uses to form chords or run scales on the fretboard — curled inward.
Instead of giving up, McLaughlin decided to relearn how to play the guitar left-handed — which another acoustic guitar virtuoso, Leo Kottke, likens to trying to breathe through your feet. It’s exactly that hard.
McLaughlin says:
You know the vase hits the floor and in that moment that it shatters and that sound comes out you realize, ‘Oh, oh, that’s gone forever.’ And in my case, there’s no new hand to put on. But I found another way around it. And that’s a lesson for every area of my life.
McLaughlin is the subject of the forthcoming documentary Changing Keys: Billy McLaughlin and the Mysteries of Dystonia.
Go see it.