Music seems to float like holographic images in sound, filling the space around us, and although we cannot actually touch, taste, see, feel or smell... affects us just as if it were an actual physical object. This thing we call music... is a landscape or "Soundscape" an image built from vibrations that seem to float through the air, with characteristics very much like tangible objects we encounter daily... with dimensions and measurements not unlike things in the visible world. Music is not just a linear stream of events as most listeners experience, or for the most part as seen when reading a piece of music. Music Is Sculpture In Sound... it has shape and form... experienced just as other objects are when on a journey... that one looks upon and then moves on to the next. Music is like a motion picture in sound... instead of vision, taking us on a journey as we listen, leading us to where it wants us to go... but yet allowing us the most extensive levels of personal interpretation... instead of a concrete, static image as with the visual world, that always remains the same... except perhaps if we are under the influence of some substance.

Additionally, the very nature of a multi-stringed instrument's neck such as the guitar with it's frets and even the violin family without frets... is a horizontal and vertical grid, and can be seen as is Earth itself with it's latitudinal and longitudinal delineations. It is along this neck that we find the sounds that result in the music that flows from the players hands as such "sound images", just as if they are solid forms. The physical instrument is only a tool for producing the sound and the fretted neck, acts as a road map to where their locations can be found. As the locations on a map are not the actual places, the "graphic" locations on a string instruments neck are only locations where we can find what we need to create and experience the music.

The guitar... with it's horizontal strings and and vertical frets allows us to access these sounds with our mind functioning similar to a GPS device navigating through this environment of sound positions and places to reach and discover what we call music. We are all explorers on an endless highway taking us on this journey of music as we create or as we play and even as we just listen, for the music is both our guide and our adventure. This is the hidden, secret and natural connection of the Left Hand to the world of music from the strings of all such instruments... and the creative spark handed to Adam... depicted in the Sistine Chapel's Image. It is by no mere coincidence, or accident that the left hand is the chosen hand on string instrument necks for thousands of years. It is The Hand Of Creativity.

Craig Smith Guitarist