A teenage kid today listens to approximately 300 songs per week. Most of them once, scrolling through.
This is a striking number. No time for deep listening. No time to dive into a crafted melody or a guitar solo. It’s background noise mostly. Music becomes fast food.
Now compare that to the medieval monk who heard maybe 20-30 different melodies in his entire life – all sacred music, all performed live, all requiring his full attention during religious ceremonies.
Who do you think had deeper melodic experiences?
The monk’s brain had time to form deep neural pathways around those melodies. Each one was significant, memorable, part of his spiritual and emotional landscape. The modern teenager’s brain is overwhelmed, unable to form lasting connections with most of what passes through.
This isn’t a judgment – it’s neuroscience. And it directly affects your ability to create memorable guitar solos.
Summary
The original article ‘The Melody That Haunts You’ explores what makes certain melodies unforgettable for decades and how guitarists can develop the consciousness to create them. In this newsletter, we’ll focus on the modern attention span crisis and its impact on musical depth – and what you can do to consciously develop the sustained focus that helps you creating memorable melodies.
1. The Attention Span Problem
Endless swiping on the phone reduces our attention span. For most of us that’s no news. But many aren’t aware of one consequence – the loss of appreciation for well-crafted music.
For me, well-crafted music is artfully balancing harmony, melody and rhythm, transports the craftsmanship and spirit of the composer and musicians, and elevates my spirit.
🎯 Starting Point for Beginners
Here’s what this means for your guitar playing: if you can’t sustain attention when listening to music, you won’t be able to sustain attention when creating music. Every great melody requires sustained focus – both in the moment of creation and in the hours of practice that develop your melodic vocabulary. If your practice sessions consist of scrolling through tabs while playing fragments, you’re basically training distraction, not musical depth. Start with this: one 15-minute practice session with your phone locked in another room. Notice how different your playing feels.
When attention spans shrink, so does the capacity for musical depth. You can’t create something you can’t sustain attention for.
This affects guitarists in multiple ways:
Surface-Level Learning
Quick video tabs teach you the notes but not the why. You learn the pattern without understanding the musical thinking behind it. Your playing becomes a collection of borrowed fragments rather than coherent musical statements.
Impatience with Development
Real melodic ability develops over months and years, not in weekend workshops. But when you’re used to instant gratification from social media, the patient work of building musical depth feels frustrating.
Fragmented Practice
Jumping between different exercises, songs, and techniques without deep focus on any of them. You’re practicing distraction, not mastery.
2. The Cultural Shift in Musical Consumption
For me, sometimes music means sitting in my chair, maybe with eyes closed, listening. Just listening, letting the melodies, harmonies and rhythm take me where they want to take me. And imagining where on the guitar to play that melody. Or listening in the dark with some candles. Damn, that’s an important part of my musical life.
The opposite of this is music as sonic wallpaper – something playing in the background while you do other things. Both approaches have their place, but only deep listening builds the internal musical library that great players draw from.
🧠 Starting Point for Thinkers
Consider the economics: Spotify pays artists fractions of cents per stream. The business model requires volume – hundreds of millions of plays to generate meaningful income. This incentivizes music that works as background, that doesn’t demand full attention, that fits algorithmic playlists. The financial structure of modern music distribution literally rewards music that doesn’t require deep listening. As a musician, you face a choice: create for the algorithm or create for artistic depth. These paths increasingly diverge.
What We’ve Lost:
The ritual of listening. Putting on an album, reading the liner notes, giving it your full attention for 45 minutes. This wasn’t just aesthetics – it was how musicians developed taste, the ability to distinguish quality, and understanding.
What We’ve Gained:
Access to everything. I can instantly hear baroque compositions, bebop jazz, Indian classical music, Norwegian death metal. The range of available music is unprecedented.
The Paradox:
More access, less depth. You can hear everything but deeply experience nothing. For guitarists trying to develop authentic voice, this is problematic.
3. The Craftsmanship Response
So what’s the answer? Not nostalgia for a lost golden age. Not rejection of modern technology. But conscious cultivation of depth alongside range.
Practical Strategies:
Dedicated Deep Listening Sessions
Once weekly, choose one piece of music – could be a guitar solo, a classical piece, a jazz standard. Give it three full listens with complete attention. No multitasking. No scrolling. No reading. Just listening.
Analyze what you hear. Take notes if it helps. Let the music reveal its structure and emotional architecture.
Quality Over Quantity Practice
Better to practice one thing deeply for 30 minutes than to scatter attention across ten things for three minutes each. Concentrated practice builds real skill. Scattered practice builds the illusion of productivity.
No-Sound Practice
Counterintuitive but essential: regular time with no input at all. No music, no podcasts, no background noise. This creates space for your internal musical hearing to develop. The silence lets your melodic consciousness emerge.
4. The Deeper Mission: Psychology and Melodic Connection
Understanding why certain melodies haunt us reveals larger forces at work. Psychology plays a key role in this melodic game. We’re all subject to psychological mechanisms we don’t always realize or understand. Like a boat on a river: we’re driven and not the driver.
An example? An emotional memory can be tied to a specific melody, like a childhood song. Hearing it can even trigger the emotion itself, making it a truly haunting melody.
The journey from Gregorian chant to electric guitar tells a story about human consciousness itself. You could say – and this is a provocative way to put it – that the journey of humans when it comes to musical understanding went from introspection, belief in God or other higher forces, to quick and superficial satisfaction.
Sure, the guitar can transport and increase deep emotions or even spiritual elements, but it all depends on the music and especially on the melodies the player creates on his instrument.
The Question for Modern Guitarists:
Will you participate in the cultural drift toward superficiality? Or will you consciously develop depth, craftsmanship, and the patient work of creating melodies that actually matter?
This isn’t elitism. It’s about craftsmanship. It’s the recognition that creating something memorable requires more than technical facility – it requires the deep listening, sustained attention, and internal musical development that modern culture makes increasingly difficult.
5. Your Choice
Here’s the reality: you’re swimming against a cultural current. Developing genuine melodic depth in an age of distraction is harder than it was for musicians in previous generations.
But it’s also more valuable.
When everything around you is ephemeral, superficial, designed for immediate consumption and instant forgetting – your ability to create depth becomes distinctive. The guitarist who develops real melodic consciousness stands out precisely because this is now rare.
The tools I’ve shared in previous newsletters – the Trinity Method exercises, the inner hearing development, the baroque principles – these aren’t just technical skills. They’re practices that cultivate the sustained attention and deep musical thinking that creates unforgettable melodies.
You have a choice to make. Not once, but daily. Will you scroll through another hundred guitar videos this week, or will you spend those same hours deeply learning one great melody? Will you practice scattered fragments, or will you develop systematic depth?
The melodies that haunted me for decades – Gary Moore, Yngwie Malmsteen playing Albinoni – came from players who developed deep musical consciousness in an era that still valued sustained attention. You can develop the same depth today. It just requires conscious resistance to cultural patterns that reward distraction.
This completes our exploration of what makes melodies unforgettable and how guitarists can develop the consciousness to create them.
We’ve covered:
- The neuroscience of haunting melodies
- The baroque principles behind modern guitar solos
- Practical exercises for building your inner melodic library
- The cultural challenge and craftsmanship response
In upcoming newsletters, we’ll explore how cultural evolution shaped melodic possibilities – and why this matters for every guitarist seeking authentic voice.
☝️ For now, make one commitment: this week, have at least one deep listening session. Choose a melody that moves you. Repeat it. Again. Give it your full attention for 10 minutes. No phone, no distractions. Just you and the music.
Notice what you discover when you actually listen.
If this newsletter resonated with your concern about cultural superficiality and your commitment to musical craftsmanship, consider sharing it with someone ready to choose depth over distraction.
Dan Keller
