Learning to play Street Fighter made me a better piano teacher

The week that followed was June 2014 Ultra Street Fighter 4’s console release, I earned my master’s degree in music education, with a focus on piano pedagogy. Looking down on what was likely to turn out to have been nearly a whole year of unemployment I decided it was time to fulfill a long-held interest: I bought the game, a fight stick, and began to lose matches. While I enjoyed the accountability of fighting games, as I practiced my skills in the training phase, I discovered that I entered into the same headspace when working on difficult pieces at the piano bench.

If I can master a Beethoven sonata I am sure that I can also learn how to stop an opponent from jumping at me.

This comparison proved to be more salient than I knew, and, nearly a decade later, having opened a teaching studio with about 45 students, I’ve noticed a reciprocal relationship between learning fighting games and playing musical instruments.

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Both skills are physically demanding. However, we want to be able to focus our attention on abstract mental concepts and open up the doors to true mastery. In a fighting game, you’re up against an opponent whose specific goal is to stop you from implementing what you’ve learned, while in music you’re either playing by yourself or in an ensemble with everyone trying to complement one another. Both require intense concentration, pattern recognition and adaptability.

My parallel growth as a teacher and Chun-Li main has kept me in a beginner’s mindset, which helps me empathize with my students and appreciate how daunting the early grind can be. My time as a musician have passed. I have ingrained knowledge that reading music is the same as reading words and holding a pen is playing the piano.

However, I’m only a few years removed from learning these exact same skills in Street Fighter. It was difficult to get used to the fight stick. This is because it required me to master a completely different control method than a normal controller. In a sense, I’m right back to where I was when I was 8 years old, training my body to perform very specific fine motor functions.

How can we get our bodies to do these functions? Establishing reliable muscle memories is the first hurdle we have to overcome. It will eliminate the gap between how our brain tells our fingers what to do and what it wants.

Take it slow. You can learn to play do, rel, and mi. Now you can play “Hot Cross Buns.” Add fa and sol to that, and you can play “Ode to Joy.”

Find the best way to use directional inputs and hit each button consistently for various strength attacks. Now you can perform Ryu’s crouching medium kick. Teach your left thumb to roll from down to forward — slowly at first, then faster as you become more confident — and now you can execute a Hadouken. Pair the Hadouken with the kick you learned earlier and you’ve got the tools for a basic combo.

This is a simplified version of the process, but even at higher levels, it’s more or less the same. When working on a difficult passage, we want to focus on small chunks until they become single musical “units,” and then combine those together. When working on longer combinations, it is important to start with smaller pieces that are easy. So, once you’re able to perform the Ryu combo described above, you can start adding to it on either end without your brain having to struggle through an overwhelming list of inputs.

This can seem like a major hurdle for a novice, but it is not difficult. Mental games are far more challenging. The mental game is far more difficult for musicians. They know the pain of nailing a piece in practice, only to have their lesson or performance cancelled by their opponent. And I’m sure fighting game players have all experienced hopping online after a hard training session only to have that work go out the window because their opponent doesn’t sit still like a training dummy.

When other people are involved, things can get more complicated. My students understand this and I stress muscle memory to them. You can’t play at 100% in practice rooms. Outside forces will soon chip away at your figure. With rare exceptions, we’re not going to be able to bring that 100% to a performance, so we want to eliminate as many question marks as possible to allow our 80% to be as strong as possible.

One of the biggest question marks is how we’ll fare under pressure, and this is pretty hard to account for. We can’t really practice performing without, well, performing. There are some exercises that we can include in our training, to strengthen our nervous system.

The process is the same for both pursuits: Let’s say you’re having a hard time against opponents jumping in on you. Set the dummy up to jump and attempt to get them off the ground 10 times. You can reset the counter back to zero if you make a mistake. The pressure builds up and the 10th repetition can prove nerve-wracking. This exercise is a great way to simulate the pressure of a performance, and eventually you’ll start pulling off anti-airs before you’ve had time to consciously process that you’re being jumped at.

This is a lesson that I can use for myself. I’m a classically trained pianist with nearly 30 years of playing. An OK Street Fighter has a real benefit player (Ultra Silver, but I could hit Gold if I really wanted to…) is that I am constantly in that beginner’s mindset, which helps me empathize with my students. It’s easy to take for granted what I know as a musician — what I see as a straightforward major scale is, to a young musician, a long sequence of notes that requires you to change your hand position.

And as these sequences become longer, the early success wears off, and we’re confronted with the inescapable fact that, from here on out, it’s going to take Work to improve. I’m not so removed from the frustration, the sheer despair, that comes from the deep struggle of loving something, wanting so badly to participate in that thing, and finding myself lacking in the skills needed to do so. I’ve thrown piano books across the room and I’ve slapped my controller in frustration; I’ve cursed the memories of beloved composers and I’ve called my opponents’ characters cheap.

There’s no shortcut to getting over this part. Practicing skills like these is intensely personal: if you’re doing it right, you’re wallowing in your weaknesses and making a million mistakes until, through frustratingly incremental progress, you emerge from each session a little bit better. Stack enough of these little victories together, and one day you’ll look back and realize the great progress you’ve made, almost without realizing it.

Fighting games are known for their high-stakes, low-lows, and high levels of excitement. This is due to the fact that you can prepare theoretically for almost anything with sufficient practice. It’s no different with the piano — at this point, the only thing separating me from, say, “La Campanella” It’s time. You can blame bad matchups, cold fingers, lag, whatever, but in your heart of hearts, you know that your failure comes from a lack of preparation, and that’s why the salt stings so badly. A hard-earned win feels like a true triumph. You can blame everyone except yourself for failing, but on the other side, every achievement is your work. Your hard work.

There’s nothing more gratifying than watching a kid gain confidence in a new and difficult skill. It’s a joy to watch these children go from singing one note songs to complete sonatas. I also enjoy playing fighting games to keep myself connected to their struggles as they develop as musicians.