You might find this hard to believe, but cats can play guitar too! My cat Loki likes to play, and she’s actually pretty good.

Of course, Loki can’t play guitar in the normal way. Having no fingers and being too small to hold the instrument, she can only play when I lay my guitar down on the couch or floor. She approaches the guitar cautiously (she doesn’t completely trust it yet) and, if she’s in the right mood, bites one of the strings gently, making a loud, bright sound.

I won’t pretend to understand Loki’s intention behind her playing, but the fact is, she’s a unique sort of guitarist. She’s plucked open strings on too many occasions to count, and she always does it just once, listens for a minute, and then walks away. Again, I don’t exactly know what’s going on in her head, but her habit of playing is too deliberate and fascinating to ignore.

The first few times she bit a string, she seemed startled by the loud sound she made. These days, with six months of experience under her belt, she seems to know what she’s doing. She doesn’t play a whole lot, maybe twice a week, but she’s been steady with it. The whole thing is pretty funny to watch, as you might imagine.

This post is all about what Loki’s playing has taught me about the guitar. I think we can learn something from every kind of musician, including nonhuman ones. Here are 3 lessons we can all learn from the greatest cat guitarist of the 21st century!

Loki doesn’t have the technical ability (or desire?) to fret any notes on the guitar. As I mentioned, the best she can do is use her teeth to play open strings, usually right near the bridge.

While she is capable of plucking any of the strings in this fashion, she finds the low and high E strings most accessible for obvious reasons, and plays them more often than the others.

This habit of Loki’s reminds me to appreciate the open strings. Without applying our fretting hands at all, we can ring out six notes: (low) E, A, D, G, B, and (high) E.

These six musical ingredients are all you need to create a simple right-hand melody! Because the open strings don’t contain any sharps or flats, we’ll basically be in the key of C major or A minor.

The open strings have a special sound, a certain flavor that that fretted notes lack. They tend to ring out longer and more fully than other notes, particularly the notes fretted high up on the neck.

If you’re playing acoustic guitar, whether steel-string or nylon-string, you generally want to be playing as close to first position as possible. This means you should be playing open strings fairly often, taking advantage of their unique resonance.

Another advantage of the open strings is that they allow you to play music while isolating your right (or picking) hand.

In fact, one of the best ways to develop your technique is to work on one hand at a time. With both hands going at once, there’s often too much going on for you to problem-solve effectively.

Don’t be afraid to give your left hand a break while you practice alternate picking, arpeggios, tremolo, or any other right-hand technique you typically neglect.

Loki doesn’t play complex music. She keeps it pretty simple—she plucks a single note, and she just listens to it for a while.

I think we can all learn something from that. I mean, good music doesn’t need to be note-heavy. Rather than aspiring to play a lot of notes per minute, we should focus our efforts on being as musical as possible. That means one note perfectly played is worth a thousand played poorly.

Personally, whenever I’m not enjoying my practice time, I slow things down and try to listen closely. I find that it’s easy to play without really listening, and that’s just the sort of playing that can spoil your mood.

You might even say that your unconscious self wants to hear beautiful music even more than you do, and when that need isn’t met, you respond emotionally.

The key is to stay in the present moment. I know that’s easier said than done, but any self-centering you can manage will make a big difference. This is where it can actually help you to be an adult learner on the guitar.

We tend to assume that children learning music have all the advantages in the world, but one thing they usually lack is the ability to control their states of mind and reign in their emotions as needed.

As I elaborate on in this post, guitar progress is more a matter of the mind and spirit than of the fingers. Disciplining yourself to slow down and just listen, even to a single lowly note, is much more important work than speeding through a couple of scales.

The most impressive feature of Loki’s playing is her use of silence. She doesn’t sit around and bite at strings for hours on end. Instead, she waits until the time is ripe, plays a note, listens closely, and then leaves the guitar alone. Many days pass where Loki has the opportunity to play but decides against it.

We might interpret Loki’s peculiar playing habits in a number of ways. Is the sound too intense for her to play very much? Or does she just get bored after one note? Is she cleaning her teeth? Obviously, there are many unanswered questions.

But I do think she likes silence as much, if not more, than she likes the sound of the guitar. After all, if we read her as a certain kind of guitarist (ignoring that she’s a cat), we would have to admit that her music-making is overwhelmingly about keeping silent; a silence rarely broken, and only broken by lone notes. To be sure, Loki plays, at most, two or three notes a week.

Modern technology has a way of making the world louder and louder. Sometimes it can be challenging to find a quiet moment. As guitarists, I think we should measure our skill not only by the sounds we make, but by the silences we keep.

We’ve all heard our parents or teachers say, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Loki extends this to guitar playing: if you don’t have anything nice to play, you should keep silent and listen until you do.