Bar eight.
Your finger landed in the wrong place
for a quarter of a second,
and you heard it.
No one else did.
The room is loud.
The drummer is loud.
Half the people are talking,
and the other half
have never heard this song,
which means they do not know
what was supposed to happen.
A wrong note in a song
nobody knows
is just a note.
Then the real damage starts.
You spend bar nine
thinking about bar eight.
You spend the chorus
deciding whether it was obvious.
By the second verse
you are watching one face near the front
and trying to read it.
You are no longer in the song.
That part they do hear.
They hear you come in late
because your attention was behind you.
They hear the dynamics go flat
because you have turned careful.
They hear you stop listening
to the person you are playing with,
which was the only thing
holding the four of you together
in the first place.
A quarter of a second
became four minutes.
Not because of the mistake.
Because of the review.
The players who look easy on stage
are not the ones who never err.
They are the ones who have practised
letting it go in the next beat.
That is a skill.
It is trainable.
Almost nobody trains it,
because rehearsal teaches the opposite.
Stop. Go back. Fix it. Again.
You can spend years
teaching yourself
that a mistake means stop,
and then wonder
why stopping is what your hands do
in front of two hundred people.
So put it in the practice.
Play a whole song through,
and when you flub something,
keep going.
Do not wince.
Do not look at anybody.
Finish, and discuss it afterwards
if it still seems worth discussing.
It usually does not.
The take is the take.
Bar eight is finished.
Bar nine is still yours.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)