Three Songs You Can Play Cold

Someone hands you a guitar
at the end of an evening.

The room goes quiet
in that friendly, terrible way.

And you discover
that you know forty songs
at seventy percent
and nothing at all
at a hundred.

Forty songs is a hobby.

Three songs you can play cold
is a different thing entirely.

Cold means what it says.

Cold hands.

No warm-up.

A room with the wrong sound in it.

An instrument that is not yours
and is set up badly.

Tired, mildly embarrassed,
no lyric sheet,
no second chance
at the first chord.

Pick three.

Not your hardest three.

Pick the ones you actually love
to play,
because you are going to play them
far past the point
where they are interesting.

Then practise them
the way you never practise:
all the way through,
starting from the start,
no stopping to fix the bar
you fluffed.

Because the skill you are building
is not the song.

It is continuing.

Almost nobody practises continuing.

We practise fragments,
and fragments are where
we are allowed to stop.

So the first time
something goes wrong in public,
we stop,
because that is the only thing
we have ever rehearsed.

Three finished songs
change how you show up.

You stop being a person
who is learning guitar
and start being a person
who plays.

That is not vanity.

It is the difference
between rehearsing
and performing,
and it is a real difference
you can feel in your hands.

The three will change over the years.

One of them will fall away
because you got sick of it,
and another will arrive
because you could not stop
playing it for a month.

That is fine.

The number is what matters,
not the list.

There is a version of this
in every craft.

A demo you can run
on any laptop,
in any room,
offline,
without praying.

One talk you can give
with no slides.

One story you can tell well.

Everything else you know
can stay at seventy percent.

But keep three things
that are finished,
worn smooth,
and ready
when someone hands you the guitar.

– Serguey Asael Shinder