4.17- Tuning Slide: Mistakes or Not

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
— George Bernard Shaw

Scanning some notes and articles on the Internet I came across an article that referenced some research. It was in Wired magazine and burst the bubble that we “learn from our mistakes.” There are many motivational quotes that would have us believe just the opposite. Or so I thought. I went looking and found that this idea about mistakes being learning is a short-cut in thinking. What many of the quotes really say is that mistakes are to be expected as we are learning. If we haven’t made any mistakes, we haven’t done anything. Einstein, Teddy Roosevelt, and Meister Eckhart, among others, lead us to understand that.

In essence though what mistakes teach us is what NOT to do. If we continue to do the same things and keep getting the same mistakes, we are not learning and growing in our musicianship. If we don’t do anything to correct the mistake, all we are doing is reinforcing the mistake. One I had to learn the hard way was missing accidentals or even key changes. I was adamant that as a good musician I should be able to learn what key I am playing in and not miss that F# or Eb. Yet time after time I would miss it. Or I would hit the F# when it wasn’t. What I wasn’t doing was marking the note I was regularly missing. You know, circle it or some other notation.

I was being stubborn- and perhaps not wanting my colleague on the left or right to know I had to (God forbid) mark a note that I should be playing correctly. (Even though they clearly heard every wrong note I played!) Instead of improving as a musician, I was stubbornly getting stuck where I was. Once I was willing to use a pencil correctly, things began to change. I also developed a series of notations that I use to remind myself of certain things that I have tended to get wrong or struggle with. I see that notation and I know what I need to do.

To say that mistakes are our friends and tell us what not to do can be a dangerous path- mistakes are not good things when we could have done something differently. Mistakes are not what we want to have happen in a performance. We will make mistakes, of course; notes will slip, something will be out of time or out of tune. Those mistakes will not improve our playing. The mistakes we learn from are the ones that we make in our practice rooms, or lessons- where they can be caught and corrected.

But there are other mistakes that we regularly fall into. These are more insidious that the missed accidental. They can go to the heart of who we are as performers. So here is a far from complete list of:

Mistakes musicians make that we can change:
Poor sound- We can’t truly hear ourselves when we are playing unless we are on stage and a monitor is giving us an idea. There are a number of reasons for this- we are on the wrong side of the horn, we get some of the sound through our facial bones and not from the air, we hear part of the sound in our imagination which “auto-tunes” the sound we are getting from the horn. In order to deal with these we can practice in places where there is a strong echo and we can record ourselves. The mistake we make is not finding out how we truly sound.

Lack of rhythm- timing and tempo are essential to good music. Some of it can be corrected by working with a metronome, but that will never give us rhythm. A metronome has no feeling, no rhythm. It is only tempo. Feeling the music is important, no essential. We will talk more about this next week when I talk a little about “flow.” Our big mistake in this area is to ignore how the music makes us feel and then translating that into the performing of the music.

Believing we can’t do it- actually, this is worse than a mistake. This is a killer of quality and creativity, a sure-fire way to fall into a hole we dig for ourselves. I know I may never be as good as Doc or Maynard, but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to be better than I was last month. In order to get there, I must be pushing the limits in healthy, organized ways.

Not planning- if we don’t know where we want to go, we won’t get anywhere. That doesn’t mean we have to map out our whole musical journey. It does mean we have to have an idea where we need to go and where we want to go. This is where the errors we make or the recording we hear can guide us. When I discovered how poor my tone was, I knew what I had to work on. When I found my endurance decreasing, I went looking for ways to improve what I was doing.

Getting stuck on hardware- heavy caps and the latest version mouthpiece won’t correct what is wrong with our sound. For most of us we are no where near the best sound the instrument we own can make. A new instrument may be a good thing- and the right thing- for some of us. But it will still take practice, practice, and even more practice to continue to evolve as a musician.

Fearing mistakes so much that we don’t try- the ultimate mistake! Just do it. Move forward. Challenge yourself. Take lessons and get feedback. Record yourself and listen critically. Be ready to grow!

Don’t plan for mistakes; don’t build them into your practice. But listen for them; prepare for them; and when they happen discover what they can teach you about a better, more effective, more musical way.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.
— Neil Gaiman