Something I learned about getting better at playing recently

allen

So, I consider myself an upper intermediate kind of player, but a couple of things happened recently.

I went for an audition for a band and it took me hours to practice the songs to the level that I didn't make too many mistakes. I never normally practice a song all the way through or that hard. I particularly found it hard playing through to the original track and keeping up for the whole 3 minutes.

I then decided to record some 30 second performances for instagram. Each one took bloody hours to absolutely nail (and I'm not even sure that I did in the end).

The pretty obvious lesson from all of this is that I was learning stuff before so that I could play it in a kind of compromised way - I could play it if I didn't mind a mistake or 2 every time.

Since then I've been pushing myself to record something for instagram every week to force myself to put the work into absolutely getting it 100%. This week it's the intro to sweet child o mine. Sorry!

If you haven't recorded yourself playing something I totally recommend it as a way to improve.

monquixote

The old adage is an amateur practices until they can get it right, a professional practices until they can't get it wrong.

Learning a set is a learnable skill. I can learn songs really quickly from playing in a bunch of cover bands.

Tannin

Wise words Allen. Trouble is, I lose interest at the point where I can play all the parts of a song, which is long before I can play all the parts mistake-free one after the other. Once I'm within sight on being able to play something right all the way through (just within sight of it, not actually there), I'm either complicating it with new (and difficult) variations, or I'm  working on some other thing. 

Your audition was obviously very good for your playing. (My gigging days were decades ago. I'm a much better player now  - bad habits notwithstanding - but  I won't be doing that again.) You should audition every week!

HAL9000

In a similar vein...

I’d consider myself to be an intermediate player but despite having played live a number of times I’ve never been part of a permanent band.

Recently I auditioned for a band and was given a list of nearly fifty songs just under a fortnight beforehand. Now to be fair a lot of them were blues, shuffles, fifties R’n’R so nothing too onerous. However the vast majority were either obscure or not the version everybody knows. So spent two or three hours every day going through YouTube and Spotify to make sure I’d got a handle on all the chord structures, intros, turnarounds, etc, and somehow managed to get through the audition. One of the band members sent me recordings from our first rehearsal - I’d never actually recorded myself before so this was the first time I’d actually heard what I sounded like ‘from the outside’). Listening back to a recording certainly means you can hear things far more objectively than when you’re part of the action, and get a halfway-decent feel about areas for improvement.

Like the OP, if you haven’t already done so, I’d recommend recording your playing and then critically analysing things. (In my case there were one or two timing issues, a few wrong notes, a tendency to repeat myself, plus one particularly cringeworthy ‘inability to count bars’ incident.)

MikeC

I think this is sound advice (no pun intended). After not gigging for 10 years, I'm now standing in for an injured friend in a covers band and we are gigging 'regularly' (if there is such a thing during the pandemic - ie once or twice a month). But its hard to learn 4-5 new songs a week, remember the other 60 we now play now and again and maintain my day job / marriage!

I tend to find a lesson on youtube I like (that may cut some corners) and work that out so that it fits the band's dynamics. Once I've kind of mastered it (especially in a live context), I then see if I can get it closer to the original. I'm a very average / intermediate player, just been playing for almost 45 years. There is no substitute for hard work / practice, and as you say, listening to recordings of yourself.  

CaseOfAce

It's quite a revelation to hear yourself playing at rehearsal / at a gig.

First thing I noticed was how much our drummer's tempo drifts... like er...substantially.... gulp.

The second thing i noticed was how little boost I needed for my solos to stand out (and yet I persist in slamming up the slider to max on my GE-7 mid gig thinking I can't be heard and forgetting erm...ear fatigue!?). 

Recording yourself along with practicing with a metronome is one of those tiresome "do I have to ?" habits (much like eating your greens) that unfortunately are a good thing.

As an aside I once read Zappa always recorded his band in rehearsal and live and provided them with the recordings after.

Dominic

Once you reach a certain level of competence it's very easy to skim over tunes and 'bluff' your way through songs especially in a band context as the bass, vocals or other instruments hide you from yourself.
Easy to get 95% of the way there but the little nuances ,voicings,inversions go under the radar until you record /isolate yourself and listen .
It can make a very big difference .