Practice Tips for Performers

yep.... rehearse the important parts.

I helped start a house band some years back.... we had only a few weeks to learn enough songs to do a normal 4 set show. A few of those weeks were wasted because one player had obligations.

So we started working on songs....but we only rehearsed the intro's, breaks/solos, and the  endings.   The club owner was letting us use his garage to rehearse since the current house band was still in the club.  He would set in his house and listen. One night he came out and there was about 3 weeks left until we started. He said he was a bit worried since time was short and he had not heard us play an "entire song" yet.

I explained the strategy to him..... he looked at me and said.... "Boys, humor me and play me three songs all the way through"... so we did and he was satisfied. We started 3 weeks later and stayed there for 2.5 yrs.

Guitarhacker


yep.... rehearse the important parts.

I helped start a house band some years back.... we had only a few weeks to learn enough songs to do a normal 4 set show. A few of those weeks were wasted because one player had obligations.

So we started working on songs....but we only rehearsed the intro's, breaks/solos, and the  endings.   The club owner was letting us use his garage to rehearse since the current house band was still in the club.  He would set in his house and listen. One night he came out and there was about 3 weeks left until we started. He said he was a bit worried since time was short and he had not heard us play an "entire song" yet.

I explained the strategy to him..... he looked at me and said.... "Boys, humor me and play me three songs all the way through"... so we did and he was satisfied. We started 3 weeks later and stayed there for 2.5 yrs.

Herb, Both Peggysuechan and you have brought up a practice strategy that reminds me so much of how I used to practice guitar when I was first learning to play guitar as a teenager. Once I attained a certain level of competence, I would omit practising parts of songs that I could play easily, and repeat hundreds and hundreds of times the difficult passages, either new or complex chord changes, or parts of lead lines. At this stage I had never played with a band or in front of any audience of any kind, just learning my craft. My mother, who was very supportive of me and my new found "hobby" used to constantly berate me for not playing any song the whole way through, and I could never communicate successfully to her that at that stage it would have been a waste of valuable practise time. It was only years later when she came to see me and my band perform at a show that she understood just what the years of practise had been all about.
 
Coming full circle to this thread, just this week I have purchased some MP3 backing tracks just to learn some difficult but well known solos by looping sections in Sonar in order to work up the solos before taking them into my live situation.
 
All in all, a great strategy for learning difficult sections of songs quickly.
 
Slugbaby, like you I like to have a "dress rehearsal" of a full new set, although I always feel obliged to have a least a couple of new numbers in a set played by the seat of the pants with a minimum rehearsal, or even a talk through only. If you and your band are experienced enough musicians, it rarely if ever completely falls apart and adds a certain frisson to performance and band and therefore audience experience.
 
Just my $0.02 worth
 
Garry Kiosk

Roger that Herb, I remember the last band I played in as drummer. In the last rehearsal before my first booking with them, the band leader / bass player deemed everything "good enough". I wasn't happy with his stage comms during song endings and he and the guitar player had played together for a while. So, I got him round to my place the day of the show, and insisted we go through every ending, made performance notes and basically told him if he didnt cue the endings I was going to do it to ensure we performed professionally enough to warrant the fee we were getting as we were the band for the biggest day in at least two peoples lives that night, the wedding band.

He got the message, I ended up leading all the cues and endings to all 3 sets, and he said after the gig that the band had never played better ! Its just taking your craft seriously.

peggysuechan


I would like to know what works for everybody else. I'll start.

1. Run through the difficult parts of your music daily. 

As often as possible, anyway.  Just go down your list of music, and one by one, go through the really challenging sections. This way you can be ready mechanically and confident mentally to perform at all times. 

Nobody has time to practice every piece every day. But in most pieces, there are a few notes that give us lots of trouble. If we'll just hit these few notes routinely, we'll keep in good shape.    

Assuming you're talking about solo practicing, there are two sure fire techniques to keep difficult passages polished.
 
First, practice with a metronome.  Set it slow and try to play at that tempo.  If you can't (and you might be surprised at how hard this is to do the first time), it shows that you don't have the notes fully under your control.
 
The second is to play passages at a comfortable tempo, but introduce a different rythmic pattern.  For example, if the passage is eight notes, play combinations of dotted-eight and sixteenth notes, or vice versa.
 
Both techniques will build a good "muscle memory" for tricky passages so that when you play them normally, it'll be much less challenging to get the notes right.

No How


these are very good tips.  Makes me want to try harder.

What i do is earvision the part then:
1) if it's easy I play it and make it sound hard
2) if it's hard i rewrite and see number 1 or to number 3...
3) ask someone else to play it as there are virtuoso's by the case-pack here.

pathetic aren't i?

You sir, have blantantly stolen the secrets to whatever mild level of success I have enjoyed. My attorneys will be in touch.
 
Randy

One thing I discovered late in life is to study the song, hard parts, and easy parts  no matter, and figure out 2 or 3 different ways to play the same thing.

I am not a performer, though. I just play for learning, and I enjoy figuring these things a lot. There are countless ways to play the same thing,  and I like to explore a few.

After a while, things make a lot more sense, rather than just practice one single way.

I think they are called "variations".