“You need to still practice a lot! Watch my playing.” some fairly well known player wanted to tell me.
What is the use? who should care? and why should they care?
Who benefits? HOw do you contribute to anyone’s enjoyment or growth?
In the culture code, Daniel Coyle reminds us that vulnerability is essential to build trust, community feelings, team…
People like Pat Flynn, by being open, self exposing, built communities around their work, that feel them as humans and are very loyal.
yet, still there seem to be players (not using the term musician), who want audience to see them as perfect and worship them etc… somehow they believe perfection is the key to what they want…
should there be perfect playing? yes… to serve the music and the connection in the useful way. without transcribing, practising long and deliberate, without skill to express the details and complexity, the musician limits herself… so yes… all those are needed.
but machine like perfection makes one the same as the other and replaceable. one can go to the extend of saying, the mistakes is the personality. the continuation of music inspite of the mistakes, the grace, the connection… knowing what is the priority. wanting to look all perfect and separate from the audience is so far away from reality.
The obsessed editor equivalent in guitar playing, the obsessed player, perfecting with no practical sense of reality in mind…
The divergent player is happy with one good performance. He knows it’s not about the notes. 10 times more mistakes, but when he plays, there is something transfered to the listener.
the dance between the player and the guitar. the honesty of the player rather than the tension and I am great attitude.
Take the copywriter analogy. One of the first things a good copywriter will tell us is to go for write like you talk. Grammar comes second – no don’t ignore grammar for the sake of it, but when conversation is affected, go for conversation than strict grammar and sentence structure.
Isn’t this true about music playing too? who set the rules that some kind of a cleaned up set of notes is what music is about?
Personal experience: one of the earlier videos that brought me a lot of supporters, had a very very obvious lyrics mistake – the mistake changed the meaning from ‘swing’ to ‘cow fodder’. yes, that level.
someone told me that was the video that attracted the most, since I continued singing keeping the flow, being in the space, inspite of the obvious mistake.
see, performance is not about music alone. it is how the person connects with the music enough to ignore other things. the silent guts. the commitment to the priorities.
I don’t want to be a convergent fault finding player who dwells in the negative and has lost touch with the world.
Egoistic and telling that the world is wrong in not noting their perfection is all fine… it is up to them. But then, the world may not know that!
The divergent arranger, the author who has good content, love stories and tales of beautiful sadness to tell, connects with the audience.
Instead of wasting time on matters that don’t connect, he invests in the audience and him. he becomes the audience, who himself feels the emotional, the song in the playing.
the intangibe rather than the tangible. which is of course always more difficult – the tangible is easy. the intangible is a way of being… a trance to be gifted to the one who listens.
inspite of mistakes, when the other sees the player, safe behind the guitar, being who he really is and always will be in the beginning and ending of the world and time and space, one in oneness, the other is no more. included, safe and loved.