Intro
If I could go back in time and tell my 10 year old self, or 17 year old self a thing or two about learning, practicing and performing music, what would I tell him? Would I tell him to learn certain songs? Would I tell him that he absolutely has to practice 4 hours a day? Would I tell him to get a degree in music or join every band in town? Actually no. If I went back in time and could impart some practical wisdom on my young, impressionable mind I think my advice would be different, and have to do with how to create a long career out of music and how to keep having fun playing music while learning. If I could go back, I think that are really 8 lessson that I would taught that would helped me have a much better musical career and kept me playing for longer and better.
No Pain, No Gain
We’ve all heard this saying. It’s pervasive all throughout sports and business, and it’s used often in the arts as well. While this can be true in certain circumstances, like the pain of learning through our mistakes, or the muscle aches you get after a good workout. Most of the time this phrase is just damaging. In every instrument I can think of (including voice) pain is not your friend, and will not help you become a better musician. In fact, if you’re feeling pain, you’re probably doing it wrong or you’ve been practicing for too long. When I was first learning I took this phrase to heart. I would play until I had blisters, then continue playing through them, and considered those blisters a badge of honor, a rite of passage even! I would try to play faster and faster, which made my wrists tired, which caused more tension, which led to tendinitis. I was rehearsing, practicing or performing 4-8 hours a day in college and it destroyed my body and burned me out so much that I actually stopped practicing any more than once or twice a week for years. It wasn’t until after doing physical therapy and taking a hiatus from music (outside of my military music job) that I finally got back into playing the bass. So, sometimes pain is just pain, and trying to force your way through it actually makes you lose any gains that you thought you had. So, don’t do it! Don’t play through the pain. Take your time to work yourself up to it and listen to your body. If you’re feeling pain, stop! Take a break and come back to it later.
Proper Form and Posture
You’d think it would be a given to play with good form and posture, but it very frequently gets forgotten or neglected. It takes practice to get used to playing with good form. It requires practice and experimentation to figure out your ideal posture and form for any instrument. Ignoring form and posture can lead to all kinds of problems, or at the very least will hold you back from your full potential as a musician. Remember to practice and perform with good form!
Playing Faster Does Not Make You Better
Look, you can play as fast as you want, don’t let anyone (including me) tell you that you can’t play things as fast as you want, but if you can’t play it in time and with groove then you should reconsider your deicisions. No musician should be solely focused on playing things faster. There are so many things to learn that are much more important and will actually land you gigs. Groove, feel, articulation, dynamics, etc. Playing music poorly but faster doesn’t make it any less painful to listen to. If you’re butchering your part trying to play it fast it’s just bad music played quickly. Also some music was just never meant to be played fast. If you have the ability to play it accurately quickly, all the more power to you, but just because you can play a lot of notes doesn’t necessarily mean you should play a lot of notes. I wish I had learned that sooner.
A Little Theory Goes a Long Way
You don’t have to be a music theory genius to be able to be a great musician, in fact there are many professional musicians who have only rudimentary music theory knowledge because theory isn’t required for what they do. What I’ve learned over the years is that a little bit of music theory knowledge can get you very far. Just understanding scales, modes, basic chord structures and basic rhythmic patterns can set you up to be able to play a multitude of things without needing to dive too much further into the more esoteric things. Most popular music is built on the most basic theory building blocks, and (honestly) most music always has been built on those basic building blocks. Learn those basic building blocks and a whole plethora of musical possibilities and understanding will open up to you.
Practice the Hard Parts in Isolation
It’s a common trap to want to practice the whole song through every time. If you want to practice a song, you have to start at the beginning and play to the end, right? If you mess up, you need to go back to the beginning, right? Wrong! If you want to practice effectively, start by putting your instrument down and look through the music first. Identify the hard parts that you think will need some extra practice, circle them or mark them in the music. Practice those hard parts until they’re easy, then put the whole thing together. Once you can play the hard parts easily, it becomes much simpler to put everything together and play through the whole song without errors or issues. I wasted so many hours trying to play songs top to bottom. Don’t be like me, be better than me.
Practice Slowly First, Then Speed Up
It’s really common, especially among the younger folk, to want to play everything fast. Because fast is cool, right?! I did it all the time in my younger years. I probably still do sometimes. I know what you’re thinking: “but Trevor, playing fast is so cool!”. I don’t disagree, it is cool. Which is why the young whippersnappers like to play fast. But if you’re trying to practice everything at a bullets pace, you’re doing yourself no favors, and you will probably just practice your mistakes until they become second nature. A better, and more efficient way to practice is to start playing it slower and slowly work your way up to the tempo it should be. You want to learn something super fast? Awesome, first make sure you can play it accurately, then speed up gradually until you can play it both fast and accurately. Then you will sound awesome because you can play it both quickly and well.
Protecting Your Hearing is Essential
Another common problem among young or silly people (not all silly people are young), is the idea that ringing in your ears after a concert is a good thing. Like a badge of honor. It is absolutely and unequivocally not cool. Get that idea right out of your head! You only have one pair of ears, and hearing damage is one of those things that our bodies can’t recover from. Once you have hearing damage, you can never get rid of it. Believe me, I speak from experience. I live with a constant, high-pitched ringing in my ears (tinnitus). It never goes away, no matter what I do. Do whatever you can to protect your hearing. There are lots of options for protecting your precious earholes without compromising your coolness. There are really amazing musician earplugs. Not those cheap foam ones (although, those will work fine in a pinch). There are well-designed earplugs that don’t muffle the music, they just reduce the volume. There are also in-ear monitors, which are essentially ear bud headphones for performers, they are a fantastic way of reducing stage volume and letting you hear everything at a comfortable level. There are even some newer in-ear monitors that have microphones so you can hear everything around you, and your music, but at a level that isn’t damaging. There are lots of options to protect your hearing, use them! I wish I had.
Louder Is Not Better
To follow onto that: there is another common misconception that louder is better. If the music isn’t shaking the house down, then it’s not loud enough. If you don’t have a full-stack 8x10 amp with tube head cranked to 11, then you’re not a real rocker! Well, this is just silly. Taking music and making it louder doesn’t necessarily make it better, in fact it makes bad music that much worse. Much of the time we keep turning things up because we can’t hear properly, which has more to do with the balance of sound on the stage and the EQ than anything else. In fact, many times when we’re up cranking our amps on stage, we’re just amplifying the bad acoustics of the venue and giving the audience a bad experience. Don’t get me wrong, there is something absolutely awesome about FEELING the bass hit your chest. There is nothing quite like an immersive concert experience, but you have to remember that the feeling of the sound shaking and rattling has less to do with the volume of it than the number and quality of the speakers producing the sound as well as the EQ of the instrument and amp. So, having that full-stack tube amp could be an amazing thing to give you immersive sound, but you shouldn’t be cranking to a point where you’re causing people (or yourself) to go deaf. You should set things up so that you feel and hear that awesomeness without hurting anyone’s ears. This takes work, and often means you have to change your EQ settings for different venues, and verify what the audience is hearing. You should always consider, as a musician, that what you hear on stage is not always indicative of what the audience hears. Take the time in sound checks to verify that what the audience hears is going to be good.
Conclusion
Alright, those are 8 things that I wish that someone had explained to me when I started playing music. I feel like if someone had at least gotten me thinking about these things earlier on I could have saved myself a lot of headaches, and I could have created much better performances for audiences. So hopefully these things help some of you out, and you can come up with a different list of things you wish you had told your younger self when you get older! Let me know in the comments what things you wished you had known when you started, or if you’re new to music, what things you’re getting stuck on.