Perfect is a myth.
It’s impossible to play something “perfect”. No matter how good you play something now, no matter how perfect you think it sounded in the moment if you record your performances, you’ll look back later and notice things that could have been better. You’ll always find things that would sound better if you did them differently.
Striving for perfection in a musical performance is a recipe for depression and burnout or at the very least an uninspiring performance. If you ever think “That was perfect, there is no way I or anyone else could do that better than I just did it” you are lying to yourself. Perfect in music, in this world, doesn’t exist. Unless you’re Jesus, you’re not playing anything perfectly, so just get that idea right out of your head!
A healthier way to think of things is to look at your practice and performances not as a search for the perfect performance, but as a learning experience. Every time you get up on stage, or sit down in the practice room you should be looking to do the best you can with what you have to work with.
No performance will go perfectly, something will happen, something will go wrong. You’ll make a mistake, or some piece of equipment will go down during the show. I’ve seen amp tubes burn up on stage, power outages, and people tripping on cables. Wireless signals get crossed or dropped, and strings break. Stuff happens.
You need to train yourself to be focused on creating a great performance while you’re performing, to celebrate what went right, and then recognize areas for improvement for next time.
We musicians don’t just perform once. We keep performing, so letting one concert define your career is a mistake, and allowing one botched event to tank your self-esteem is the same.
Another thing to understand is that musical skills on your instrument have a relatively short shelf life. If you stop practicing for a while, your chops are going to suffer and you won’t be able to play as long or as well as you were when you were practicing regularly.
You can’t expect your skills to keep growing without exercising, like how you can’t expect your body to stay in good shape sitting at a desk all day and drinking diet sodas … but I wouldn’t know anything about that. I’m in the best shape of my life!
Learning music (any skill, really), is a lifelong journey. You’ll never “arrive” and feel like you’ve “made it” if you’re serious about music and are a student of the art. If ever you feel like you’ve peaked as a musician, it’s probably time to reevaluate what being a musician means to you, because there’s no such thing as “arriving” at a complete end destination in music. You can define and achieve your goals, but once achieved it’s time to celebrate, then focus on the next goal.
Don’t get me wrong, many people’s sole ambition is to play in a band. Period. That’s awesome if that’s your sole ambition — to play well enough to play your band’s music and not crash and burn — I salute you, keep up the good work! If you want to be a student of music, “arriving” is not your goal. And even if you just want to play in a band, and don’t have any ambition to be an A-list player, you will quickly realize that maintaining even simple songs from gig to gig can be quite a feat.
You should always be looking on the horizon for things to learn, and ways to improve. Your band or group will thank you, and music will get a lot more fun when you expand your horizons. Don’t think of being in that band as “arriving”, think of it as beginning a journey where every gig, every rehearsal, every practice session is a point in that journey. Getting into the band is not the end, it’s just the beginning.
Where does your journey take you, and how far? Well, no one but yourself can really tell you that. That’s something that we all have to discover for ourselves, no single musician’s journey is exactly the same as anyone else’s.
The moral of the story here is to stay in good musical shape, work on your craft, and accept that perfection is a myth and completely unattainable. The goal — the real goal — is to be better tomorrow than we were today, knowing fully that perfection doesn’t exist. Expression and exploration, yes, but not perfection.
So keep practicing, keep learning, keep honing your craft. Every experience is part of the journey, both the good and the bad. Don’t get caught up in the idea that you can only be a great musician with perfect performances. Learn to create great performances and provide an amazing experience for audiences, because that’s much more important than striving for perfection and failing to achieve the impossible. Audiences don’t care if the music is perfect, they care if it’s a great experience to listen to it, so focus on that instead!