I have a gig coming up and am taking time each day to get up to speed. Prepping for a gig can be as much or as little as you make it. Want to be uber-prepared? Get busy about two weeks ahead, daily work. If it is very charty, that would be 2 months. Metronome practice, and a lot of it. Until the metronome sounds like Zig. Or Danny Richmond. and so on.
Meh. Point is: at least I have a plan.
And the improbable situation I find myself in is that I have become a person who is all about planning. Planning in the sense of structuring activity and time in a way to get things done. I also find myself at the a very weird crossroads in life. A place where I have hit a lot of strong numbers. Turning 50. 21 years on one job. Two amazing nephews turning 21. 25 years with an amazing partner who was suggestible enough to agree to marry me, baggage and all. My main man Wylee kicking ass at 11 years.
There is a rising drumbeat reminder of how tenuous it is and how things change. How much change I have seen. Who, and how, and when, and occasionally why. Rarely why.
There is a certainty that the present is a testament to how well or badly we have measured the past. The successes and mistakes form the ripples and eddys. It might be that the most important human mental tool is that we learn from mistakes. If we are especially aware we can learn from others’ mistakes. The humor in the idea that we are better off learning from the mistakes of others is that it is just not the real thing. Yes, you can learn from someone else’s mistake. But you won’t learn as much.
Nothing will get worn smooth by your mind like rehashing your very own gnarly, craggy mistake. Don’t pass up that juice. I realize that I’m a big fan of mistakes on the simple premise that mistakes are an essential tool. Throwing their value away is a monumental waste.
Mistakes are a huge part of preparing for a gig. It is all about making the mistakes before you get to the gig. My wife just sat through a week or two of me working on audio mixes for a project. Essentially it is repetitive listening to eradicate mistakes or make incremental improvements. Nobody wants to hear that except one person. And that person is always looking for ways to have to hear less of it. The continuous quest is to get more efficient. Not that inefficiency is all bad, it just is not as good. Being inefficient is its own, lesser, learning tool.
And you would be wise to ask why someone would put themselves through all that. All those mistakes and slop and frustration… Simply: At any moment you either decide not to suck at something, or you decide something else, anything else. So the odds are stacked against that decision. To make it, and make it regularly, you have to be motivated by something. Formal education is all about someone else providing enough structure to make that work compulsory and fairly evaluated. Otherwise you would be going all Huck F. Finn on your schedule. Without that external structure you need to do it because you want to do it. Your plan depends on it. Internal or external, that structure is essential. Huck was not going to ride that raft forever. He had a plan.
You have a plan of attack. Good. You can treat it as a formula like I did up top in the gig prep. I need two weeks to make all those mistakes. It is an inefficiency, but like friction generates heat, actions generate a voice. In music there are many variables. How you listen. How you feel time. How well you read. How well you can translate your inner voice with your instrument’s voice.Your voice becomes a product of your process. Your product will bear the fingerprints of your plan.
You decide, you act, you observe, you hopefully learn, and you apply the lesson. Done.
In a few days I play some Miles Davis, and Herbie, and Nick DeMaria (fer crissakes) and the questions all get answered. Musical questions, and some others too. And there will be more mistakes to provide the grist for the mill.
Miles’ “It’s about that time” is in the setlist, and each time I hear it I laugh at Miles playing with the words in a way James Brown or Sly Stone would immediately recognize. It is all about “that time”. Miles was always the man with the plan.
[this post is dedicated to my nephews Nick Charlton and Chris Gonzalez]
petebrunelli 