June 4th, 2009 by JohnRadcliff
From time to time I consider myself a performer or at least I fill that role every once in a while. Like every other performer, I make mistakes when I play a gig. Most likely from a lack of practice. I’m such a bad John Milton. Most of the time I look upon them with dread, but every once in a while a mistake can be a good thing.
When you’re performing, it can be a chance you to pop a joke about how you wrote this song, etc. Or you could just show the audience you are human and crack a smile. If you’re any good at all, that can win a crowd over for you. I’m the first that should practice what I preach, but a certain amount of interaction with the crowd will usually pay of for you. If you’ve ever seen Scott Miller or Kevin Montgomery live, you understand what I mean. Those two come to mind first, because they are just as entertaining when they are talking as when they are playing. I’m going to practice that a bit in the future along with my playing to see if I can get the crowds a little more involved with me.
Yikes that’s a crazy paragraph! It also doesn’t have much to do with why I started this post, but let’s just move forward and take what we can from it.
I wanted to talk about the kind of mistakes we make when we practice or record. My friend, John Williams, used to make mistakes when he was soloing all the time. He was going for something but he didn’t know quite how to get there. He would make mistakes if you compared them to what he would normally do, but the honest truth is that they were some of the most mind blowing collection of notes I have ever seen and heard. The thing was, when he would make one he would go through it over and over to make the mistake sound like it wasn’t a mistake. He would come up with something that would sound awesome by going the wrong way.
I have another friend, Joe Vallina, that played an entire solo of bad/wrong notes. I mean literally like a blind person typing for the first time, and it would come out great every time like it sounded like it was meant to be!
I guess what I wanted to pass along is really summed up in the title. Don’t be afraid of mistakes. You can reverse that wedgie and make it a good thing if you think about it the right way.
