How To Practice Your Guitar For Real-Life Playing

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Transcript
Student: I’ve worked a lot on improvising for the last two years and something I found that happens is when I go to actually perform, I improvise on stage, it was brought to my attention about 2 hours ago today, I revert a long way back in my playing versus what I'm capable of.
TOM HESS: Yeah, that’s pretty normal.
S: What can I do to speed up the process of moving things into my performance?
TH: So you have to realize - I’m going to give you a short term answer, an immediate answer and a long tern answer. The short term answer is basically this. You know where your skills are. You’ve got your playing skills here, your soloing skills are at this level. Your improvising skills are somewhere below that. They’re here, or somewhere lower. Then below that is your performing skills when improvising, and that’s going to be lower. What you can do in your bedroom or your house is one thing. What you do on stage in front of people is always going to be lower, or usually going to be lower. So if you know about, what that difference might be, then you wouldn’t necessarily attempt to improvise at the same level of difficulty, complexity or speed as you would when you’re at home, right? If you could to this at home, that’s your maximum ability, don’t do that in front of a crowd, right? You have to play down here. All right?
TH: So if you were about to walk on stage right now and were going to improvise and you’re nervous about these people seeing you make a mistake or whatever, I would say “Ok Darryl, you’re going to improvise at this level, don’t go beyond this level right now”. Because in the next two minutes when you are about to do it, you don’t have time to close that gap, ok? That’s the short term answer.
TH: The long term answer is, of course we want to close the gap. We want to take away or at least shorten the gap between your theoretical improvisational skills, when you’re at home or whatever, and your live performing improvising skills. We want this, to go like that - close the gap.
TH: Now there are two ways really to bring this up. Your live performing or live improvising skill sets up. The first way is to simply practice being - closing the gap from here to here and the second way is leaving the gap where it is and not worry about closing it but raising this level. When you raise this level, again this is the level of your improvising skills at home, when you raise this, and let’s say this is 85% of what you could do at home, this is 100% at your max capacity, and this is 85% whatever, could be 65%, could be 98%, it’s some relative percent of this. You raise this and this bottom guy comes up with it. Okay that’s one way. The other way is to close the gap. The best way is to do what? Both, right? Is to do this, that’s the best way. But there are essentially two main ways to work on this. Increase the top line number or close the gap. Ok, that’s the long term answer.
TH: Now how would we approach each one? If we want to increase your maximum capacity skill, then it’s simply doing more of what you’re already doing. You’re a good guitar player. So you already know how to advance your skills. You’re just going to do more of that and bring everything up with it. You don’t need specific instruction on that because you’re already doing it.
TH: As far as closing the gap, if you want to do this part, well then there are a few things that need to happen. One, put yourself in a situation where you are performing more regularly. That helps you to relax when you really realize: A) it’s not a big deal if I make a mistake despite what people might say or think, or whatever-ok it’s really not a big deal. The second thing is, when you’re practicing at home, as best as you can, simulate that environment. Okay, how would you simulate the environment? Well one, you would put your amplifier where it would actually be on the stage. You would stand where you would stand on the stage. You might have a monitor here, right in front of you, a wedge or whatever right on the stage, you would have lights right in your face like those, where you can’t see really anything. Those are just simple white lights that are constant. When you’re playing a real show, the lights are all different colors and they’re on and off, maybe there’s, the thing that would always killed me was a strobe light. That would immediately make me start making mistakes, a strobe light, that would always do it.

[@DanVasc]

This actually very useful for any instrument! Thank you for that, Tom Hess.

[@truthteller1914]

This is the best playing advice I have ever heard for public performing, speaking or anything else. Well done.

[@tucko11]

Also, I suggest like he said, play in front of friends, family birthday parties work your way up to an actual concert hall or live gig that always helps sharpen your live abilities. Because whether you’re playing in front of five people or 500 gives you good practice.

[@erhanmusician]

Plus recording yourself. Always works!!

[@JohanTillgren]

Awesome video! Great suggestions for what is needed to become good at playing live.

[@gert-janboot3928]

Thx voor this awesome information Tom !!

[@zengokigyh]

Such good advice

[@unfetteredaxes1032]

Thanks for hearing me. You are the most logical maestro I have ever seen. If I could afford it, I would take lessons twice a week for the rest of my life from you.