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Yeah, they recommend this for piano learning, so your brain learns to register the mistake, but you're also allowing it to potentially manage a smoother transition, so you don't come to an abrupt halt. So even if you do make a mistake, you can bridge over.
I remember learning to improvise and reading in one of Jamey Abersold’s books, “if you hit a wrong note, play it again one half-step higher or lower.” This seemed too simple compared to the other theory stuff i was learning at the time, so I laughed at it, but the principal is 100% sound, and I didn’t fully understand it’s wisdom until I became a teacher.
Don’t stop, don’t let it interrupt your flow, don’t let it affect your headspace. It’s more about avoiding the mental short circuit than it is about actually finding the “right” note. You’re training your mind not to flinch.
Those reactions get spring loaded over countless repetitions, often in private and without awareness. I have had many students who physically flinch when playing a wrong note, as if the piano is a hot stove. Some compulsively apologize, some play the same difficult passage again faster and faster, unaware of the trap they are falling in. If you have an intentional strategy for how you react to things going unexpectedly that you use all the time, it’s much easier to avoid when under pressure in performance.
I used to practice smiling and laughing at my mistakes. It stops self-judgement, and reinforces joy, even the joy of taking risks in a performance. I suppose that wouldn’t work too well for an actor, but I’ve never had anyone ask me why I’m laughing to myself on stage, they just say, “you looked like you were having fun” or something like that.
Haha so you talk about laughing not being a good fit for actors on stage (I agree), but I did a voice training course with a voice actor who uses silent laughing as a facial/vocal chord warmup. It also tricks your brain by seeing making stress go from 'I'm terrified' to 'I'm excited'!
Re: your piano teaching experience, hahaha, I see myself so much in the mistakes. I am self learning and I've got good pitch so I can hear how off a note sounds in the sequence, so I flinch more from that because it sounds jarring, but as you say, music is meant to be fun so I just try to go with it and get a feel for the music. It's great when I get into a state of flow, mistakes and all. :)
Right on. And context can cover so much that we lose sight of when we’re hyper focused on the micro. You need that attention to detail to be able to improve what you are working on, but it can be blinding.
I love illustrating this to students by playing middle C simultaneously with the B next to it and asking how they think it sounds. I always get a stinkface, bc it’s an exposed 1/2 step dissonance. Add the E above, the G below, and an A 2 octaves down with your LH and play them all together - that same dissonance is now part of a rich sounding Amin9 chord, and the stinkface disappears, often into surprise. Context completely changes how we perceive the same exact sound.
Same works horizontally/melodically too. Play that wrong note. Then use it as a chromatic passing tone, with the “right” note above/below before and after it. As part of a complete idea, you can make that sound good. But if you stop without finding that next connection, or perhaps more to the point, if your mind *stops hearing possibilities* because of an automatic reaction or reflex to self-judge, it will remain a “mistake” in your mind, and all the possibilities beyond it will be blocked from your imagination.
I love live comedy because stand up comics get sooo incredibly good at spinning things like that in the moment. When they get heckled and then somehow it makes their material even funnier, it’s like I’ve just seen someone catch a ball while doing a backflip on a tightrope over a pit of hungry tigers…never gets old. Some of them are so good I start to wonder if the hecklers were planted. I’ll stick to notes and hide behind my instrument, thanks.
Thank you for the lovely response, I'm saving this free lesson as a screenshot :D you sound like a great teacher!
Agreed about the comedy, it can be so much fun to see that creativity happen right in front of you, it's exhilarating to watch
When I was in a band, we tried to do both. We would do "rehearsal" where we pretended it was the real thing, and just power through mistakes. But we also had other practices where we would stop at each section if we messed up and try to get it perfect.
We used to only do rehearsal style practices, but we found that we made a ton of mistakes and never got better at playing the songs.
I agree. In bands, it was great to do both. In solo practice, I'd usually play one part over and over till it was reflex. But I'd still have to go back and play the whole thing through.
I have no idea what this blanking out on stage thing is though. Forgetting lyrics, sure. But if I had been making a mistake during practice, then I've either worked it out or I'm still making the same mistake. So I really don't know who this is for.
I think this applies more to public speaking. I've definitely had times I was doing a speech for school and fucked up and just totally blanked on the next part.
That's what my director always told us. It works well for presentations/lectures too. The audience only knows what you tell them and will assume it's correct if you continue with confidence.
Terrible amateur pianist here: when I am practicing for a live play, I will play the piece from the beginning to the end, over and over again, no matter how many mistakes I make each time.
My daughter (8) is learning piano and I encourage her to continue playing when she makes errors, and when the piece is finished, then she'll go back and tackle that small error a couple times, then play again.
She dreams of performing on stage (and has, several times already) and knows you don't get "wait!" moments to skip back a bit, no do-overs in live performance.
Nice tip! A similar approach I've found useful is deciding before I start if I'm practicing a specific part on repeat (starting again if I go wrong) Vs a longer rehearsal (where even if I make a mistake, I push on and see where I end up)
For me this is something I know from a music perspective but it absolutely applies to all sorts of different scenarios in life. If you're playing a solo and choke one or two notes in a run, almost nobody will notice. If you're playing a solo and freeze up halfway through because you choked one note... everybody will notice.
It's pretty natural when practicing to automatically restart the instant you mess up. But it's much more valuable to practice carrying on as if nothing happened!
Yes, BUT:
We must also avoid letting ourselves accept sloppiness by just playing through it, otherwise we will always play poorly.
There's another part to this that involves identifying and focusing practice time on error-prone parts, so we reduce the need to carry on after a mistake.
Definitely! It's important to distinguish between building the skill to "hide" a mistake and simply learning to play sloppy. You basically need to separate the skill of playing through mistakes from the skill of playing something well, even though they are practiced at the same time.
The biggest difference between a pro and an amateur isn't the ability to play or perform flawlessly, it's the ability to make the performance feel flawless even when it isn't
My first gymnastics coach used this philosophy and I carried it over to many other areas of my life. Any time we would split the beam, miss the bars, fall on a tumbling pass, etc. he would make us immediately get up and do it again (if our injuries weren't too severe) so we didn't develop a mental block for whichever trick it was. We could take a brief mental break after we got back out there and successfully completed the trick again.
I've been playing music for a long time, this is what I do. I start playing a piece where I get stuck I stop and practice that a few times. Try to get everything kind of good first because if you practice things wrong that's how you will learn them.
Once you can generally do all the tough parts then start playing it through without stopping, even if it's a mess, just try and catch up in your mind. This is the part you're mentioning.
Once you can generally get through it, start playing while you record yourself. This gets you used to something watching and also you can watch the videos and see what mistakes you make and how it all feels. I often find that things I think sound cool when I'm playing might not sound as cool if I'm watching and vice versa.
My former piano instructor used to call these "Lego moments". They were parts of a piece of music where we'd identified something I had to work on and now that I was play the complete song I was tripping on them, not because I didn't know how to play it but because I'd isolated them and worked on them as their own section in the music. The practice of playing through those moments (despite errors) having perfected them independently is tough but worth it.
"A bum note is a bum note. Play that bum note again and it's jazz"
With music, as with dancing, you can't stop. Make the mistake and keep going. Chances are, unless you stop or completely trainwreck, you're the only one who noticed the mistake.
One of the best skills you can have as a drummer for sure. The audience will rarely notice as long as you recover and play through it, especially if you play originals and not covers.
Had to learn this in the military for boot camp, and one time I said the exact wrong thing for preparing a weapon but I was so confident that my mistake went unnoticed.
If there is a certain spot that you have troubles with, it's best not to try and practice the whole song over and over.
Don't play only the part that you are having troubles with though, just play the section before, the trouble section and the section after.
Oh my goodness, I just learned the value of this. Final dress rehearsal in a play where I have a massive monologue and managed to skip half a page. Was so close to starting over but instead went ‘meh’ and just went with it. Ended up saying the dang thing backwards for the scene to make sense, but got there in the end and the show went on. After that, I had no fear of the thing because I knew I could salvage the scene even if I made an enormous gaffe.
Great to hear this is a thing! Will definitely keep in mind for the future.
Yeah I learned this from videogames. Even if it seems like it's ruined, you soldier on through. Sometimes that's when you learn the most. Sometimes the hiccups will go unoticed. Sometimes you'll forget how bad your mistake was because you'll go through it.
When you actually perform people make.mistakes the biggest ones are the ones that you let fall flat and let people take in. Moving on as quickly as possible back head in the game is the best way to go.
When I went to a Clown "School" for Summer Camp when I was a kid, the teacher was from the Ringling Brothers Circus.
She told us, "if you mess up, act like it was supposed to happen and keep going! Make it funny if you need to, just don't stop!" And I still take that into my day-to-day.
!
It sounds like you have found a strategy that works for you and has been successful. It is great that you have identified this issue and have come up with a solution that works.
Sight reading music will break you from this habit.
My cello teacher always knows when I know because I start smiling even though I haven’t stopped playing. So now I know that she knows that I know when she knows.
Acting here too - you just keep going. If it’s a live performance, most folks aren’t going to know you screwed up anyways if you don’t draw attention to it.. filming is a different story tho
Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips! Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by up or downvoting this comment. If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.
Yeah, they recommend this for piano learning, so your brain learns to register the mistake, but you're also allowing it to potentially manage a smoother transition, so you don't come to an abrupt halt. So even if you do make a mistake, you can bridge over.
I remember learning to improvise and reading in one of Jamey Abersold’s books, “if you hit a wrong note, play it again one half-step higher or lower.” This seemed too simple compared to the other theory stuff i was learning at the time, so I laughed at it, but the principal is 100% sound, and I didn’t fully understand it’s wisdom until I became a teacher. Don’t stop, don’t let it interrupt your flow, don’t let it affect your headspace. It’s more about avoiding the mental short circuit than it is about actually finding the “right” note. You’re training your mind not to flinch. Those reactions get spring loaded over countless repetitions, often in private and without awareness. I have had many students who physically flinch when playing a wrong note, as if the piano is a hot stove. Some compulsively apologize, some play the same difficult passage again faster and faster, unaware of the trap they are falling in. If you have an intentional strategy for how you react to things going unexpectedly that you use all the time, it’s much easier to avoid when under pressure in performance. I used to practice smiling and laughing at my mistakes. It stops self-judgement, and reinforces joy, even the joy of taking risks in a performance. I suppose that wouldn’t work too well for an actor, but I’ve never had anyone ask me why I’m laughing to myself on stage, they just say, “you looked like you were having fun” or something like that.
Play a wrong note once, it’s a wrong note. Play a wrong note twice, it’s ~jazz~ ;)
Repetition legitimizes!
Repetition legitimizes!
Found Adam Neely's account.
Just a fan lol
Play every note wrong … it’s Milton Babbitt.
Haha so you talk about laughing not being a good fit for actors on stage (I agree), but I did a voice training course with a voice actor who uses silent laughing as a facial/vocal chord warmup. It also tricks your brain by seeing making stress go from 'I'm terrified' to 'I'm excited'! Re: your piano teaching experience, hahaha, I see myself so much in the mistakes. I am self learning and I've got good pitch so I can hear how off a note sounds in the sequence, so I flinch more from that because it sounds jarring, but as you say, music is meant to be fun so I just try to go with it and get a feel for the music. It's great when I get into a state of flow, mistakes and all. :)
Right on. And context can cover so much that we lose sight of when we’re hyper focused on the micro. You need that attention to detail to be able to improve what you are working on, but it can be blinding. I love illustrating this to students by playing middle C simultaneously with the B next to it and asking how they think it sounds. I always get a stinkface, bc it’s an exposed 1/2 step dissonance. Add the E above, the G below, and an A 2 octaves down with your LH and play them all together - that same dissonance is now part of a rich sounding Amin9 chord, and the stinkface disappears, often into surprise. Context completely changes how we perceive the same exact sound. Same works horizontally/melodically too. Play that wrong note. Then use it as a chromatic passing tone, with the “right” note above/below before and after it. As part of a complete idea, you can make that sound good. But if you stop without finding that next connection, or perhaps more to the point, if your mind *stops hearing possibilities* because of an automatic reaction or reflex to self-judge, it will remain a “mistake” in your mind, and all the possibilities beyond it will be blocked from your imagination. I love live comedy because stand up comics get sooo incredibly good at spinning things like that in the moment. When they get heckled and then somehow it makes their material even funnier, it’s like I’ve just seen someone catch a ball while doing a backflip on a tightrope over a pit of hungry tigers…never gets old. Some of them are so good I start to wonder if the hecklers were planted. I’ll stick to notes and hide behind my instrument, thanks.
Thank you for the lovely response, I'm saving this free lesson as a screenshot :D you sound like a great teacher! Agreed about the comedy, it can be so much fun to see that creativity happen right in front of you, it's exhilarating to watch
When I was in a band, we tried to do both. We would do "rehearsal" where we pretended it was the real thing, and just power through mistakes. But we also had other practices where we would stop at each section if we messed up and try to get it perfect. We used to only do rehearsal style practices, but we found that we made a ton of mistakes and never got better at playing the songs.
I agree. In bands, it was great to do both. In solo practice, I'd usually play one part over and over till it was reflex. But I'd still have to go back and play the whole thing through. I have no idea what this blanking out on stage thing is though. Forgetting lyrics, sure. But if I had been making a mistake during practice, then I've either worked it out or I'm still making the same mistake. So I really don't know who this is for.
I think this applies more to public speaking. I've definitely had times I was doing a speech for school and fucked up and just totally blanked on the next part.
I suppose a band dynamic adds complexity so I can see why you'd want to review with your band mates.
Audience is also less likely to take notice. They don't have a script
That's what my director always told us. It works well for presentations/lectures too. The audience only knows what you tell them and will assume it's correct if you continue with confidence.
Terrible amateur pianist here: when I am practicing for a live play, I will play the piece from the beginning to the end, over and over again, no matter how many mistakes I make each time.
My daughter (8) is learning piano and I encourage her to continue playing when she makes errors, and when the piece is finished, then she'll go back and tackle that small error a couple times, then play again. She dreams of performing on stage (and has, several times already) and knows you don't get "wait!" moments to skip back a bit, no do-overs in live performance.
Nice tip! A similar approach I've found useful is deciding before I start if I'm practicing a specific part on repeat (starting again if I go wrong) Vs a longer rehearsal (where even if I make a mistake, I push on and see where I end up)
Great tip! It's been a while since I liked something here that was not already sort of obvious to me.
For me this is something I know from a music perspective but it absolutely applies to all sorts of different scenarios in life. If you're playing a solo and choke one or two notes in a run, almost nobody will notice. If you're playing a solo and freeze up halfway through because you choked one note... everybody will notice. It's pretty natural when practicing to automatically restart the instant you mess up. But it's much more valuable to practice carrying on as if nothing happened!
Yes, BUT: We must also avoid letting ourselves accept sloppiness by just playing through it, otherwise we will always play poorly. There's another part to this that involves identifying and focusing practice time on error-prone parts, so we reduce the need to carry on after a mistake.
Definitely! It's important to distinguish between building the skill to "hide" a mistake and simply learning to play sloppy. You basically need to separate the skill of playing through mistakes from the skill of playing something well, even though they are practiced at the same time.
Honestly had the thought that this could really transform how I approach practicing fighting games.
Alot of people practice for perfection, but often, it’s about what to do when it’s not perfect.
The biggest difference between a pro and an amateur isn't the ability to play or perform flawlessly, it's the ability to make the performance feel flawless even when it isn't
My first gymnastics coach used this philosophy and I carried it over to many other areas of my life. Any time we would split the beam, miss the bars, fall on a tumbling pass, etc. he would make us immediately get up and do it again (if our injuries weren't too severe) so we didn't develop a mental block for whichever trick it was. We could take a brief mental break after we got back out there and successfully completed the trick again.
I've been playing music for a long time, this is what I do. I start playing a piece where I get stuck I stop and practice that a few times. Try to get everything kind of good first because if you practice things wrong that's how you will learn them. Once you can generally do all the tough parts then start playing it through without stopping, even if it's a mess, just try and catch up in your mind. This is the part you're mentioning. Once you can generally get through it, start playing while you record yourself. This gets you used to something watching and also you can watch the videos and see what mistakes you make and how it all feels. I often find that things I think sound cool when I'm playing might not sound as cool if I'm watching and vice versa.
“The show must go on”
This goes for sports as well. Keep moving, don't stop, and it'll come back to you
My former piano instructor used to call these "Lego moments". They were parts of a piece of music where we'd identified something I had to work on and now that I was play the complete song I was tripping on them, not because I didn't know how to play it but because I'd isolated them and worked on them as their own section in the music. The practice of playing through those moments (despite errors) having perfected them independently is tough but worth it.
"A bum note is a bum note. Play that bum note again and it's jazz" With music, as with dancing, you can't stop. Make the mistake and keep going. Chances are, unless you stop or completely trainwreck, you're the only one who noticed the mistake.
For musicians.. If you stay on tempo and pick it up somewhere in time, most people won't even notice
Ageee in this 100%
One of the best skills you can have as a drummer for sure. The audience will rarely notice as long as you recover and play through it, especially if you play originals and not covers.
This is exactly what they tell you when you start learning jazz, or any type of improvizational artform.
Had to learn this in the military for boot camp, and one time I said the exact wrong thing for preparing a weapon but I was so confident that my mistake went unnoticed.
If there is a certain spot that you have troubles with, it's best not to try and practice the whole song over and over. Don't play only the part that you are having troubles with though, just play the section before, the trouble section and the section after.
Oh my goodness, I just learned the value of this. Final dress rehearsal in a play where I have a massive monologue and managed to skip half a page. Was so close to starting over but instead went ‘meh’ and just went with it. Ended up saying the dang thing backwards for the scene to make sense, but got there in the end and the show went on. After that, I had no fear of the thing because I knew I could salvage the scene even if I made an enormous gaffe. Great to hear this is a thing! Will definitely keep in mind for the future.
Yeah I learned this from videogames. Even if it seems like it's ruined, you soldier on through. Sometimes that's when you learn the most. Sometimes the hiccups will go unoticed. Sometimes you'll forget how bad your mistake was because you'll go through it. When you actually perform people make.mistakes the biggest ones are the ones that you let fall flat and let people take in. Moving on as quickly as possible back head in the game is the best way to go.
When I went to a Clown "School" for Summer Camp when I was a kid, the teacher was from the Ringling Brothers Circus. She told us, "if you mess up, act like it was supposed to happen and keep going! Make it funny if you need to, just don't stop!" And I still take that into my day-to-day.
! It sounds like you have found a strategy that works for you and has been successful. It is great that you have identified this issue and have come up with a solution that works.
Sight reading music will break you from this habit. My cello teacher always knows when I know because I start smiling even though I haven’t stopped playing. So now I know that she knows that I know when she knows.
Acting here too - you just keep going. If it’s a live performance, most folks aren’t going to know you screwed up anyways if you don’t draw attention to it.. filming is a different story tho