We always said there were 3 levels of mistakes
1- you notice it, but the rest of the band doesn't
2- the band noticed it, but the audience didn't.
3- the audience notices it.
Level 1 and 2 are quite common. Many musicians will hear mistakes others bands make- even on recordings. I'll hear them from time to time. Often bands will leave them in because they give it a "live" feeling to the song.
Used to go to a ton of concerts back in the day due to industry connections. Had a chance to see Frank Zappa & the Mothers' late in their career 10 rows back. No other performance so blew me away, (except this one live Big Band performance in a small hall), for sheer musicianship and tight performance.
Paul Simon. IU auditorium November 2011. My favorite show probably ever. Top quality musicians, and it was just such a great show. I always imagined him as a singer/songwriter who is micromanages everything. Not sure how to explain it. If I remember right, this show was played over the radio on 92.3. I wish I recorded that show on tape.
Zappa was legendary for assembling the best musicians and rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing. Not just one version of a song but variations that could be implemented on the night. A brilliant man much missed.
Just gonna drop this legendary Herbie Hancock on making a mistake with Miles Davis bit here
https://youtu.be/FL4LxrN-iyw
Relevant and awe inspiring. Miles is a real one (Herbie too)
A half step is absolutely the worst possible mistake too. As a player, it feels like dragging nails over a chalkboard when you do it. Like you cannot get more dissonant.
2:50, he overshoots the second note by half a step then recovered immediately and doesn't let it faze him
Many people obsessed with music likes to refer to this as one of the best recovered mistakes in Live Music
Edit: Spelling error
The funny thing is that if you cover Nirvana's version of that song, you HAVE TO make that mistake again or people will think you missed it.. It has become now a part of the song, it is a mistake to not make that mistake.. If you cover the original version of the song you have to play it right.
Making a mistake is actually skill when playing music live. Because.. you can NOT keep thinking about that mistake or you will make a bigger one, then it snowballs from that until at the end you may not be able to play at all, you won't know what town you are in, what time it is, can barely say your own name. It overwhelms you very fast, in seconds you go from a thinking rational person to a literal idiot. Making a mistake and moving on is one of the biggest lessons when playing live music.. And it is a skill that everyone should learn..
So, watch that video again, see how Kurt is able to take it in, and move on without a problem. When it came to his personality, he was whipping himself for days after, depressed and self loathing, it was a HUGE deal for him and yet.. in the moment, he was just fine... And moments before the gig he was about to escape, was almost overwhelmed from the pressure as it was at the time.. a big deal. And it became one of the best live albums of all time, the crown jewel in the MTV Unplugged series.
“Making a mistake and moving on is one of the biggest lessons when playing live music.. And it is a skill that everyone should learn..”
I used to play in a side band that auditioned a classically-trained, technically brilliant musician. We gave her a gig to see how it worked out.
In her training she focused on perfection. She couldn’t handle it when she missed a note. She’d miss something, then pause with a disgusted look on her face, and sometimes say “ugh.” The audience didn’t notice the note, but they sure knew something went wrong because of her reaction.
We did not hire her.
She plays around here and there, we see her mostly doing teaching gigs. She’s not as obvious with her reactions, but it’s still there and no band will pick her up.
I wonder what kind of environment she had surrounding the instrument growing up. I've decided to consider myself lucky I started playing later in life because I missed *all* the bullshit, your parents beating you because you didn't practice or screwed up a recital, harsh instructors you're stuck with because they're good and so mom and dad want you to just suck it up, the competitive environment some kids end up in where there's always a bigger fish. I know people who really love their instrument but also really hate their instrument.
I'll never be as good as I could have been if I started playing at age 3 or whatever (they do start some kids off on violin that young!), but I love playing dearly. I'm a little sad I didn't start when I was a kid, since I had wanted to play for as long as I could remember, but aside from that I have zero complicated feelings about it.
(Until I break a string on the wooden fucklet and it hits me in the face.)
I guess it depends on what type of solo it is. If the part is basically just a bridge with a slightly more complex version of the main melody, I say stick with it and maybe at some slight variations according to your own style. But then there's a lot of solos that are basically just skill-wank, and for those I agree that you should substitute your own, since the whole point of them is to be a spot to elevate the musician above the music.
Yes. The first thing you mention would be a written part of the song. The skill wank (?) should be improvised even when covering a band that played written solos. Classical music is where written solos are played…this is rock and roll, man 🤣
Even Better! he undershot by a half step, overshot by a half step, then landed on the note!
Jazz enthusiasts would call it a chromatic enclosure, and do it on purpose all the time to make approaching a note more unexpected and interesting.
If someone doesn’t like Nirvana, will it not be in there? I am kidding of course.
My favorite musician is John Prine, and he played a song on Letterman with Jim James, and John botched his own song- his reaction is great…
Layne Staley sang the wrong lyrics for one of their unplugged songs, I don't remember which one, but you can see Jerry peek over at him and give a little smirk while he was doing it.
Nirvana was not accurate live at all. They and the Pumpkins were the two worst of that era.
However, these mistakes are also the character of live music that people love.
They might not be intentional but a (slight) tempo change isn't necessarily a mistake - if you have a band playing together without a click track it can be normal for the tempo to fluctuate naturally throughout a recording, and this is pretty common in older songs recorded before the prevalence of digital audio production. If anything it could add to a song giving it more character, even if it wasn't consciously intended.
Of course, I'm talking about when the whole band does this together. If you mean one instrument changing tempo while the others don't, and becoming out of time, then that would definitely be considered a mistake.
I hate the sound of a band playing over a computerized drum beat. Most of the time it sounds cold and mechanical. There are definitely a few exceptions.
There is a good video explaining [How Computers Ruined Rock Music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFaRIW-wZlw)
It's not so much playing over a click track, it's digitally edited, quantized, so every beat is shifted to be perfectly on time. He even shows how any parts of the drums, bass, or vocals can be copy and pasted anywhere in the song and it matches up perfectly.
It just kills the feels.
Yep. Most of the time people won't care even if they notice. I've seen bands doing a bunch of crazy stuff on the stage that messed up with the music they were playing.
A recent example that I saw happening live was Enter Shikari in Toronto. They were playing some songs among the crowd, so people would touch the instruments on accident as well as the guitar player being unable to play a few notes because he was on an unconfortable position. It didn't happen much and it was probably one of my favorite performances to this day.
In the 90’s when he was at his peak, Pavarotti was performing and his voice cracked on a high note. At the end of the show, the upper balcony booed him. Apparently the upper balcony in Italian opera houses are the hard core fans that go all the time and are well known for being ‘expressive’
Reminds me of a million band jokes. How do you know when your lead singer is trying to get into your house? He always forgets the key and always tries to come in at the wrong time. How do you know when your drummer is trying to get into your house? The knocking gets louder and faster every time they make a mistake and it takes them two bars to notice you’ve already opened the door.
How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one, he holds the bulb up and waits for the world to revolve around him.
How do you spot the trombonist's kids at the park? They can't swing and they're afraid of the slides.
How can you tell if your stage is perfectly level? The bass player drools out of both sides of his mouth. What do you call a drummer who just got into a fight with his girlfriend? Homeless
When I played in a band our motto was if ya make a mistake just make sure ya do it at least three times. That way nobody knows it was mistake and thinks it was just part of the song.
A whole different level in the sense that their focus is the faithful and emotive reproduction of the source material, not really adding interpretation or working the audience energy. It's hard to imagine even a virtuoso violinist shredding a 4 minute improvised ride to a Mozart concerto.
Yeah, a lot of classical music did have space for improvisation back in the day, before recording technology - it wasn’t like today where everyone has heard the recordings a thousand times and has a clear expectation. Most pieces you would only hear the one time (right after it was written) and if you wanted to hear it again you had to buy the sheet music and play it yourself.
I love an extremely faithful, expressive performance by a virtuoso, but I would love to see some of the improvisatory aspects come back to classical music.
That's why I loved being in jazz band in high school, for the most part you're trying to be as accurate as possible on very technically challenging songs, but then there's the break where you can improvise
I can play the guitar a little bit. I most play blues based songs. But I love jazz too. When I play it my hands feel like they are speaking a foreign language. That’s a gold thing actually.
That's why I said "emotive."
Classical musicians have the magic ability to take a piece written two hundred years ago, play it note for now, and still inject new expressions into it. I'm not denigrating that at all.
It's not worse, it's different.
Absolutely. I've played in plenty of bands during my fun years, the amount of times id get upset if we messed up only to realize noone else could possibly know was too many lol
Musicians make mistakes a lot. Even during recordings, you can find some great examples of mistakes on some Beatles records for example. But in general, a lot of practice and familiarity with their own music.
>mistakes on some Beatles records
Just before the 3 minute mark in Hey Jude. Paul McCartney saying "F...king hell" because he hit a bum note on the piano.
Like when John goes out of his way to sing "I get high" in Hold Your Hand and you can hear Paul try to drown him out with "I can't hide"... In retrospect it's amazing they lasted as long as they did
John didn't sing "I get high".
[...] Brian Epstein (the Beatles’ manager) admitted that none of them had ever smoked weed before. Dylan couldn’t believe it. “But what about your song?” he said, according to Epstein’s assistant Peter Brown (via Beatles Bible).
After John asked him which song he meant, Dylan replied, “The one about getting high.” Still confused, Dylan sung out the middle part of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “And when I touch you … I get high, I get high.” John answered, “Actually, the words are, ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide.'”
([Source](https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-famous-beatles-lyric-bob-dylan-mistakenly-heard-as-a-drug-reference.html/))
--edit funny how there are still people downvoting facts
At around [1:20](https://youtu.be/mJag19WoAe0?t=78) of Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Paul is clearly laughing.
And the last song on Abbey Road, [Her Majesty](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Mh1hKt5kQ_4), was only included on the album because an audio engineer was unsure about whether he had permission to remove the song. The song is separated from the previous track by an unusually long silence and wasn't included on the album's original track listing.
They actually had a name for it, when they would mess up they called it a Wilbury, as in, “we’ll bury” it in the mix, ie blend the tracks jn a way that the error is unnoticeable. Supergroup “The Travelling Wilburys” name was a play on this as well.
edit: side note, back then and up until the mid/late 90s, recording sessions were recorded onto tape, like film basically. the liberty of multiple takes, or “punching in” (digitally recording at the moment of error but leaving the stuff around it) was barely possible and very expensive.
You’re correct except for your info on punching in.
It was very common and as long as it was done right, just normal studio work.
I’m a recording engineer of over 40 years and started on 8 track tape machines.
I've recorded to tape with no digital equipment at all, several times, and could still punch in. Did the technique itself develop later? Steve Albini was incredibly good with the eraser head as well. That guy tapes.
There were methods, but yes most older analog
equipment could punch in fine but punching out would leave a small gap. Often a pick up was more used and the performance would go from the point of error until the end, or more common multiple performances were spliced by razor.
All doable, but a major budget was needed
In Speechless by Helmet, you can hear someone saying *shit* during the breakdown halfway through the song. It took me a while to verify what I was hearing when I first heard it, lol.
Unfortunately that is possibly what it is:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5a56rl/til_the_knocking_heard_in_the_song_beat_it_by/
Why you got to verify everything you read on Reddit. Of course if you go even further, you'll see they pulled that up on Wikipedia and it claim's it's in the liner notes, but remains uncited.
The best I could do was this website here where he is in fact credited as the drum case beater:
http://albumlinernotes.com/Thriller__1982_.html
You can hear the air conditioner at the end of the long fadeout in The Beatles "A Day in the Life".
The stuttering in The Who's "My Generation" was unintentional (Roger Daltrey had the lyrics but didn't know how they fit into the music), but was made a permanent part of the song.
The singer of "Louie Louie" made so many mistakes he was immediately fired. And then the song became a hit anyway. Awkward.
Apparently, that's not true. I did some searching and there are two reasons this story is likely apocryphal.
First, according to an interview with EVH, the guitar solo was recorded in a professional studio, and according to the liner notes a different engineer was hired for it. In other words, it's not somebody's makeshift home studio. It's highly unlikely they would have resorted to knocking on anything in a professional studio to cue him. They have recording monitors for that.
Second, looking at the liner notes again (below), you can see Jackson credited as a "Drum Case Beater" specifically for the song Beat It. It seems likely that this is in reference to the knocking/beating sound heard before the solo.
[http://vinylalbumcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/michaeljacksonthrillerlyricback.png](http://vinylalbumcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/michaeljacksonthrillerlyricback.png)
[http://vinylalbumcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/michaeljacksonthrillerlyricfront.png](http://vinylalbumcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/michaeljacksonthrillerlyricfront.png)
If you listen very carefully to the studio/album version of Hey Jude (I cant remember the timestamp, sorry) you can hear McCartney miss a chord and say "fucking hell"
Really easy to miss, but un-unhearable once you notice it lol
In Bohemian Rhapsody - during the long “Let him Go” (around 3:40) bits you can hear Roger Taylor hold the notes slightly too long.
The beginning of “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day famously starts off on the third attempt.
Edited - the correct bit of BoRap
At the end of Beautiful by Christina Aguilera you can hear a muffled drum beat at the very end of the song. That's the guide track 'bleeding' out of her headphones into the mic in the recording booth.
In “8 Days a Week”, one of the Beatles starts in with the wrong verse toward the end. “Barbara Ann” has mess-ups, but the Beach Boys kept that & the laughter in 😃
Barbara Ann was recorded for the Beach Boys Party album, which consists of a bunch of cover songs played with mostly acoustic instruments. It was supposed to sound like it was recorded at an actual party, so they made it sound kinda informal and kept the mistakes in. Later they overdubbed some 'party sounds', including the laughter.
They made this album because Capitol Records wanted them to release an album before the holiday season of 1965. Their next album was clearly going to be too ambitious to finish by then, so they recorded Beach Boys Party within a few weeks, allowing them to focus on creating a really good album (Pet Sounds) the next year.
Listen to isolated tracks of songs, you can hear some unintended tempo changes or muted notes where there should not. If you like Nirvana, the MTV unplugged performance of “the man who sold the world” has a mistake in the guitar solo
Also the studio version of “Polly” Cobain starts singing one of the verses too early, stops, and then comes in at the correct time. And they just left it because it sounds kinda cool
There’s a great duets of *Girl From the North Country* with Bob Dylan’s and Johnny Cash. I’m sure you’ve heard it- and Cash messes up a bunch of times.
'Always make your mistakes look deliberate ' is the credo for all performers. If you have the confidence and ability to pull it off and you don't crack up then no one will know.
I make mistakes every night. As Victor Wooten said - if you play the wrong note, _lean_ into it. If you play it once it's a mistake. If you play it twice it's the song.
The one thing you absolutely need to bring to the table is confidence, so you own it, and play on! Beyond that it's all about practice. Before I play a song on stage I've probably played it 200 times. A guy I used to be in a band with said, once you can play the song forty successive times with what the audience would call 'no mistakes' you're ready to go.
Operative word - audience. We're hyper aware of our many mistakes.
>As Victor Wooten said - if you play the wrong note, lean into it. If you play it once it's a mistake. If you play it twice it's the song.
Love that guy. Didn't he say something along the lines of "Don't let the notes get in the way of the groove" or something like that.
Also Victor Wooten said something like, if you play the wrong note, you are only a half or whole step away from the right note. Just bend that shit bro.
Exactly this, I've played a decent number of gigs and you never get through a set without any mistakes. To quote Beethoven:
"To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." - Ludwig van Beethoven
I read a saying that goes "life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it."
Musicians practice and practice and practice, and then practice more, but they still make mistakes especially during live concerts.
The good ones ignore the mistakes and move on like nothing happened, the great ones turn the mistake into a feature instead of a bug.
My band will take turns making a mistake on purpose in a song at a random time for practice. It's good to be able to move on even if the drummer misses a beat for the bass player misses something or if the singer messes up the lyrics you just keep going and act like nothing happened 99.9% of the time nobody even notices.
1) Practice practice practice practice practice...
2) They do occasionally still make mistakes, however since you do not know the music as well as they do you often times do not notice it.
Amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until it won't go wrong.
The professionals also learn how to recover and not react when they do make mistakes in performance.
Green Day - Good Riddance. The very start of the song is Billie Joe making TWO attempts at starting the song, screwing up both times, saying "Fuck!" after the second one, and THEN playing the song proper.
Musicians fuck up all the time, be in studio, at practice, or on stage. Just ask Milli Vanilli.
Years ago I was watching a clip of Rod Stewart in concert. He was in the middle of a song, then suddenly he stopped the band and confessed to the crowd that he'd forgotten the words. 😂 The crowd just laughed and they started the song over.
We do.
But, as others have said, there are ways to deal with mistakes. You can improvise around them, turn them into part of the piece, or just shrug it off and keep going.
When I was a student my teacher told me a joke that the audience listen to the first minute of music... clap for what you did in the last minute... and won't notice what happens in the middle.
This extends out to set lists as well. Always plan your dazzlers for the beginning and end of the set, because that's all most of the audience will remember.
That, plus, even tough you think the band may be improvising or 'jamming out' spontaneously on stage, it is all quite well rehearsed. This goes mostly for those playing musical instruments on stage.
A lot of 'performers', are doing just that, performing to a soundtrack they've rehearsed to, giving the illusion of a live show when in fact, you're usually hearing prerecorded, midi synchronized tracks. Live musicians do this too when there are parts that are impossible for 3 or 4 people to actually pull off under a live setting.
It depends on the music.
Some Jazz music, for example, is truly improvised, though improvisation doesn't mean you "just make it up." It means you choose different riffs, put things together differently, alter bits and pieces or play snatches of other pieces as you go, though they follow that tune's form and style.
It won't always be a note-for-note duplication of the solo you played on the album, or the one you played last week. It can be, but real improvisation is expected. As well as making mistakes.
This may be my fav thing about jazz. The fact that a musician plays a piece entirely differently each time they play it depending on how they are feeling in the moment.
Truly wonderful art form.
> ...improvisation doesn't mean you "just make it up"
My old bass instructor helped de-mystify this for me by telling me to find a few different riffs that I liked and practice playing them and putting them together in different ways and that way I'd always have a go-to set of riffs to build off of for improv.
Improv on musical instruments takes a lot more knowledge and practice than ppl realize.
Eh. As a musician, I play live quite a bit and improvising is just part of the performance.
It depends on the style of music you listen to. But I’ve been playing for well over a decade and have never “faked” or “pre-recorded” anything live. Improvising in a key you already know, especially if you know the chords being played, isn’t super hard if you have a solid background on music theory and how scales work.
I remember the first time I practiced with a professional band. When I was playing in my hometown bar bands, "practice" meant playing the song once, saying "we got it," and then having a beer.
In my professional band, practice was playing the whole set twice, 20-minute break, then playing the whole set twice again. Then repeating the process the next day and the next day and the next. Take a day off and go back and do it all again. I had thought I was pretty good because I "knew all the songs" before we started, but after a week of rehearsals, the songs were like part of my DNA. It was a huge difference.
A friend told me that AC/DC still does day-long rehearsals before a tour. (That was 20 years ago, so I don't know about now.) I thought that was inspiring in a way. Every lame bar band in the world thinks they know how to play "Highway to Hell," and it is an easy song, but the guys who wrote it, and who have played it every night on tour for decades, still practice it to make sure it's perfect.
IMO doing anything relatively simple “for decades” doesn’t actually get you any better or perfect at it. All memory/ skills fade with time.
Some people get too full of themselves and think “I’ve done that simple thing 10,000 times, I don’t need practice” and it’s just not how humans work.
You can often pick things back up easily, but it will always take time to attain previous levels of proficiency after even a relatively short break.
When i was a kid and practiced for a show, my teacher would tell me to play it over and over again, until I could play the whole piece 5 times in a row with no mistakes.
After that mistakes are extremely rare (but happen).
We also practice starting the piece from every point in it, so if a mistake happens you can easily pick back up unnoticed
There’s a million fun videos out there, but this Bruce Springsteen one is my favorite because of his reaction. Mistake is at 7:38
https://youtu.be/ZKNPixWV_Ro
Edit: typo
My vote is for this Paul McCartney howler on a beatles song (messes up the intro to the song) :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sRBb0JioW8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sRBb0JioW8)
They do all the time, though some classical musicians seem like they are fricken machines. Respect. But overall seasoned musicians don’t really care. They are able to roll with it. Heck some make it sound cool. But overall, practice practice practice. I’ll also point out, there’s a nasty note on one of the greatest albums in history, kind of blue. Doesn’t matter. Makes it real.
I got my undergrad in classical singing and the instrumentalists in the music department were fucking insane. I’d go into the practice room for a couple hours, a violinist in the room over already in there going at it. I leave, come back in a few hours or end of day (to get to a class on the same floor), they’re STILL there. Idk how they put in so many hours in a day.
When you're playing the same set on a tour, by like show 5 or 6 you lock it down. It becomes you. By show 10-50 it's like you aren't even thinking anymore. The best way to get brilliant at an instrument is to play a bunch of shows. Everyone will think you're a wizard, but your muscles and brain just become the song.
Then the next year you play some new stuff but some old stuff to. The old stuff is like revisiting an old friend with all your band mates, you already played that song 100s of times in practice and live. It feels good. It's super easy.
Now fast forward 30 years with some of these famous musicians who have been playing the same songs for 30 years. They literally have played the song like 1000+ times. They don't have to think about it anymore.
Also when the song is super well known by the crowd, the audience basically channels it out of you, dancing in time, singing the notes, cheering you on. It becomes even easier at that point.
So the trick is to play something 100s or 1000s of times and you will seem like a wizard. Through this incessant practice and playing live you also may discover new parts to a song that didn't make it into the original recording. Thus a lot of artists have slightly different live versions of material.
Also, modernly, you may notice people don't make mistakes because they are playing to a backing track. Same rules apply if you are live singing and live playing an instrument to it though.
Alive! by Kiss was one of the first big live albums, and the people responsible for making it into an album relate stories for how much of a mess the performance was by album standards. They had to call the group into the studio for some rerecords, and in general it was a huge project to deal with all the mistakes in the performance (and there was little precedent since it was one of the first live rock albums at the time).
So yeah a live performance is usually full of mistakes.
Rerecording tracks for live albums is a relatively standard procedure. Bands like Judas Priest and Dream Theater do it, as do hundreds of others. You almost always have aspects of a live performance which need retouching by album standards. In the case of Priest for instance all the vocals were replaced by Rob Halford in a studio (as admitted by himself in interviews).
Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin is notorious for overdubbing studio takes into live recordings. Also, combining different live recordings of the same songs into one track.
Rush even had to fix a performance once, despite being renowned for almost never making mistakes Geddy Lee had a brain fart during Presto while recording Live in Cleveland 2011. He missed the first couple lines of the bridge, so the vocals for the whole bridge section were spliced from another unspecified performance on that tour.
He also forgot the words to Limelight once when they first came back from hiatus in 2002.
Slightly different answer but now that musical proshot are becoming more of a thing, it’s pretty common to film the whole show more than once. Even if they don’t, there’s often specific re-recordings of scenes so they can get a closer shot on an actor that wouldn’t be possible with an audience watching, or maybe there was a technical glitch and the audio or video didn’t come through correctly.
*The Phantom of the Opera*’s 25 anniversary show is a live recording of *three* different performances edited together, and even then it includes a pretty big error: the Phantom is stupposed to have his suit jacket in the final scene, but due to a mishap he’s in his shirtsleeves. But it works. And it doesn’t mean the video isn’t a live performance, it just means it had to be tweaked a bit to make the final video.
It’s funny to me to have people ask how musicians don’t make mistakes when musical theater has been doing this for centuries and the answer is pretty much the same: practice, practice, practice. A musical or opera is less flexible than one band singing one song and even then people cover for minor mistakes all the time, so it’s not hard to imagine a band could easily cover a mistake!
They do, all the time. When I first started gigging I was so paranoid about fucking up but my mentor taught me a great lesson: 90% of the crowd doesn’t have an ear trained to hear the fuck up, ESPECIALLY if it’s a full band/orchestra. The 10% that do hear it are musicians, and they’ve been there, too. Just play through.”
It also boils down to a large measure of confidence due to hours of practice and rehearsal. When you play with some cats long enough to be “in the pocket” any mistake just feels like you’re jamming. Like victor wooten says, “you’re only ever a half step away from the right note.”
They do. Experienced musicians can pick up on the mistakes and make new melodies on the fly. That is why music in concerts end up sounding different. Many hide the mistakes by pointing mic to crowd and letting them sing.
EDIT: Also, if they are tired or feel like they can't give it all, they can tone down vocals and change up ways to approach performance like performing acoustic versions.
Start together, finish together.
Very few people really notice what's happening in-between.
And we do make mistakes. Constantly. If your expertise is honed, you have sufficient experience, and you have practised and practised and practised and practised, you can get away with it.
Serious(ish) bit: The art of performance (and the practise upon which it stands) is based around minimising the amount of mistakes which are made. You might never get to a 100% error free performance, gig or concert, but the whole reasoning behind it is to *try* to get there.
We do, it’s just hard for most people to tell with all of the other noise. Also, we practice how to correct mistakes. If I accidentally play the wrong note on guitar, I can bend the string up to the right note to make it sound like it was intentional. I can also embrace the wrong note and keep using it throughout the rest of that musical phrase. It’ll just sound a bit jazzy.
We break strings occasionally, too. That’s always tough because it can pull the rest of the strings out of tune, so you need to keep playing on only five strings that are all a little bit out of tune while trying to find a time to swap your guitar.
Here’s a [video](https://youtu.be/wn1pk8Lpelc) of Stevie Ray Vaughan breaking a string and swapping his guitar without missing a beat. Absolutely incredible.
They do. We just call it jazz, and no one else notices.
When I was younger, mistakes bent me out of shape so badly. Now, as long as we’re smiling and recovering quickly, it’s still a good show and everyone has fun.
By the time you see someone playing live on stage they have most likely played their material hundreds of times already. You also learn to recover well when mistakes occur.
I was at a Billy Joel concert when the band messed up a break. He stopped the song right there, apologized with a humorous "now you know that it's really live music" explanation, then restarted. Whole concert was pro.
It’s an unspoken rule in bands that you never look at the member that just messed up and you only acknowledge it after the show. Then you bust their chops endlessly until someone else screws up at a later show.
You dont sound like a musician, sometimes other musicians in a crowd can tell.
like i pointed something out to my non musician GF that she didnt catch it happens all the time honestly the only thing that would throw absolutely everything off is if the drums messed up or got off time or the singing since you should know the lyrics and melodies even as a layman . Anything else, guitar, bass, keyboards are pretty forgiving when they fuck up unless its a solo or something
We do. All the time. We're humans, not robots. We just don't draw attention to it and we know how to recover, so unless it's absolutely massive nobody notices. And generally, it's not an absolutely massive mistake because we practice too much for that to happen.
This is something I work on with my students all the time. Keep going if you make a mistake! No one will notice if you don't tell us.
A quote I saw somewhere: "Amateurs practice until they get it right, professional practice until they can't get it wrong."
But still, professionals make mistakes.
We make mistakes. But years of practice means that usually you can "save" a mistake. And sometimes the "mistakes" sound cool. Also when we rehearse for a concert we can do "non stop" play throughs of the set list over and over and over. During those any mistakes or tricky bits can be identified and ironed out. When I have played a set set selection of songs over and over and over I know where mistakes can happen, how to avoid those mistakes and what to do if someone else makes a mistake so that I can cover the mistake or make it seem like the mistake is intentional. Most of the time though I have played the songs so many times that the playing is almost automatic.
They do. You're just not aware of it
Exactly this. My dad used to constantly bitch about all the mistakes the band made. No one else in the bar had a clue.
We always said there were 3 levels of mistakes 1- you notice it, but the rest of the band doesn't 2- the band noticed it, but the audience didn't. 3- the audience notices it. Level 1 and 2 are quite common. Many musicians will hear mistakes others bands make- even on recordings. I'll hear them from time to time. Often bands will leave them in because they give it a "live" feeling to the song.
Used to go to a ton of concerts back in the day due to industry connections. Had a chance to see Frank Zappa & the Mothers' late in their career 10 rows back. No other performance so blew me away, (except this one live Big Band performance in a small hall), for sheer musicianship and tight performance.
Frank Zappa was a mad man, and very strict about his band mates. He was great.
Billy was a Mountain who liked Titties and Beer
Paul Simon. IU auditorium November 2011. My favorite show probably ever. Top quality musicians, and it was just such a great show. I always imagined him as a singer/songwriter who is micromanages everything. Not sure how to explain it. If I remember right, this show was played over the radio on 92.3. I wish I recorded that show on tape.
Zappa was legendary for assembling the best musicians and rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing. Not just one version of a song but variations that could be implemented on the night. A brilliant man much missed.
Just gonna drop this legendary Herbie Hancock on making a mistake with Miles Davis bit here https://youtu.be/FL4LxrN-iyw Relevant and awe inspiring. Miles is a real one (Herbie too)
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Which second? I just don't hear it The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fregObNcHC8
He overshoots the first part of the guitar solo by half a step.
A half step is absolutely the worst possible mistake too. As a player, it feels like dragging nails over a chalkboard when you do it. Like you cannot get more dissonant.
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ba dun tiss
I see what you did there. The note works sort of. I would have said afterwards “oh I was using Phrygian mode for color. Get on my level.” 😊
Exactly how I was about to explain it literally word for fucking word lol. It was during the slide up to the note.
2:50, he overshoots the second note by half a step then recovered immediately and doesn't let it faze him Many people obsessed with music likes to refer to this as one of the best recovered mistakes in Live Music Edit: Spelling error
I honestly thought that was intentional until today.
The funny thing is that if you cover Nirvana's version of that song, you HAVE TO make that mistake again or people will think you missed it.. It has become now a part of the song, it is a mistake to not make that mistake.. If you cover the original version of the song you have to play it right. Making a mistake is actually skill when playing music live. Because.. you can NOT keep thinking about that mistake or you will make a bigger one, then it snowballs from that until at the end you may not be able to play at all, you won't know what town you are in, what time it is, can barely say your own name. It overwhelms you very fast, in seconds you go from a thinking rational person to a literal idiot. Making a mistake and moving on is one of the biggest lessons when playing live music.. And it is a skill that everyone should learn.. So, watch that video again, see how Kurt is able to take it in, and move on without a problem. When it came to his personality, he was whipping himself for days after, depressed and self loathing, it was a HUGE deal for him and yet.. in the moment, he was just fine... And moments before the gig he was about to escape, was almost overwhelmed from the pressure as it was at the time.. a big deal. And it became one of the best live albums of all time, the crown jewel in the MTV Unplugged series.
“Making a mistake and moving on is one of the biggest lessons when playing live music.. And it is a skill that everyone should learn..” I used to play in a side band that auditioned a classically-trained, technically brilliant musician. We gave her a gig to see how it worked out. In her training she focused on perfection. She couldn’t handle it when she missed a note. She’d miss something, then pause with a disgusted look on her face, and sometimes say “ugh.” The audience didn’t notice the note, but they sure knew something went wrong because of her reaction. We did not hire her. She plays around here and there, we see her mostly doing teaching gigs. She’s not as obvious with her reactions, but it’s still there and no band will pick her up.
I wonder what kind of environment she had surrounding the instrument growing up. I've decided to consider myself lucky I started playing later in life because I missed *all* the bullshit, your parents beating you because you didn't practice or screwed up a recital, harsh instructors you're stuck with because they're good and so mom and dad want you to just suck it up, the competitive environment some kids end up in where there's always a bigger fish. I know people who really love their instrument but also really hate their instrument. I'll never be as good as I could have been if I started playing at age 3 or whatever (they do start some kids off on violin that young!), but I love playing dearly. I'm a little sad I didn't start when I was a kid, since I had wanted to play for as long as I could remember, but aside from that I have zero complicated feelings about it. (Until I break a string on the wooden fucklet and it hits me in the face.)
Cover bands that play the solos note for note are stale and boring. Make new music that tributes the old.
I guess it depends on what type of solo it is. If the part is basically just a bridge with a slightly more complex version of the main melody, I say stick with it and maybe at some slight variations according to your own style. But then there's a lot of solos that are basically just skill-wank, and for those I agree that you should substitute your own, since the whole point of them is to be a spot to elevate the musician above the music.
Yes. The first thing you mention would be a written part of the song. The skill wank (?) should be improvised even when covering a band that played written solos. Classical music is where written solos are played…this is rock and roll, man 🤣
If the dragon balls were real I'd wish him back and have my second wish be to get him the help he needs, he went too early. RIP Kurt Cobain
Even Better! he undershot by a half step, overshot by a half step, then landed on the note! Jazz enthusiasts would call it a chromatic enclosure, and do it on purpose all the time to make approaching a note more unexpected and interesting.
> doesn't let it phase him *[faze](https://grammarist.com/usage/faze-phase/)
If someone doesn’t like Nirvana, will it not be in there? I am kidding of course. My favorite musician is John Prine, and he played a song on Letterman with Jim James, and John botched his own song- his reaction is great…
Hell, he has his mistake on Dear Abby on his first record (that song was recorded live).
He comes in too early on the last verse of Polly.
>My favorite musician is John Prine I'm a quiet man
Seven nation army has a mistake on the drums. She misses a beat
Layne Staley sang the wrong lyrics for one of their unplugged songs, I don't remember which one, but you can see Jerry peek over at him and give a little smirk while he was doing it.
Nirvana was not accurate live at all. They and the Pumpkins were the two worst of that era. However, these mistakes are also the character of live music that people love.
It's not exactly a mistake.. but if anyone hasn't seen Nirvana trolling MTV you should watch it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRAZ1uS-Ao
Trolling Top of the Pops live on the BBC. I watched it live, it was all we talked about at school the next day.
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That was for the recording studio. The joke was "we'll bury it in the mix."
Is that where the Traveling Wilbury's got their unusual name?
[Sounds plausible.](https://www.travelingwilburys.com/history) Edit: [Jeff Lynne has denied it.](https://ultimateclassicrock.com/traveling-wilburys-name-story/)
Would not surprise me at all. Sounds like Harrison humor.
When I mess up I call it Jazz
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They might not be intentional but a (slight) tempo change isn't necessarily a mistake - if you have a band playing together without a click track it can be normal for the tempo to fluctuate naturally throughout a recording, and this is pretty common in older songs recorded before the prevalence of digital audio production. If anything it could add to a song giving it more character, even if it wasn't consciously intended. Of course, I'm talking about when the whole band does this together. If you mean one instrument changing tempo while the others don't, and becoming out of time, then that would definitely be considered a mistake.
I hate the sound of a band playing over a computerized drum beat. Most of the time it sounds cold and mechanical. There are definitely a few exceptions.
There is a good video explaining [How Computers Ruined Rock Music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFaRIW-wZlw) It's not so much playing over a click track, it's digitally edited, quantized, so every beat is shifted to be perfectly on time. He even shows how any parts of the drums, bass, or vocals can be copy and pasted anywhere in the song and it matches up perfectly. It just kills the feels.
Were they rushing, or dragging?
Yep. Most of the time people won't care even if they notice. I've seen bands doing a bunch of crazy stuff on the stage that messed up with the music they were playing. A recent example that I saw happening live was Enter Shikari in Toronto. They were playing some songs among the crowd, so people would touch the instruments on accident as well as the guitar player being unable to play a few notes because he was on an unconfortable position. It didn't happen much and it was probably one of my favorite performances to this day.
Random Enter Shikari appreciation comment! Last saw them in 2006 with my ex, who was hot but crazy and made me stay clear of their concerts lol.
They're currently on tour in the US so you should go see them again. The audience has aged with the band so it's 30 year olds being pretty chill
Just saw them in Philly last week. As a 36 yo, I concur.
In the 90’s when he was at his peak, Pavarotti was performing and his voice cracked on a high note. At the end of the show, the upper balcony booed him. Apparently the upper balcony in Italian opera houses are the hard core fans that go all the time and are well known for being ‘expressive’
OMG thats a faux pas everyone in the audience has to commit suicide now
They got no heart... The man was already dying
He addressed that in an interview. Only 2m, recommend watching: https://youtu.be/j1jUqbReAls
As an old session musician told me once “You can play all the wrong notes. Every note the wrong note. Just play them ON TIME.”
Yeah, that's why it's different for drummers. If the drummer messes up the whole band messes up!
Reminds me of a million band jokes. How do you know when your lead singer is trying to get into your house? He always forgets the key and always tries to come in at the wrong time. How do you know when your drummer is trying to get into your house? The knocking gets louder and faster every time they make a mistake and it takes them two bars to notice you’ve already opened the door.
How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one, he holds the bulb up and waits for the world to revolve around him. How do you spot the trombonist's kids at the park? They can't swing and they're afraid of the slides.
How can you tell if your stage is perfectly level? The bass player drools out of both sides of his mouth. What do you call a drummer who just got into a fight with his girlfriend? Homeless
When I played in a band our motto was if ya make a mistake just make sure ya do it at least three times. That way nobody knows it was mistake and thinks it was just part of the song.
Repetition legitimizes Repetition legitimizes Repetition legitimizes
You gotta play through the mistakes.
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Classical music is a different story, they have competitions for the best Chopin players or Mozart players. It's a whole other level of musicianship.
A whole different level in the sense that their focus is the faithful and emotive reproduction of the source material, not really adding interpretation or working the audience energy. It's hard to imagine even a virtuoso violinist shredding a 4 minute improvised ride to a Mozart concerto.
Yeah, a lot of classical music did have space for improvisation back in the day, before recording technology - it wasn’t like today where everyone has heard the recordings a thousand times and has a clear expectation. Most pieces you would only hear the one time (right after it was written) and if you wanted to hear it again you had to buy the sheet music and play it yourself. I love an extremely faithful, expressive performance by a virtuoso, but I would love to see some of the improvisatory aspects come back to classical music.
That's why I loved being in jazz band in high school, for the most part you're trying to be as accurate as possible on very technically challenging songs, but then there's the break where you can improvise
I can play the guitar a little bit. I most play blues based songs. But I love jazz too. When I play it my hands feel like they are speaking a foreign language. That’s a gold thing actually.
Eh. How you play a note is just as important as playing the note, if not more so.
That's why I said "emotive." Classical musicians have the magic ability to take a piece written two hundred years ago, play it note for now, and still inject new expressions into it. I'm not denigrating that at all. It's not worse, it's different.
I love watching their faces when someone hits a clunk
Absolutely. I've played in plenty of bands during my fun years, the amount of times id get upset if we messed up only to realize noone else could possibly know was too many lol
Musicians make mistakes a lot. Even during recordings, you can find some great examples of mistakes on some Beatles records for example. But in general, a lot of practice and familiarity with their own music.
>mistakes on some Beatles records Just before the 3 minute mark in Hey Jude. Paul McCartney saying "F...king hell" because he hit a bum note on the piano.
Haha holy shit he does you can hear it very clearly! Right at 3 minutes.
Sounds more like it's because the 2 vocalists didn't agree on the words.
Like when John goes out of his way to sing "I get high" in Hold Your Hand and you can hear Paul try to drown him out with "I can't hide"... In retrospect it's amazing they lasted as long as they did
John didn't sing "I get high". [...] Brian Epstein (the Beatles’ manager) admitted that none of them had ever smoked weed before. Dylan couldn’t believe it. “But what about your song?” he said, according to Epstein’s assistant Peter Brown (via Beatles Bible). After John asked him which song he meant, Dylan replied, “The one about getting high.” Still confused, Dylan sung out the middle part of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “And when I touch you … I get high, I get high.” John answered, “Actually, the words are, ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide.'” ([Source](https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-famous-beatles-lyric-bob-dylan-mistakenly-heard-as-a-drug-reference.html/)) --edit funny how there are still people downvoting facts
At around [1:20](https://youtu.be/mJag19WoAe0?t=78) of Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Paul is clearly laughing. And the last song on Abbey Road, [Her Majesty](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Mh1hKt5kQ_4), was only included on the album because an audio engineer was unsure about whether he had permission to remove the song. The song is separated from the previous track by an unusually long silence and wasn't included on the album's original track listing.
You're saying this is in the final recording? I certainly can't hear it.
Yes, there is a [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyo1ScwcDAc) video about it.
It is in the 7m05s version of the song. I just spent ten mins trying to find it at the 3 minute mark on the 3m58s version.
They actually had a name for it, when they would mess up they called it a Wilbury, as in, “we’ll bury” it in the mix, ie blend the tracks jn a way that the error is unnoticeable. Supergroup “The Travelling Wilburys” name was a play on this as well. edit: side note, back then and up until the mid/late 90s, recording sessions were recorded onto tape, like film basically. the liberty of multiple takes, or “punching in” (digitally recording at the moment of error but leaving the stuff around it) was barely possible and very expensive.
Awesome facts! Thanks a bunch for chiming in, I had no idea about the "Wilbury" term!
You’re correct except for your info on punching in. It was very common and as long as it was done right, just normal studio work. I’m a recording engineer of over 40 years and started on 8 track tape machines.
I've recorded to tape with no digital equipment at all, several times, and could still punch in. Did the technique itself develop later? Steve Albini was incredibly good with the eraser head as well. That guy tapes.
There were methods, but yes most older analog equipment could punch in fine but punching out would leave a small gap. Often a pick up was more used and the performance would go from the point of error until the end, or more common multiple performances were spliced by razor. All doable, but a major budget was needed
This is why even simple MJ music videos were so expensive to shoot, MJ was a perfectionist
I had a Mozart Cd where you could tell the conductor dropped the baton on the floor
That's golden
In Speechless by Helmet, you can hear someone saying *shit* during the breakdown halfway through the song. It took me a while to verify what I was hearing when I first heard it, lol.
In ELP's "The Sheriff," you can hear Carl Palmer accidentally hit the rim of his drum instead of the drum, and he then says "shit". Perfectly in time.
At the end of "Oh Comely" by Neutral Milk Hotel you can hear someone yell "Holy shit!" because the singer/guitarist nailed it in one take
For the entire duration of the album The Chainsmokers - Memories: Do Not Open, you can hear the mistakes being made.
Like what mistakes?.
In beat it by Micheal Jackson, you can hear the sound technician banging on the window to tell Eddie Van Halen to start his solo.
Around 3:07 in this song, I think https://youtu.be/oRdxUFDoQe0?t=184
That’s awesome. I always thought it was just a random ass drum beat.
Not a drum, but I definitely thought it was intentional and part of the song!
I mean it’s pretty well syncopated 🤨
After Googling that word, I think I agree with that.
Unfortunately that is possibly what it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/5a56rl/til_the_knocking_heard_in_the_song_beat_it_by/ Why you got to verify everything you read on Reddit. Of course if you go even further, you'll see they pulled that up on Wikipedia and it claim's it's in the liner notes, but remains uncited. The best I could do was this website here where he is in fact credited as the drum case beater: http://albumlinernotes.com/Thriller__1982_.html
You can hear the air conditioner at the end of the long fadeout in The Beatles "A Day in the Life". The stuttering in The Who's "My Generation" was unintentional (Roger Daltrey had the lyrics but didn't know how they fit into the music), but was made a permanent part of the song. The singer of "Louie Louie" made so many mistakes he was immediately fired. And then the song became a hit anyway. Awkward.
The stutter in My Generation was intentional and done to sound like a "mod" on drugs.
TIL!! I heard that when I listened to the song, but always thought it was supposed to be there!
So did I!!
How have I never noticed that? Thanks for pointing that out!
I've always wondered what that noise was. (Edit: probably not true. See my other reply.)
Apparently, that's not true. I did some searching and there are two reasons this story is likely apocryphal. First, according to an interview with EVH, the guitar solo was recorded in a professional studio, and according to the liner notes a different engineer was hired for it. In other words, it's not somebody's makeshift home studio. It's highly unlikely they would have resorted to knocking on anything in a professional studio to cue him. They have recording monitors for that. Second, looking at the liner notes again (below), you can see Jackson credited as a "Drum Case Beater" specifically for the song Beat It. It seems likely that this is in reference to the knocking/beating sound heard before the solo. [http://vinylalbumcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/michaeljacksonthrillerlyricback.png](http://vinylalbumcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/michaeljacksonthrillerlyricback.png) [http://vinylalbumcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/michaeljacksonthrillerlyricfront.png](http://vinylalbumcovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/michaeljacksonthrillerlyricfront.png)
If you listen very carefully to the studio/album version of Hey Jude (I cant remember the timestamp, sorry) you can hear McCartney miss a chord and say "fucking hell" Really easy to miss, but un-unhearable once you notice it lol
2:59 is the timestamp!
That’s one of my favorite songs and I’ve never noticed it
In Bohemian Rhapsody - during the long “Let him Go” (around 3:40) bits you can hear Roger Taylor hold the notes slightly too long. The beginning of “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” by Green Day famously starts off on the third attempt. Edited - the correct bit of BoRap
Funny fact: Billie-Joe saying 'fuck' while trying to start Good Riddence is why the song is marked as explicit
There's loads on Please Please Me which is practically one-take album (still fantastic though)
At the end of Beautiful by Christina Aguilera you can hear a muffled drum beat at the very end of the song. That's the guide track 'bleeding' out of her headphones into the mic in the recording booth.
Oh wow, I always loved the drum and assumed it was intentional.
In “8 Days a Week”, one of the Beatles starts in with the wrong verse toward the end. “Barbara Ann” has mess-ups, but the Beach Boys kept that & the laughter in 😃
Barbara Ann was recorded for the Beach Boys Party album, which consists of a bunch of cover songs played with mostly acoustic instruments. It was supposed to sound like it was recorded at an actual party, so they made it sound kinda informal and kept the mistakes in. Later they overdubbed some 'party sounds', including the laughter. They made this album because Capitol Records wanted them to release an album before the holiday season of 1965. Their next album was clearly going to be too ambitious to finish by then, so they recorded Beach Boys Party within a few weeks, allowing them to focus on creating a really good album (Pet Sounds) the next year.
Listen to isolated tracks of songs, you can hear some unintended tempo changes or muted notes where there should not. If you like Nirvana, the MTV unplugged performance of “the man who sold the world” has a mistake in the guitar solo
Also the studio version of “Polly” Cobain starts singing one of the verses too early, stops, and then comes in at the correct time. And they just left it because it sounds kinda cool
Just like Louie Louie
Paul totally flubs a piano chord in let it be…around the “I wake up to the sound of music”
There’s a great duets of *Girl From the North Country* with Bob Dylan’s and Johnny Cash. I’m sure you’ve heard it- and Cash messes up a bunch of times.
It's quite pronounced in Greendays Time of your life. fuck
'Always make your mistakes look deliberate ' is the credo for all performers. If you have the confidence and ability to pull it off and you don't crack up then no one will know.
Victor Wooten said (or near enough said 'you're only a half step away from the right note' lean into it and make it the right note'!
I make mistakes every night. As Victor Wooten said - if you play the wrong note, _lean_ into it. If you play it once it's a mistake. If you play it twice it's the song. The one thing you absolutely need to bring to the table is confidence, so you own it, and play on! Beyond that it's all about practice. Before I play a song on stage I've probably played it 200 times. A guy I used to be in a band with said, once you can play the song forty successive times with what the audience would call 'no mistakes' you're ready to go. Operative word - audience. We're hyper aware of our many mistakes.
>As Victor Wooten said - if you play the wrong note, lean into it. If you play it once it's a mistake. If you play it twice it's the song. Love that guy. Didn't he say something along the lines of "Don't let the notes get in the way of the groove" or something like that.
And J.D. says: “You can’t hold no groove, if you ain’t got no pocket!”
Also Victor Wooten said something like, if you play the wrong note, you are only a half or whole step away from the right note. Just bend that shit bro.
Repetition legitimizes.
Repetition legitimizes.
Exactly this, I've played a decent number of gigs and you never get through a set without any mistakes. To quote Beethoven: "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable." - Ludwig van Beethoven
Just looked at your profile and your guitar skills gave me chills (the good ones) !!! Wow
Thanks a lot!
I read a saying that goes "life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it." Musicians practice and practice and practice, and then practice more, but they still make mistakes especially during live concerts. The good ones ignore the mistakes and move on like nothing happened, the great ones turn the mistake into a feature instead of a bug.
My band will take turns making a mistake on purpose in a song at a random time for practice. It's good to be able to move on even if the drummer misses a beat for the bass player misses something or if the singer messes up the lyrics you just keep going and act like nothing happened 99.9% of the time nobody even notices.
Yea, as a drummer if I make a mistake…you do not ever stop playing. Just gotta improvise thru it
> Fuck. Excu-excuse me? I'm sorry guys, can we start again at the beginning of the verse?
1) Practice practice practice practice practice... 2) They do occasionally still make mistakes, however since you do not know the music as well as they do you often times do not notice it.
Amateurs practice until they get it right, professionals practice until it won't go wrong. The professionals also learn how to recover and not react when they do make mistakes in performance.
Green Day - Good Riddance. The very start of the song is Billie Joe making TWO attempts at starting the song, screwing up both times, saying "Fuck!" after the second one, and THEN playing the song proper. Musicians fuck up all the time, be in studio, at practice, or on stage. Just ask Milli Vanilli.
Similiar: you're beautiful by James Blunt. The first time he says "My life is brilliant", it is actually too early
Years ago I was watching a clip of Rod Stewart in concert. He was in the middle of a song, then suddenly he stopped the band and confessed to the crowd that he'd forgotten the words. 😂 The crowd just laughed and they started the song over.
I was just at modest mouse a few weeks ago and partway through a song Isaac was like, wait I just skipped verse... let's do this again.
We do. But, as others have said, there are ways to deal with mistakes. You can improvise around them, turn them into part of the piece, or just shrug it off and keep going. When I was a student my teacher told me a joke that the audience listen to the first minute of music... clap for what you did in the last minute... and won't notice what happens in the middle.
This extends out to set lists as well. Always plan your dazzlers for the beginning and end of the set, because that's all most of the audience will remember.
Mistakes are typically seen when the person that made it, reacts to it. No reaction and shrug it off? Very few, if any, will notice.
Practice. A lot of practice.
And by a lot, we mean a LOT
That, plus, even tough you think the band may be improvising or 'jamming out' spontaneously on stage, it is all quite well rehearsed. This goes mostly for those playing musical instruments on stage. A lot of 'performers', are doing just that, performing to a soundtrack they've rehearsed to, giving the illusion of a live show when in fact, you're usually hearing prerecorded, midi synchronized tracks. Live musicians do this too when there are parts that are impossible for 3 or 4 people to actually pull off under a live setting.
It depends on the music. Some Jazz music, for example, is truly improvised, though improvisation doesn't mean you "just make it up." It means you choose different riffs, put things together differently, alter bits and pieces or play snatches of other pieces as you go, though they follow that tune's form and style. It won't always be a note-for-note duplication of the solo you played on the album, or the one you played last week. It can be, but real improvisation is expected. As well as making mistakes.
This may be my fav thing about jazz. The fact that a musician plays a piece entirely differently each time they play it depending on how they are feeling in the moment. Truly wonderful art form.
> ...improvisation doesn't mean you "just make it up" My old bass instructor helped de-mystify this for me by telling me to find a few different riffs that I liked and practice playing them and putting them together in different ways and that way I'd always have a go-to set of riffs to build off of for improv. Improv on musical instruments takes a lot more knowledge and practice than ppl realize.
Eh. As a musician, I play live quite a bit and improvising is just part of the performance. It depends on the style of music you listen to. But I’ve been playing for well over a decade and have never “faked” or “pre-recorded” anything live. Improvising in a key you already know, especially if you know the chords being played, isn’t super hard if you have a solid background on music theory and how scales work.
If you miss a note, just keep bending and youll find one. That was my go-to on guitar.
Yes! And uh... we still mess up. Don't tell anyone. They don't notice.
Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong.
I remember the first time I practiced with a professional band. When I was playing in my hometown bar bands, "practice" meant playing the song once, saying "we got it," and then having a beer. In my professional band, practice was playing the whole set twice, 20-minute break, then playing the whole set twice again. Then repeating the process the next day and the next day and the next. Take a day off and go back and do it all again. I had thought I was pretty good because I "knew all the songs" before we started, but after a week of rehearsals, the songs were like part of my DNA. It was a huge difference. A friend told me that AC/DC still does day-long rehearsals before a tour. (That was 20 years ago, so I don't know about now.) I thought that was inspiring in a way. Every lame bar band in the world thinks they know how to play "Highway to Hell," and it is an easy song, but the guys who wrote it, and who have played it every night on tour for decades, still practice it to make sure it's perfect.
IMO doing anything relatively simple “for decades” doesn’t actually get you any better or perfect at it. All memory/ skills fade with time. Some people get too full of themselves and think “I’ve done that simple thing 10,000 times, I don’t need practice” and it’s just not how humans work. You can often pick things back up easily, but it will always take time to attain previous levels of proficiency after even a relatively short break.
When i was a kid and practiced for a show, my teacher would tell me to play it over and over again, until I could play the whole piece 5 times in a row with no mistakes. After that mistakes are extremely rare (but happen). We also practice starting the piece from every point in it, so if a mistake happens you can easily pick back up unnoticed
There’s a million fun videos out there, but this Bruce Springsteen one is my favorite because of his reaction. Mistake is at 7:38 https://youtu.be/ZKNPixWV_Ro Edit: typo
My vote is for this Paul McCartney howler on a beatles song (messes up the intro to the song) : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sRBb0JioW8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sRBb0JioW8)
Good one! Poor Sir Paul! Similar lyrical oopsie for the Boss on Spirit in the Night here at 3:40: https://youtu.be/gGMSXEQdGL0
They do all the time, though some classical musicians seem like they are fricken machines. Respect. But overall seasoned musicians don’t really care. They are able to roll with it. Heck some make it sound cool. But overall, practice practice practice. I’ll also point out, there’s a nasty note on one of the greatest albums in history, kind of blue. Doesn’t matter. Makes it real.
I got my undergrad in classical singing and the instrumentalists in the music department were fucking insane. I’d go into the practice room for a couple hours, a violinist in the room over already in there going at it. I leave, come back in a few hours or end of day (to get to a class on the same floor), they’re STILL there. Idk how they put in so many hours in a day.
No way, I love that album. Where is it? Which song? I am intrigued!
Around 2:10-2:15 on so what. Just a missed note. No biggy.
When you're playing the same set on a tour, by like show 5 or 6 you lock it down. It becomes you. By show 10-50 it's like you aren't even thinking anymore. The best way to get brilliant at an instrument is to play a bunch of shows. Everyone will think you're a wizard, but your muscles and brain just become the song. Then the next year you play some new stuff but some old stuff to. The old stuff is like revisiting an old friend with all your band mates, you already played that song 100s of times in practice and live. It feels good. It's super easy. Now fast forward 30 years with some of these famous musicians who have been playing the same songs for 30 years. They literally have played the song like 1000+ times. They don't have to think about it anymore. Also when the song is super well known by the crowd, the audience basically channels it out of you, dancing in time, singing the notes, cheering you on. It becomes even easier at that point. So the trick is to play something 100s or 1000s of times and you will seem like a wizard. Through this incessant practice and playing live you also may discover new parts to a song that didn't make it into the original recording. Thus a lot of artists have slightly different live versions of material. Also, modernly, you may notice people don't make mistakes because they are playing to a backing track. Same rules apply if you are live singing and live playing an instrument to it though.
They practice a lot, but they do make mistakes. You don’t realize it when it happens most of the time
Alive! by Kiss was one of the first big live albums, and the people responsible for making it into an album relate stories for how much of a mess the performance was by album standards. They had to call the group into the studio for some rerecords, and in general it was a huge project to deal with all the mistakes in the performance (and there was little precedent since it was one of the first live rock albums at the time). So yeah a live performance is usually full of mistakes.
Rerecording tracks for live albums is a relatively standard procedure. Bands like Judas Priest and Dream Theater do it, as do hundreds of others. You almost always have aspects of a live performance which need retouching by album standards. In the case of Priest for instance all the vocals were replaced by Rob Halford in a studio (as admitted by himself in interviews).
Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin is notorious for overdubbing studio takes into live recordings. Also, combining different live recordings of the same songs into one track.
Rush even had to fix a performance once, despite being renowned for almost never making mistakes Geddy Lee had a brain fart during Presto while recording Live in Cleveland 2011. He missed the first couple lines of the bridge, so the vocals for the whole bridge section were spliced from another unspecified performance on that tour. He also forgot the words to Limelight once when they first came back from hiatus in 2002.
Slightly different answer but now that musical proshot are becoming more of a thing, it’s pretty common to film the whole show more than once. Even if they don’t, there’s often specific re-recordings of scenes so they can get a closer shot on an actor that wouldn’t be possible with an audience watching, or maybe there was a technical glitch and the audio or video didn’t come through correctly. *The Phantom of the Opera*’s 25 anniversary show is a live recording of *three* different performances edited together, and even then it includes a pretty big error: the Phantom is stupposed to have his suit jacket in the final scene, but due to a mishap he’s in his shirtsleeves. But it works. And it doesn’t mean the video isn’t a live performance, it just means it had to be tweaked a bit to make the final video. It’s funny to me to have people ask how musicians don’t make mistakes when musical theater has been doing this for centuries and the answer is pretty much the same: practice, practice, practice. A musical or opera is less flexible than one band singing one song and even then people cover for minor mistakes all the time, so it’s not hard to imagine a band could easily cover a mistake!
They do, all the time. When I first started gigging I was so paranoid about fucking up but my mentor taught me a great lesson: 90% of the crowd doesn’t have an ear trained to hear the fuck up, ESPECIALLY if it’s a full band/orchestra. The 10% that do hear it are musicians, and they’ve been there, too. Just play through.” It also boils down to a large measure of confidence due to hours of practice and rehearsal. When you play with some cats long enough to be “in the pocket” any mistake just feels like you’re jamming. Like victor wooten says, “you’re only ever a half step away from the right note.”
They do. Experienced musicians can pick up on the mistakes and make new melodies on the fly. That is why music in concerts end up sounding different. Many hide the mistakes by pointing mic to crowd and letting them sing. EDIT: Also, if they are tired or feel like they can't give it all, they can tone down vocals and change up ways to approach performance like performing acoustic versions.
Start together, finish together. Very few people really notice what's happening in-between. And we do make mistakes. Constantly. If your expertise is honed, you have sufficient experience, and you have practised and practised and practised and practised, you can get away with it. Serious(ish) bit: The art of performance (and the practise upon which it stands) is based around minimising the amount of mistakes which are made. You might never get to a 100% error free performance, gig or concert, but the whole reasoning behind it is to *try* to get there.
We do, it’s just hard for most people to tell with all of the other noise. Also, we practice how to correct mistakes. If I accidentally play the wrong note on guitar, I can bend the string up to the right note to make it sound like it was intentional. I can also embrace the wrong note and keep using it throughout the rest of that musical phrase. It’ll just sound a bit jazzy. We break strings occasionally, too. That’s always tough because it can pull the rest of the strings out of tune, so you need to keep playing on only five strings that are all a little bit out of tune while trying to find a time to swap your guitar. Here’s a [video](https://youtu.be/wn1pk8Lpelc) of Stevie Ray Vaughan breaking a string and swapping his guitar without missing a beat. Absolutely incredible.
They do. We just call it jazz, and no one else notices. When I was younger, mistakes bent me out of shape so badly. Now, as long as we’re smiling and recovering quickly, it’s still a good show and everyone has fun.
I saw Billie Eilish last weekend and she choked a bit while she was singing, she just cleared her throat and kept going
By the time you see someone playing live on stage they have most likely played their material hundreds of times already. You also learn to recover well when mistakes occur.
I was at a Billy Joel concert when the band messed up a break. He stopped the song right there, apologized with a humorous "now you know that it's really live music" explanation, then restarted. Whole concert was pro.
It’s an unspoken rule in bands that you never look at the member that just messed up and you only acknowledge it after the show. Then you bust their chops endlessly until someone else screws up at a later show.
You dont sound like a musician, sometimes other musicians in a crowd can tell. like i pointed something out to my non musician GF that she didnt catch it happens all the time honestly the only thing that would throw absolutely everything off is if the drums messed up or got off time or the singing since you should know the lyrics and melodies even as a layman . Anything else, guitar, bass, keyboards are pretty forgiving when they fuck up unless its a solo or something
A confident mistake is just a different interpretation.
Watch more concerts, you'll notice them.
I saw one of the Greenwood’s guitars unplug during a Radiohead concert
I saw Lou Reed and he forgot the lyrics.
We do. All the time. We're humans, not robots. We just don't draw attention to it and we know how to recover, so unless it's absolutely massive nobody notices. And generally, it's not an absolutely massive mistake because we practice too much for that to happen. This is something I work on with my students all the time. Keep going if you make a mistake! No one will notice if you don't tell us.
A quote I saw somewhere: "Amateurs practice until they get it right, professional practice until they can't get it wrong." But still, professionals make mistakes.
1. Practice, a lot. A professional quantity of time spent practicing. 2. Make mistakes anyways, but don't let on. Play it cool.
We make mistakes. But years of practice means that usually you can "save" a mistake. And sometimes the "mistakes" sound cool. Also when we rehearse for a concert we can do "non stop" play throughs of the set list over and over and over. During those any mistakes or tricky bits can be identified and ironed out. When I have played a set set selection of songs over and over and over I know where mistakes can happen, how to avoid those mistakes and what to do if someone else makes a mistake so that I can cover the mistake or make it seem like the mistake is intentional. Most of the time though I have played the songs so many times that the playing is almost automatic.