…well not really hair,
but there seem to be some kind of bad days when I’m playing just horrible. All the known tunes I mostly play great just seem to go so bad - rolls not working, rythm gets broken - suddenly I don’t have enough breath like I usually do - bad things in 2 words.
It doesn’t go away either… I just decide to leave the whistle that day and hope for better tomorrow. Maybe it’s just because I’m a newbie? hate to think the pros suffer from this and they have a show on those days…
I’ve always had ‘bad hair days’. They’re frustrating, but sometimes you have to keep going anyway.
If it’s a gig or a big rehearsal, it’s tough. If it’s just solo practice, then it becomes an opportunity to work on technique (scales, intervals, ornaments) without hacking away at complete songs or sets. It’s difficult to keep faith, but pain-in-the-butt practice of the basics helps in the long run.
I indeed have days like this; tunes that I could play in my sleep are suddenly horribly off beat, the ornamentation sounds like a mess and sometimes I can’t even remember the notes for the life of me. I usually just end up putting the whistles away out of frustration. I think somedays I just get out of focus and can’t give my playing the concentration and attention it needs.. I think it’s pretty normal.
Well, there’s always the silver lining: Some days everything just falls into place, and you feel like a real musician!
I’ve always wondered what it’s like for professionals, who have to live with having good/bad days up on stage in front of many people. It’s a lot easier at home where no one has paid good money to watch you do amazing things!
Happens to all of us. I was at the Dan Reid Memorial, an invitation-only competition for 6 of the finest pipers in the world, and one of them was having such a day…painful to watch, especially knowing that on any other day that person could play my rump into the dirt. One thing to keep in mind: if you’re playing solo, most people don’t know what the tune is supposed to sound like anyway unless it’s a session…just play and have fun. Accept the mistakes as reminders of the parts you need to rehearse more. The mistakes become fewer as your fingers develop the memory of the tune.
Dave
There is not a great deal you can do about it.
Some days I wake up to discover that my hands have been replaced by two bunches of bananas, and on other days I appear to have inherited Yehudi Menuhin’s hands.
On the banana-hand days you have to follow the example of British politicians who are embroiled in sleaze scandals and “tough it out”.
On the Yehudi Menuhin days you fall on your knees and thank whoever you usually thank.
I am reminded of wonderful interview scene in the Grateful Dead Movie where Jerry Garcia (who had a fair bit of Irish blood in him) talks about this sort of thing. He describes a night when, as the band was playing, he became convinced the performance was a disaster, that nothing was happening, that it all seemed forced, so that frustrating he shoved his bass player down the stairs after the show, and so on.
Funny thing was, he listened to a tape of the perfromance a few days later and it sounded completely different, and great. I think “just crackling with energy” was how he described it.
Moral of the story: the way the music feels when you are making it is one thing; what others hear is another.
I think most teachers encounter a similar phenomenon - I know I have. What you find is that the stuff the students pick up on best is NOT necessarily from those days when everything flows and comes easy for you in front of the class, but rather from those painful sessions where you leave the classroom muttering “Gawd, I made a mess of that…”
I have bad days to, when that happens I just put down the whistle, or whatever insturment I’m playing and leave, otherwise i end up getting mad, and wanting to throw something
When I played full time (keys and frets) those Yehudi days were the worst - these were the times when I was in danger of leaving the audience behind. Other days when the bananas would not behave were good for theatricals - playing with teeth, making the keyboard jump up and down, generaly hamming it up - all the while playing like Syt. These were the gigs when the punters realy had a good time.
Sometimes, when this happens to me, I find it fun to just twiddle around. Forget about playing tunes or songs. Forget about cuts, strikes, rolls and cranns. Just blow through the sucker and let your fingers do what they feel like doing.
I’ve found that when everything I play sounds like s**t to me, I am usually on the verge of making a quantum jump in my playing ability. Don’t force it. Let it come. Just don’t quit playing.
I think everybody had “on” and “off” days–it just sucks if one of those off days is a performance. I just wish I knew how to predict when those days would be…
But I think we often sound worse to ourselves than we do to other people. I had a theory for a while that I sould really bad when I play when I’m sick, but it turned out that I don’t sound any worse than I normally do. It sounds wrong to me, because my ears are stuffed so I can’t hear it properly.
hate to think the pros suffer from this and they have a show on those days…
