Pro vs. Amateur Soloing Mistakes

Listen up…

What I’m about to say is NOT supposed to make you feel better about sounding bad on your instrument.

Ready?

Everybody makes mistakes.

Remember, this isn’t a pep talk! Instead, I want to dig into why mistakes made by pros sound different from mistakes made by amateurs.

Whether it’s improvising or sight reading or playing standards from memory, the difference between pro mistakes and amateur mistakes comes down to one word: recovery.

If you can recover well, your blunder might not sound like a mistake at all.

The problem is that many amateurs tend to fall flat on their faces when just about anything goes wrong.

The main culprit is that when many musicians make mistakes, they become disconnected from the time, aka the pulse, aka the beat…

Whatever you want to call it, your awareness of the time is the last thing you want to lose.

Think of the time like a train. If you fall off, that choo choo ain’t stopping.

In fact, let’s take the analogy further…

Say you’re in an action movie on a freight train and the boxcar door is wide open. Crates filled with pitches and rhythms and chords are blowing out into the wind.

The professional remains calm and stays on the train while the amateur panics and leans out the door trying desperately to save a few notes – only to fall out and watch the train ride off into the distance.

Moral of the story? No matter how bad your unintended note or notes may have sounded, don’t lose the time!

You can even practice playing wrong notes on purpose while keeping good time in order to enhance your recovery skills.

Just play a bunch of intentional gibberish while tapping your foot on beats two and four, and you’ll become much better at bouncing back from mistakes.

The skill of good recovery is going to be super important for incoming students of Making the Changes – my six-week improvisation course on how to solo over chord changes.

So many of you have been writing in asking when enrollment is going to reopen. Well, today is your lucky day! Just make sure to secure your spot by Friday, February 12.

Click here to learn more about Making the Changes and enroll by Friday!

Happy Shedding,

Jeff