Refine your skills...Tape your gig!
By Ted Vieira
Copyright 2001 © T.A. Vieira, Jr.
No matter how long you've been playing, there is always room for improvement. If you're in the early stages of your career as a musician, you've got a lot of room to grow. If you've been playing for a long time, there are still ways for you to refine your skills to be the guitarist you really want to be. (That's one of the joys of being a guitarist; you'll always have something new to work on!) Even if you're the fastest, hottest, tastiest cat in town, one way to fine tune your playing is to tape your gig and listen back to how fast, hot and tasty your playing is, AND how well if fits in with what everyone else is doing!
After your hours/months/years of intense practicing, hours/months/years of learning all the songs for your gig, and even after you've been playing the same songs, in the same band for a long time, there may be things you can do with your playing that may work better than what you have been doing.
Often, during performance the energy is high. There are a lot of things you are consciously and subconsciously concentrating on at one time. Things like....
Like I said, some of this stuff is conscious, and some of it is being taken care of by your subconscious. Either way, it's all stuff that is taking up part of your attention span during your performance. This can keep you from being able to always giving 100% of your attention to listening to how your parts really sound... Especially in context with what everyone else on stage is doing.
By taping your gig, the tape recorder acts like an objective ear that is listening to every note, phrase and chord that you play. Then when you've got a clear head you can listen back to the tape, and objectively listen to how well you are playing everything; what parts sound great, and parts that you could improve on, or play differently to make the work and fit better in the song.
If you can, try to get a "direct-line-out" recording right off of your bands mixing board. This always gives you a clean recording of everyone in the band. If you cannot do that, just place a small tape recorder somewhere so you can record a fairly good mix of everyone in your band. Remember that even though you are primarily taping to hear yourself, hearing how your playing with the rest of the band is of extreme importance to improving as a professional guitarist.
There are several things taping can help you with. Here is a list things you can listen for to find ways you can improve upon your playing:
There are other things you can listen for and everyone will have their own list of what they really want to be listening for and working on, but this list should get you started on your self improvement.
After you've made a note of what you need to work on, WORK ON IT! Big surprise, huh? Sometimes, if you play along with the tape of your gig, it will help you to make your playing sound better. A lot of stuff can be fixed in your own practice time. Some things you just need to work on at the gig.
Now that you know some specific areas you want to improve upon, when you go to your next performance, keep a mental note of what you are working on during that gig. If you want to, you can even write down a list of things you want to work on during that gig and leave it on your amp, or some place where you might be able to occasionally glance at it from time to time during the gig.
Don't try to work on too much at once. Sometimes it's more productive to focus on one or two things you want to improve on, then add too your list gradually.
One final thing I want you to keep in mind about all this is, don't make yourself concentrate on things too much at the gig so you end up stressing yourself out too much! Do as much work as you can in your own practice time so that when you get on stage you can still have fun and make it easy for your audience to enjoy what you're doing.