I was having a saxophone lesson the other evening and learning to play a series of test pieces to develop my speed and skill at reading the notes and then playing what I saw. My teacher, a very experienced player and teacher was ribbing me a little about my continued desire to make sure that I played every note right. The point he was making was that at my stage of playing it did not matter if I made mistakes. It is better to keep up the flow of the music and not to worry about missed notes – either forgotten or just wrongly played.
He illustrated this to me some weeks ago where he played a piece where every note he played correctly, but the wrong length. He then played the piece with the correct pace and length notes, but every note was wrong. It was strange as the piece was unrecognisable when he played it first but recognisable on the second playing. Interesting!
After teasing me a little more at my lesson he said if a note is wrong or missed don’t worry, it has hit the floor and is gone – keep moving forward. You cannot go back and put the note back in you have to keep moving forward. All but the best players make mistakes and in many cases people don’t notice – they do notice if you stop, as I had done!
Now where is this taking us? Well how often in our world of work do we make a mistake and then stop, trying to correct things, when so often it does not matter. So often we do stop, we try and go back and put things right….and so often for no purpose at all. Sometimes going back and trying to amend things makes the situation much worse.
- So how often have you made a mistake and you have frozen?
- How often have you made a mistake only to spend so much more time trying to rectify something that did not really matter?
- How often have you ‘worried’ the issue far more by attempting to cover your tracks? (When perhaps a simple ‘sorry’ would have allowed us to move forward rather than inflame the issue!)
Imperfect action is usually far better than no action.
Now will you take ‘note’ and let you music flow?
I do hope so,
Peter
