Where Is Your Bar?
Where is YOUR bar? Not the closest watering hole as they say in Texas. Where have you set the bar for your playing?
People wonder if it is fair that I say they needed to have things ready on 1 days notice.
That depends.
Do you want to be the player everyone counts on to be perfect, or do you always want to sit in the audience and watch the player that everyone counts on?
My level of meanness is based on the level of a students knowledge and skill. I treat a comeback player who stopped in High School a lot different than someone who is auditioning for Grad school and I treat them different than a good full time pro player. Every level of student gets the bar that I expect from them raised based on how well they played last week.
The better you get; the higher the bar and that is how we constantly improve. So, there is a bar of what I will and will not accept from me as I practice today. I play something and it just isn’t exactly there. You can’t really accept that because if you do then you have started to lower your bar. Therefore, you have to stop and work on that right now. One of my students played and toured full time with Arturo Sandoval for several years. I used to get videos of some of their practices. One day Arturo played 8 measures of a song ALL DAY LONG. It is all that he played for 10 hours. He has a bar and doesn’t allow anything in practice to go below it.
But the bar isn’t what we can work up to. It is also what we can play TODAY. Music that you could do on a concert tonight with no notice before hand. What you can work up in a month or a week doesn’t count. The goal is to keep a great many things ready to go all of the time.
We fight hard to gain technique, range, endurance, flexibility… new ground. We should not abandon the newly gained ground and lose it because then we have to fight to get it back.
We get stuck in a cycle but never break through to a higher level because we keep relearning old forgotten stuff.
Don’t let complacency retake your gains. So, Where Is Your Bar?
Pops
