Where is your bar?

Where is your bar?

Posted on December 31, 2017 by Clint McLauglin

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 every one 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.

The better you get the higher the bar and that is how we constantly improve.

But the bar isn’t what we can work up. It is what we can play TODAY. What you can work up in a month or a week doesn’t count, that is because future practice is to raise the bar.

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 the enemy retake your gains.