Michael Riehle

Bass Player
San Jose, CA

Dare to suck, but strive to excel

Throughout all of my rants on this site I’m working from one assumption: I’m talking to competent musicians. I’ve recently been forcefully reminded that my assumption may be wrong. It requires a certain level of talent and skill to justify being as relaxed about rehearsal and overall effort as I’m advocating here. If you use my comments as license to be lazy, you’ll suck all the time.

Experimenting with a song that isn’t as tight as you’d prefer it to be is one thing, but just being unable to play the songs you’ve been playing for months is another. If missing two rehearsals is enough to set you back on songs you already know, you don’t know them well enough. If that’s a consistent issue, you need to ask yourself if you’re in the right band.

Minimum Expectations

• You should be able to play the signature riffs.
• Mistakes shouldn’t be so fundamental that they screw up the rest of the band.
• If you find yourself repeating the same mistake, even if it’s in different songs, you need to spend some time on your own making it better.
• Don’t be obsessive about timekeeping, but constant tempo changes constitute serious mistakes.
• A lot of mistakes are fixed by simply listening to the other instruments in the band.
• If you are responsible for a musical cue in the song, play the cue. Get it right.

Easy Excellence

I’ve recently encountered a situation where people in the band regarded my relaxed attitude about rehearsal as an excuse to be lazy. It had been a long time since I encountered that attitude, so I wasn’t really prepared to deal with it.

So, I’ve spent some time reflecting on it since then.

It requires a certain level of musicianship to justify being relaxed about rehearsal and practice. You don’t have to be a virtuoso; you don’t even have to be professional level. But you do have to be comfortable with your instrument and capable of thinking on your feet. You need to be able to remember changes and play signature riffs. You must be able to meet the minimum requirements I’ve described above.

You can be relaxed about the music. I believe it to be a requirement. But that doesn’t mean you should be lazy. You shouldn’t overwork a song, but that doesn’t mean there’s no work to be done. Learn your parts. Commit them to memory. Be ready to handle it when inevitable mistakes happen.

Musicians who can actually accomplish this tend to achieve an excellence in their playing without a lot of extraordinary effort. Once they work out a part, they can pretty much just play it. It quickly comes down to details with people like that. Often those details are so trivial that it really only matters to the individual musician.

That “easy excellence” is critical.

Mistake? Or Incompetence?

A mistake is when someone who fundamentally knows what they’re doing still manages to do the wrong thing. We should always strive to correct and prevent mistakes, but they’re going to happen.

Incompetence is when someone simply isn’t up to delivering the performance as required. They haven’t learned their parts, maybe they aren’t capable of learning their parts. They don’t spend the time necessary on their own to be ready to play with the band.

Mistakes are forgivable. Incompetence is not.