Michael Riehle

Bass Player
Stockton/Sunnyvale, CA

Don't let perfection get in the way of excellence

I've been in several bands over the years and the most helpful and damaging thing I've seen in all of them was the rehearsal schedule. Too little rehearsal and the band sounds terrible. Too much rehearsal and the band sounds terrible and hates each other as well. Too little rehearsal is not the most common problem, in my experience. Too much happens all the time.

Why do bands rehearse too much?

Musicians, at least the good ones, are perfectionists by nature. It takes a perfectionist attitude to put the time in practicing and learning an instrument. We put a piece of ourselves into every performance, so we want it the best it can be.

But this can lead to getting hung up on details that just don't matter. When the desire for excellence becomes obsessive and dogmatic, it actually becomes counter-productive and demoralizing.

None of us wants to be the lazy, useless musician who doesn't do the work to contribute. But, at least in my experience, this is actually less common than the musician who's so uptight about every performance, every song, every nuance that he or she sucks the life out of the experience for both the musicians and the audience.

How much is enough

Rehearsals are necessary. Rehearsals aren't playing. Rehearsals aren't practice. Rehearsals are rehearsals and they can be a valuable use of time, sometimes even fun. Most often, though, they're a waste of time which would be better spent by individual musicians practicing and by playing out.

If you never rehearse, you're blowing it. If you rehearse twice a week, your band members are not doing their jobs. If you are rehearsing once a week, you're not playing out enough. One of the best bands I know right now rehearses twice a year or when they need to learn a new song. They sound better when they play than many bands I've encountered that rehearse twice a week.

Get it together, then leave it alone

When you start working on a song, time is needed to polish it up. But you reach a point where no additional rehearsal will improve things. It's time to get the song out in front of an audience. At that point, spending more time on rehearsing that song can actually make things worse, especially if you spend a lot of time nitpicking each other's parts. Get it ready, then start playing it out and quit picking at it.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't revisit a song with chronic problems in performances. But don't anticipate them. Don't try to fix problems that haven't happened yet.

Most of the improvement in playing a song comes from playing the song. In my experience, an audience tends to accelerate this process.

How long does it take

Figure on starting with around thirty songs. Three months to be ready to play out, tops. This presupposes that many of the musicians have to learn most of the songs from scratch. So it could be much less.

If you are still getting ready to play out after a year there is something very wrong in your band. Somebody is not pulling their weight. Or, maybe, nobody is pulling their weight. It's demoralizing to spend all that time in rehearsal with nothing really to show for it.

Dare to Suck!

Take the music seriously. Don't take yourself seriously. Sometimes, no matter how hard you work on it, a song is going to suck. Sometimes, a song you've played perfectly a thousand times is going to suck one night. Sometimes a song won't really gel until you've played it very badly a couple of times in front of an audience.

Take the risk, put the song out there. Don't wait until it's "perfect". It'll never be perfect. Get out there and play it when it's good enough.

Never, ever let perfection get in the way of excellence