There are some days when all I want to do is play my guitar and I usually will spend hours on it.
Then there are those days when putting in even a simple 15 minutes seems like a chore. On these "bad" days I cant really play it well while on the good days everything I try to play ends up sounding pretty good.
Do any of you feel like this sometimes?
Usually good days come from a bad night.
What I mean by this is, I usually learn new material during the night time. While the nigth starts off well, I sometimes play til 3-4 in the mourning and I get absolutely exhausted and my playing sounds like crap.
The good day comes the mourning after when I think I didn't learn anything but I start playing what I learned the night before with energy and enthusiasm.
Yes i do. A lot. Today and yesterday i played from 4:00 PM to at least 12:00 AM if not later. But other days (not too long ago) i didnt play at all.
aka Izabella
On those bad days where you just can't play, just read about the guitar as much as you can, finding tips and tricks and such. You might learn something, or just "take it in" and find yourself doing it subconsciously. Even sometimes just talking with your friends about guitar and stuff might help things for the bad days.
"War does not determine who is right; only who is left."
On days when I can't bring myself to practice, I go ride my bike.
It doesn't make you less of a player to take off a day now and then.
On days when my fingers dont like to obey my commands, I tend to listen to acoustic oriented songs (mayer, mraz, ryan adams, dashboard confessional and some random songs in between) and imaging myself playing them. I imagine my fingering and strumming and stuff. Most of the songs I have no idea how to play, but it's really all about the pretending for this.
There are plenty of days when my guitar sits under my bed in it's case unused. Those are the bad days. Then I go through stretches where I find it really difficult to even close the case, i just wanna keep playing. So i guess it's normal. So just go with it. Don't try to force something that's not there.
I hate "those days". Nothing sounds quite right, and it leads to frustration that leads to even poorer playing... When you hit those days you know you've just gotta take a break.
It seems like I get overloaded with notes and chords and scales, and I need to step back and come at things fresh.
-Metaellihead
It's nice to know that Im not the only one who has days like these. On friday I had one of my best days ever, I came up with this really cool guitar riff which I hope I can turn into a song someday soon, but today I had a bad day, I couldn't play that same riff I came up with well and I didn't care much about my technique, my hands even started hurting, I notice this that on bad days my hands hurt probably because I force them to play.
I wonder if we all have bad days than how do professional guitarist play live in concert every night if they are having a bad day?
I guess there's two parts to my answer on that question... the first part is about praticing:
Sore hands almost always come from bad technique. If my hands start to hurt, it's a good sign that I've neglected something - I take a close look at how I'm holding the guitar, my hand position, etc., and try to solve the problem.
Sore fingertips is a different issue, which can come from overpractice - you end up with tiny blisters underneath the callouses. I play a lot - today's schedule mandates at least 5 hours - but I also play just because I love to do it, so I may end up playing a lot more than that. Every once in a while I'll get that fingertip pain, and my solution is to break the next day's practice into several small blocks - I might do 4 chunks of 15 minutes, instead of 2 solid hours.
Looking over my practice log, I average about 3 days a year where I cut my practice short. The last time I completely skipped a day of practice was in Feb. 2003.
The second part: how do you cover a bad day in paid performance...
You cheat.
How you cheat depends on the audience and the material. If you're playing with a cover band in a dive bar where the focus is the booze instead of the band, they'll be happy if you're loud/in key/entertaining. They don't care if the solo is note for note off the record, so you get the first four bars as close as you can, and the last couple of bars, and you sort of suggest the lines in the middle... at the end of the night they'll think you were great anyway.
If you're playing original material, they won't be familiar with it anyway... figure out what you can leave out. Swap parts with the other guitarist on a few tunes, if you can. Talk more in between tunes - tell jokes, whatever. Learn a couple of tunes that are so groove based that you can tell a long story while you start playing to stretch a tune 2-3 minutes (something like "Green Onions" or "Roadhouse Blues" has great riffs for that sort of thing.
If you're leading the band, call easy tunes. Do CCR instead of SRV. Figure out what chord shapes are most comfortable for you, and do a lot of tunes in those keys. Maybe do your closing tune as a slow tempo acapella number. Read your audience and see what you can get away with.
Finally, don't stress too much over it. In 99% of the performance situations I've been in, multiple mistakes are made by every band member... the singer will forget a line, someone will blow a change, etc. The more you play out, the better you'll react to these things.
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