Some more learning from last week’s music performance. When you think you have something memorised, you actually still have a long way to go.
Here is the process I went through with a pretty simple song, still it took time:
- Hit the right chords when reading the chord letters on a piece of paper
- Hit the right chords when starting the song from scratch, without paper
- Consistently getting the chords inversions and finger positioning right (rather than making them up each time you remember to place a chord)
- Being able to do the above with random interruptions, without starting from the start: a mistake (by you or a band member), a quick start-stop to rehearse a certain piece
- Not thinking at all about chords anymore, just hitting the right thing based on the lyrics, music you hear around you.
When you wing a story on the fly, prompted by a slide that you see on the projector, you are at stage 1 when it comes to presentation preparation, and have 4 more steps to go.