Letting Go And Forgetting

Practice, practice, practice. Practice has a purpose, but sometimes we forget it. Why should/do we spend hours and hours going through books, playing rudiments and exercises, and woodshedding things? The reason is 2-fold:

  1. We want to internalize everything so that it becomes a reflex, it becomes natural to do without having to think about doing it.
  2. We want our motions to become muscle memories so that we don't have to think about doing something, we just do it, because our muscles know what to do.



So we practice, practice, practice, spending hours and hours working on the same things until we get them down. But when we perform, it has to be different than a practice. When we perform we have to forget everything we practiced. Forget and just play. The last thing we want is to sound like we are going through exercises. So we have to get out of our way, let go, and just play, letting all the hard work we have internalized flow through us. That's why it's called playing music, not working music. 

Don't forget to play…

~ MB



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