July 1999: OOPS - YOU HAVE MADE A MISTAKE !

There you are, valiantly playing a piece you have memorized and it just happens - a mistake! You cringe, the adrenalin surges, your hands either freeze or become uncontrollably sweaty, trembling appendages. The world as you know it has come to an end - you have erred! You are bad! Well you are certainly not perfect - but who is? Oh yes - the recorded artists are perfect, but the secret of that is a thousand "takes" in the studio together with the engineer's endless bag of tricks for eliminating errors or correcting little problems. Humans - they do make mistakes. The trick is - what to do when it happens. What NOT to do is to waste so much as a millisecond on berating yourself. Instead continue playing smoothly (as if nothing happened). Then:

1) Listen to determine if the wrong note was too high or too low. Use that assessment to adjust the notes you play next. On a pedal harp the error might be a missed pedal change. If you do not immediately know which one is off, you will eventually hit the note again and you can fix it then. Yes, this might be another wrong note but so what?

2) Perhaps your mind wandered and you skipped a section of the piece. By thinking of the structure you can jump around, repeat, or improvise your way into the place you want to be.

3) Think of what your music should look like on the strings. This wil enable you to see what note you played incorrectly and what is necessary to make the succeeding ones "look" and thus sound correct.

4) Above all DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO PANIC. This is nothing but a royal waste of your abilities. Even the pros make mistakes. The difference between them and you is that they have mastered the art of coping.

See you next month.

Stephanie

Webmaster's note: I posted July and August at the same time. See the July Lesson Of The Month here.

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