One of the songs I have learned and hoped to perform is âThe Party Ainât Over Yetâ (Status Quo). I have been playing this pretty much flawlessly for 3 months now with the odd bum note or bit of string buzz here and there which probably wouldnât even notice. I change the fingering of the melody in the last part of the song about a month ago so muscle memory and therefore delivery isnât quite perfect yet on that bit (although still performance worthy).
This morning I went to start a quick playthrough and literally had a complete mental block. I donât just mean the odd note, I actually could not get anywhere through the melody riff, which is kind of fundamental to the song. Itâs like someone had stuck some fingers from another person on my hand! I played through about 10 other songs this morning too which were all near enough perfect so I wasnât having a âbad guitar dayâ generally.
After 4 attempts I had to give up as I could tell I was getting flustered so I decided to turn up the volume, play a couple of aggressive punk songs and go back to it.
I managed to get through it with two wrong notes (I think) but it didnât feel natural and yet I have been at the stage of being able to play it without looking.
Is this a normal thing? In the 11 months since I have been playing, this has never happened and all I can think now is that I canât possibly risk trying to perform that track because if the same happens, the song wonât be the song and Iâll look like an idiot!
I have worked really hard to get to a point where I felt I could have a go at a performance but this one seemingly little thing has dented my confidence exponentially and I am not sure Iâll be able to trust myself to give it a go.
How do others deal with this (if indeed itâs ever happened to you)?
I would think this is normal. Every so often you hear of a professional on stage blank out. For those of us less experienced, it is probably more frequent.
I just took a week trip without guitar. Came back and played the Canon in D (adapted for guitar, so actually in C) better than usual on Tuesday. No hiccups, remembered the whole thing.
Last night, I got about 1/3 of the way in and boom, nothing. No idea what to do or where to go. Started over and nope, nothing. I then played a few other things and finally I got through the Canon when I went back to it. No idea what tangled my brain so much.
I imagine it sucks when it hits during a performance. A seasoned pro may be able to cover it up, but a more casual amateur must feel like they are falling apart.
I donât know about this for guitar playing but in my job I have had to give hundreds of scientific presentations in conferences or to the public, often in front of thousands of people. Itâs not unusual, even when presenting research results that you have shown many times before, and know like the back of your hand, to just get a blank moment when you cannot think what to say. So in public speaking, yes it happens, and there are ways to prepare for such an event. I teach my students ways of dealing with this situation when they are presenting their work in front of an audience and have such a block.
So it doesnât surprise me that you can just have a mental block when about to start playing a song you actually know really well.
Yeah its normal. What you need is somthing jumpstart that first note. Some type of personal trick you can come up with. @LievenDV has a fantastic Club session video about stage fright where he talks about things like this and has a list of things you can do to help mitigate occurrences and when it does happen how to transition through it and past it smoothly. It might be worth a watch. The club lessons are super valuable.
But feel better that its normal for everyone to have our brains reset sometimes.
Yes, I think it happens to most people. Last night I played I Got You (I Feel Good) by James Brown on bass, and while I didnât blank out, I needed to play it through about 5 times to start sound good (finger placement, tempo, etc). And this is a song Iâve been doing for more than half a year. I guess it was just one of those days, same as for you.
Then I tackled a new song (The Prisoner by Gil Scott-Heron) and could get most of the bass parts in 2 attempts so that boosted my confidence. Sometimes you just got to focus on something else and get back to that particular song a little later.
So about 6 hours on I came back to it and played it through about 6 times (without looking what I was doing). A couple of dodgy transitions the first couple of times and then pretty much perfect again. Itâs odd as there was no pressure this morning, I was just running through a selection of songs and yet itâs as if I had never played that particular one ever before!
I can recall it happening to me twice whilst playing live.
A couple of weeks ago I was depping (subbing in American) on bass for an originals band. As we were about to start one of the songs I couldnât remember the chord sequence. I had the set list with keys for each song taped to the floor. I wasnât starting the song, so I was fairly confident that as I knew the key, my ears and whatever muscle memory I had would probably get me out of trouble. They did and I didnât mess the song up.
The other time was in church and I was lead instrument (piano this time). I knew the chords and 1st note, but couldnât remember the melody to a really well known tune. The singer sang the melody and the rest of the band kept me out of trouble. This was very uncomfortable for me though.
I think the common factors in each of them are that I knew the key and I had band mates to help out.
It happened to our lead guitar player a week or so ago. The drummer just passed him a phone with the song playing on Spotify. The guitarist listened for a few seconds then started the song.
There is a concept of âBackchainingâ for learning musical pieces (it is also used in dog training, apparently). This means learning short phrases of a piece that have a tonal beginning and ending, but starting from the end of a piece rather than the beginning and moving ever towards the beginning of the piece.
I am copying an excerpt of a passage on backchaining. The last part is why it helps in the blanking out or other failure of performance.
âThere are several benefits to back chaining:
We all know amateur guitarists who can play the beginnings of many tunes, but
cannot play the endings to any. Back-chaining solves this issue.
Back-chaining increases confidence in oneâs ability to convey the music the
farther the guitarist proceeds into the piece, since the ending is rehearsed more
than the beginning. This confidence is further confirmed by the Premack
principle, which states that a preferred or more familiar behavior can reinforce a
less-preferred or less familiar one.
Recent research shows that there is a release of endorphins when the musician
reaches the end of the piece. (These are chemicals that are released in the brain
when you eat chocolate or have sex.) Endorphins are our âtreatsâ at the end of
our âtricksâ.
Back-chaining trains us to have several âre-entry pointsâ after we fumble.
âFront-chainingâ does exactly the opposite of back-chaining. We can all remember our frustrations in our early careers when we would start at the beginning of the tune and then crash, starting it again, and crashing again, often in the same place. We would continue applying our blunt force trauma until the music finally submitted to our will. What remained was a ragged automatic memory that was âoh so fragileâ during performance. In other words, front-chaining trains us to have invalid cues to âstop hereâ in the middle
of the phrase, coupled with a brow furrowing decrease of confidence as we proceed through the piece (because the ending is rehearsed much less than the beginning).
Dr. Lawrence A. McDonald, D.M.A., Art Kaplan Fellow
Author of The Conservatory Tutor for Guitar
2008 Michael Thames Cd/Br
Royal Conservatory Advanced Guitar and Theory Instructorâ
I play my repertoire a LOT. Some times, on a song I know very well I get the same mental block you spoke of. Trying the song again right away rarely works for me. If I come back to it a bit later, itâs all fine again,
I can recommend a book that delves into the reasons behind this phenomenon. Addicted to Anxiety by Owen OâKane. I donât at all claim to be an expert on the topic, indeed Iâm pretty messed up myself. Iâve only just started reading the book but I immediately recognized the scenario you described, he talks about a very similar example in the first chapter.
There is probably some interesting science to learn about this. Memory is more than just remembering. There are complex associations, including oneâs state of mind, environment and other recent memories (probably lots more) involved in the encoding of memory. These then have impact on both the creation of a memory and the retrieval of the memory.
Retrieval is critically important as well, and is likely where this type of breakdown occurs (it clearly isnât an encoding problem, since you can play it fine other times). How the current state of mind and likely environmental considerations impact retrieval is probably critical in recalling a memory, especially a longitudinally complex ones like a piece of music.
Muscle memory (muscles donât participate in memory) is likely a combination of cerebellar encoding efficiency interacting with more complex memory circuits in the hippocampi and other subcortical and cortical pathways. Simpler, we do better at retrieval when we donât have to think about too much else, like what our fingers are doing. The motor actions are encoded in the cerebellum, which is like a big data integration center with more raw connections than the rest of the brain. Makes everything happen smoothly and easily.
All you need is some glitch, a distraction, external or internal, to derail such precise process. Once off the rails, you are on a new rail and it is hard to get back.
I often take solace in the knowledge that âmy heroâ, David Gilmour, has always had the lyrics of Shine on you Crazy Diamond taped to the floor at gigs, as he inevitably forgets them (whilst remembering the lyrics of hundreds of songs), and for the last decade has been using prompters for his live gigs.
Shine on, everybody!
If James Hetfield needs a cheat sheet for the song Battery, which is probobly one of their hardest hitting songs they ever wrote. I wont feel bad for getting a little brain freeze once and a while either.
Whats really tripping me out this morning is Master of Puppets. which Battery came out on, will be 40 years old next march. in came out 1986.
RIP Cliff Burton.
