Please help- live gigging technique

[Graffspree]

Hi, I am really hoping for some advice please. I am a 46 y/o bassist in a busy covers band. We all make mistakes sometimes, that's fine, but sometimes I make them when I have lost concentration- I have ADHD, which doesn't help... 

I will be very, very grateful indeed if any of my fellow bassists have any tips for how to maintain concentration during a two hour plus gig. I really struggle so anything will be gratefully received. 

 

Fingers crossed and thanks fro Southwest England.

[Geek99]

You should have seen me, I totally train wrecked 

I’m not adhd but partner is and kids are. I can therefore only advise from observation. They get around it by learning their material in small chunks and doing it so much that they don’t stress as much and so make fewer mistakes 

 

[Beedster]

16 minutes ago, Graffspree said:

Hi, I am really hoping for some advice please. I am a 46 y/o bassist in a busy covers band. We all make mistakes sometimes, that's fine, but sometimes I make them when I have lost concentration- I have ADHD, which doesn't help... 

I will be very, very grateful indeed if any of my fellow bassists have any tips for how to maintain concentration during a two hour plus gig. I really struggle so anything will be gratefully received. 

 

Fingers crossed and thanks fro Southwest England.

 

Do you drive? If so when you started learning it was complex and required a lot of concentration. Over the months and years it all becomes automated to the point that you can drive for hours without realising that you're accelerating, changing gear, indicating, braking, checking mirrors etc without thinking about it. This happened because you've done it so many times. Play the parts over and over and over again and the same will happen. Two bass parts I struggled to learn were Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes and Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. They both flow now without me having to think about them. In fact, if I start to concentrate too hard on what I'm playing when I'm playing either I'm more likely to f*** up 👍

[3below]

Losing concentration is a b*****d, it happens to me when I get tired with the resultant mistakes.  Thinking about what I am playing or what happens next can also often lead to errors. @Beedster and @Geek99 have the way forward, play the parts so often that you have automaticity, stop thinking and just let it happen.   For some numbers I still have crib sheets to remind me of significant moments e.g.2V C, stops.   My most entertaining source of error is listening to our guitarist.  He is on fire, playing several stonking solos of one of my favourite numbers and my bass is effortlessly playing itself. The result is I become so absorbed in the music I forget we have reached the end. Cue guitarist for another 24 bars

Edited September 22 by 3below

[BigRedX]

You and your band should carry on playing as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Don't look accusingly at each other or do anything else that would signal that someone has made a mistake. The chances are that unless it was so bad that it bought the song to an unexpected grinding halt within 30 seconds of the start, no-one in the audience will have noticed. IME to sooner you stop worrying about what will happen if you you make a mistake the sooner you will stop making them.

[Mokl]

On 23/09/2024 at 12:25, BigRedX said:

You and your band should carry on playing as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Don't look accusingly at each other or do anything else that would signal that someone has made a mistake. The chances are that unless it was so bad that it bought the song to an unexpected grinding halt within 30 seconds of the start, no-one in the audience will have noticed. IME to sooner you stop worrying about what will happen if you you make a mistake the sooner you will stop making them.

This is, in my view, the golden rule of live performance!

[Phil Starr]

All the above is golden advice. We all do it including classical musicians in professional orchestras just harder to pick out with so many of the buggers. The trick is not to worry; easier said than done, and then to slot back in as quickly and smoothly as possible. To do this you need your songs firmly in muscle memory which is down to constant repetition. I don't think those who have never played in a covers band have any idea just how difficult it is to carry 30 songs in memory, I doubt may of us can ever claim to have completed a 2 hour set fault free and the error count climbs if you haven't performed for a few weeks. It's probably not entirely ADHD or maybe not at all, just your Humanity . You learn all sorts of tricks over the years. I've played whole bars of dead notes before now and none of the band noticed.

[nige1968]

I have attention issues. Any time I become conscious of what I'm doing, my chances of f***ing up rocket. At best I look to the audience like like an ape trying to work out algebra. At worst I lose the rhythm completely, or miss the first beat, or embark on an ill-advised and needless fill, or even produce no sound whatsoever for whole seconds at a time, then start up again in the wrong key. 

 

So instead, I try to go by feel and hope that most of the notes work. As people above have noted, you need to know where the changes come to do this confidently, but that's not the same as being note perfect. Bum notes are sometimes bad, often inconsequential; bum grooves and missed beats are way worse.

 

My last band was highly improvisational, by which I mean that half the time the guy who wrote the songs would forget bits, or randomly change the structure without realising, and we became used to working around that.

 

Listening to recordings helped me a great deal – you can immediately hear what works and doesn't work, things that on the night went unnoticed by all. It also gives you chance to properly hear what everyone else is doing, and think about how you can better support that. You can then work out your changes at leisure, without having to simultaneously hold down a groove.

 

Most of all, though, it's the way the song feels that people really respond to, way more than the bassist's consistently perfect note choice. So I learned to empty my head of everything but that. I practise often enough to keep the tunes 'under my fingers', to feel the cues subconsciously so I don't have to think about them. That's very different from rehearsing songs repeatedly in search of note-perfectness, because that's just setting myself up to fail.

 

All of which is kind of the same thing everyone else has said, plus get a £75 digital recorder and listen back.

 

Clearly if you're applying to the LPO, it's definitely best to ignore me. Maybe ask your GP about beta-blockers instead.

 

 

[Beedster]

5 hours ago, Mokl said:

This is, in my view, the golden rule of live performance!

We used to glower at the guitarist irrespective of who'd made the mistake, not nice but ore fun

[tinyd]

This is highly individual, and probably doesn't even apply to many people who are driving etc, but I never drink before or during a gig, not even a small beer beforehand. I find it always messes with my concentration.