I was just listening to Hank Green talk about the idea of “Fake it til you make it” vaguely in relation to running a small business.
I highly recommend you listen to him clarify what he thinks that means (it’s only about 3 minutes of the video). Like him, I think a lot of people misunderstand and misapply this phrase and the idea behind it. But I just want to relate this to music (and it likely carries over to almost anything).
My Personal Story
Pretty much my entire music career has been this. I’m constantly thrown in way over my head. I literally started my career by accident this way. Due to circumstances out of my hands, I had my music degree (music ed with trumpet as my primary instrument), but I didn’t have my certification. That meant that I couldn’t get a job teaching, which was the plan. My wife moved for a job and so it was going to be even harder for me to get my certification because I wouldn’t be able to do my student teaching directly under my college.
While considering my options, the school she was teaching at at the time desperately needed a choir accompanist. I was not a pianist and I let them know that, but I got hired anyway. I had to learn a lot on the fly. The choir director often wouldn’t get me the music early enough (it would take me ages to learn a single octavo) or at all. I eventually had to teach myself how to use chord charts to comp passable accompaniments since I just didn’t have the the reading skills necessary, nor the technical proficiency. I needed to simply thing as much as possible.
This forced me to learn a ton about theory that I didn’t learn in college. This was just the beginning of a series of discoveries about how insufficient the standard academic theory curriculum was. Not only did I not learn a lot of things that would have been useful, I learned a lot of things that were distinctly unhelpful and I practically had to unlearn them to reframe how I conceptualized music.
I was way outside my comfort zone. Interestingly enough, the combination of skills I developed from this led to auditioning for a cover band. Once again, this is not something I was at all comfortable with. I come from a world of sheet music and extended prep times. But now I needed to learn 50-100 songs very quickly, partially by ear, and using only the resources I had available…and not even really knowing how many resources I did have. These days it would be trivial for me, but back then I was clueless and didn’t have a work flow for this process. I learned a lot more about fake books, how to make my own shorthand for chord charts, how to rehearse efficiently in that type of group, and how to prepare.
The band played all sorts of styles and tons of music I wasn’t familiar with. The depth of styles forced me to round out my musical awareness a lot. This got me deeper into jazz and ended up getting me pulled into a some jazz combos here and there. I felt much more exposed in that setting with much denser harmony, but I just kept pushing my personal growth to make it happen.
As someone who was making a living playing, I ran into an interesting problem. If you say you play piano… the people from the classical side of the tracks assume you have at least passable reading skills or that you can at least learn music fairly quickly because most of the pianists in their sphere do. Well, actually most of the pianists they know teach privately and don’t actually play anywhere. They often have fairly poor reading that nobody ever gets to find out about. But the ones they work with that actually gig can read.
I kept getting offered these jobs and it felt foolish not to take them. I viewed everything as an opportunity to grow even when I knew it would be stressful. It was like I kept getting air-dropped into a different country every few years and having to learn the local language out of necessity.
When the band finally ended I dabbled with some other band and combo work for a while, but then I decided to take a hiatus. Despite being pretty good and pretty comfortable with doing that style of work, I decided I really needed to take some time and focus on my weaker skills… reading being chief among them. Despite being able to read very well and comfortably (particularly in classicalish styles) on trumpet and taking gigs where I might be seeing the music for the first time during the performance and being expected to transpose on sight… I probably couldn’t sightread cleanly from a children’s piano book if my life depended on it.
So I actually specifically steered myself into that work, which was well outside my comfort zone. I started taking more accompaniment work for solos as well as choirs and a few church jobs. When a friend left his long time job as music director at a local church, I signed on to sub for 9 Sundays in a row which I honestly didn’t know if I could manage. I stayed there for nearly half a year until my full-time replacement came. When I left I felt very confident in my ability to do more of that work with relatively little notice.
The rut we allow
So many musicians get good at one thing. Once they are good at it, they like the feeling of being good. It’s frustrating to suck. I see this in the piano world even just within classical music where someone gets good at Bach or Chopin (just for examples), but not both. Once they are good at one, that’s what they keep working on. They want to learn all of the Nocturne or all of the WTC. They would get so much more growth (even within the obviously limited scope of “classical” music) by mixing it up between the two. Or they could get even better if they tried some music that was even further outside their wheelhouse. Maybe they could play some arrangements of pop songs or other contemporary music like from film. Maybe they could learn some jazz and learn to read from lead sheets.
This brings me to another particularly common example. Most people either play by ear or play from sheet music, but rarely both. Some people are under the mistaken assumption that you’re gifted to be good at one or the other. The reality is that whichever one you start with… they are both hard. But once you’ve good at one, the other seems so much harder. For those who read, when they try to figure out a song by ear, they eventually cave and say, “Why bother?! I can play it so easily from sheet music and it’ll sound better anyway!” On the flip side, the guy that plays by ear might be struggling to learn to read and then gives up and says,”Why bother?! I can play a more accurate and more interesting version by ear anyway!”
To work on something you’re very bad at requires starting at the beginning. You want to work on ear training? Well, you’re not going to start by transcribing Pathetique. Just like with reading, you’re going to start with something like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and you’re going to fail at it. You just have to push through that and discard the ego that makes you want to go back to your strengths.
It’s so hard to resist this. I mean, I still often take the path of relative least resistance, particularly when I’m in triage mode preparing for several deadlines. But it’s also why I intentionally throw myself in the deep end sometimes. I take a job doing something I’m not quiiite equipped to do which forces me to do the thing I might otherwise have trouble making myself do in my normal practice. I often end up pulling off way more than I thought I was capable of. Sometimes it bites me and I fail catastrophically. I’ve definitely failed out of gigs that I just didn’t have the skills for. And while managing your reputation is important and constantly failing and being that guy that sucks at gigs all the time isn’t a good look… you can develop a nose for just how far you can push yourself.
At the very least you can baarely scrape through a gig and then look back and use it as a learning experience. Whatever you weren’t able to do for that gig… that’s your job now. That is where you should point your musical practice time. Also, be mindful of your audience. I’ve learned that for most people you could be missing all the notes or playing in the wrong key and the average listener still thinks it sounds good. They don’t have the highly honed musical skills that you do for criticizing tiny details. You can get away with a lot. This isn’t a license to suck, but it’s a wake up call to take jobs that you might not do perfectly, but can allow for immense growth.
A great thing about music is that the better you get, the less work it becomes. For many jobs, no matter how good you are, certain tasks will always take a certain amount of time due to factors beyond your control. But in music, as you become better, the prep time for an individual gig gets smaller. If you’re a great reader with great technical facility, you basically just have to show up to the gig. You don’t have to spend weeks prepping the music like others might. In the later years of being in that cover band, I knew all the tunes. I just had to show up and play. It was a breeze. Learning new material was also a breeze because I had the skills to do it quickly and it was usually such a small workload of new material to learn (compared to when I started and had to learn the whole set list).
But what’s important about this is that you not just let your skill turn into complacency. So you don’t need to prep hardly at all for an upcoming gig you can sightread your way through? Well, then what ARE you bad at. That’s what you should be working on. This is another thing where taking jobs you’re less good at can create for you a whole list of things you’re bad at. Sometimes you don’t even realize a skill is a thing that’s useful or expected until you’re in the middle of a job being asked to do it or you work with other players who can do things you didn’t even realize were possible.
Storytime
Here’s a personal story about me watching this effect unfold on someone. I was playing an Easter gig and there was the hotshot high school trombone player in the group. He’d just finished playing the Arthur Pryor “Blue Bells of Scotland” for a concert at his school. He thought he was a big boy.
During the course of the rehearsal for this gig you just watched him slowly come to the realization that he was not as amazing as he thought. We had no horn player so at one point the other trombonist offered casually to cover an important horn part. So he’s reading a non-native clef and doing a very large transposition… while playing at the very upper register of his horn. Later on, when the kid couldn’t cover a tuba part and was making excuses, the other trombone player quickly just managed to play it on his tenor trombone with pedals.
The kid watched the trumpets obviously transposing away the whole time. The other trumpet player starts doing crazy jazz improv on one tune… then for the next tune he’s playing piano. The woodwind doubler was playing every instrument under the sun and just adapting to stuff on the fly as necessary.
The kid was absolutely deflated, but it was honestly probably a great learning experience for him. He probably didn’t even realize that any of those skills could be useful or might be expected. You could tell he wasn’t aware he’d ever need to transpose or read treble clef, or that someone could be good at classical and jazz, or that someone might play and gig on several instruments.
Sometimes you just have to get out there and either fail on your own, or work with other musicians who show you just how much you have to grow. Make note of it and take to the woodshed.
Final Thoughts
I make it a personal goal to be able to never say, “No, I can’t do that.” In virtually every case, I will try and I’ve gotten good at holding things together with duct tape from a musical standpoint when it turns out I really can’t quite do it. But this has pushed me to learn all sorts of new styles and pick up new instruments. Obviously some skills can’t be learned in short order, but just because you can’t cram-learn sightreading or extend your trumpet range by a 5th in 2 weeks doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work on the little thing that can be improved.
You can gradually make small improvements all the time. Don’t feel like just because you’re no longer in college with a full 12 weeks to work on 3 pieces of music that you can’t practice and make improvement. If I’ve found out anything, it’s that that sort of practice is garbage anyway. It promotes very little growth. Once you realize how much you can get out of so little time and you learn to practice efficiently, you’re just out of excuses.
I ran into a great quote somewhere in the middle of my career and realized that it’s something I was already essentially living by and I’ll leave you with that.
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!”
Richard Branson