Let’s try to be more specific than “I wish I could play like…” or “I wish I didn’t make so many mistakes”.
I’m a dedicated but technically limited amateur pianist who plays mostly classical pieces. I’ve been playing almost daily for years. On a good day I can play a one-hour programme of repertoire works that you would easily recognize and appreciate. On a bad day, I’m so terrible that you’d wonder whether I can actually play.
The thing that bothers me the most is what I call mistake contamination. I’ll learn a piece completely and play it well except for a couple of places where I stumble repeatedly, with minimal progress over weeks, months or even years. Then, one day, I’ll start making a completely random mistake in the preceding measure. Then, in the following one. And then everything unravels and I have to painstakingly practice whole passages again.
I’ve been trying to relearn Bach’s Invention in C minor, BWV 773 for the past two years. I used to be able to play it all the way through, and I’m almost there again, but I keep on messing up the ornamental notes at the very end of measure 4. Even when I can get past them, I always feel that what I’m really doing is “hit first note - insert fast piano noises - hit last note”. And it’s not unusual for me to start making mistakes in measures 2 and 3, as if I was anticipating the coming mess, or even 5 and 6. Then, it takes me days to more or less get back on track and be able to focus on the rest of the piece that I still haven’t fully relearnt, in part because this constant mistake contamination.
And in recent weeks, I’ve had the same thing happen with the Prelude in C Major, BWV 846, a piece that I’ve played for almost 10 years, including in concert, and that I used to consider as one my 2-3 surefire ones. This is discouraging.
The main thing that frustrates me is my bad memory. Even after having played piano for nearly 30 years, I can never be quite confident that, if I were to perform a piece in a recital from memory, I won’t have a brain freeze halfway through and go blank on what notes come next. It only ever happened to me once in a performance, though.
@Moonrise - are you doing [don’t have a good name for it] Slow and Careful Practice?
That is, when you learn and practice pieces, ensure that you are not making mistakes and ensure that your muscle memory is learning correct notes, not bad notes. If you do the opposite which is smudging up a bar or two then your muscle memory is defective and is confused.
Like your ornament, play them at one quarter speed. Learn it that way, and then it will be much easier to ramp up to the correct tempo. Even when I’m playing through a piece at normal tempo for myself, I’ll slow down and be careful about ornaments and tricky passages.
My big frustration is spending untold hours learning a piece and then, having gone a period of time without playing it, virtually forgetting how to perform it.
I wish I could maintain an inventory of every song I’ve ever learned.
Not my own idea, but one I read in “Playing the Piano for Pleasure” by Charles Cook.
He had the concept of a “break”, which is a bar or two that initially gave you problems, but after working on you have nailed down solid - it has been mastered to become rock solid and becomes an anchor for the entire section.
He named it break because of the analogy of a broken bone - the break is the mended part that won’t break again. It is tougher than everything adjacent.
I’ve been playing stringed instruments for 30 years and haven’t really improved in about 29 years. I’m good at a couple of things, but not playing music. When I’ve been around really good musicians I recognize that they are skilled in the same way I am at my strong endeavors, and I just don’t have it for music.
Which is fine. I enjoy what I play and, maybe more importantly, what I know about music from my attempts enables me to appreciate good music.
I’m a guitarist, currently playing in a classic rock cover band. I’ve been playing for about 50 years. I tend to press harder on the fretboard than needed. It’s just how I’m comfortable, and it accommodates any level of attack with my picking hand.
But that can sometimes change the pitch of a note, and it also makes certain simple but uncommon chords or clusters more difficult to land for some reason. If I don’t have the muscle memory for a chord, I find a softer touch forms it much easier. But I have to think about it. If I have to play jazz inversions in a given song, even ones that don’t seem to require a great deal of dexterity, it demands more practice than I think it should for someone of my experience.
Plateauing. I’ve played guitar for many years but I go through spurts of learning or improving that I’m really happy with until I realize I’m not doing anything new anymore. When I feel like I’ve really got my mojo going and I’ll be jamming with a group and all of a sudden I realize I’ve played this same lick three times in every jam for the last three weeks. And it gets in my head. I really try to stop thinking and just play when I’m jamming and when I get in my head it all falls to shit. The same thing happens at home just practicing or playing along with a jam track.
Forgetting how to play things I have written. I’ve got a couple of albums worth of songs that I’ve written and recorded (in various stages of completion), doing the majority of parts myself. I can remember what key each is in, etc. But every one has at least one part that I’ve completely forgotten how to play.
If I don’t rehearse the songs I write with a band, they’re going to be difficult to recall in six months.
My inability to sightread without considerable effort. It’s a skill I wish I had nurtured at a very young age, but I had two things going against me. First, I have a very good ear, which essentially served as a crutch. Second, I’m pretty sure I had undiagnosed attention deficit disorder which made learning anything that I didn’t find interesting far more difficult. I’ve worked as a professional musician for many years and that ear has taken me far, but not as far as I could have gone if I had the ability to read anything instantly.
My piano teacher used to teach her students to learn a piece backwards - starting from near the end and gradually working your way to the front. Her reasoning was that students tend to practice from the beginning and start out strong in a performance, but then get shakier and shakier as they near the end. By starting from the end in practice, you grow in confidence and when you’re on stage, you only get more and more confident as the piece goes on, sturdier in memory.
I like it and it applies to a lot of things that fail,fail,fail -fair- then improve with practice. A skiing turn, a boxing combination, a video game pattern, pen or brush stroke, programming technique.
Guitarist here — no matter how much I practice, I can not retain calluses. Oh, sure, the skin gets tough and trenches are dug in the fingertips, but calluses elude me.
This is me. I’ve been trying to teach myself to play guitar for about the same period of time, maybe longer. I’m not getting any better and have come to the conclusion that I’m not gonna. I guess what frustrates me the most is my lack of ability to stick with it. I’ll start playing for a few months then put the guitar down and not pick it up again for another six months or a year - at which point I feel like I’m starting all over again. (Sort of like the people who say “quitting smoking is easy - I’ve done it hundreds of times!”)
Guitar player. I don’t listen to new music so I’m still playing all the same shit I learned 20 years ago. Nobody ever asks to hear anything else. My hands essentially just do it by themselves now, I’m not really even thinking about it. If you asked me the chords to something I just played, I probably couldn’t even tell you.
I play piano and bass guitar for enjoyment. I played in a couple bands in my youth, but I don’t consider myself a musician.
It frustrates me that I taught myself to sight-read the treble clef on piano, but not the bass clef. I can work out the bass clef notes, but it doesn’t come naturally, and it takes time. I generally just improvise and play chords with my left hand. This isn’t a problem with pop or rock music, but I’d like to be better with classical pieces.
I play bass guitar. I wish I wanted to practice more.
One frustration, mentioned by others, is how ephemeral our work is. I used to play classical guitar, but it would take ages for me to work up any of the nice pieces I used to play. It’s depressing.
My wife and I have been playing Christian music for years, her on piano and me on bass. This year we began to post videos on YouTube for churches to use in their services to fill in on a week when they don’t have musicians. I noticed that the videos have a side effect of saving the work so even if it fades, I can see how I played something and remember the bass lines I used.
I really wish I had recorded some of my classical guitar work in the past. So sad.
