Not Performing for Over a Year Was Tough.
Getting back on stage hasn’t been easy, either.
My last live performance was on March 13th, 2020. I wrote a bit about the experience of seeing my whole gig schedule evaporate over the course of forty-eight hours in my article Social Media Helped Me Survive COVID as a Professional Musician. I went from having a fairly busy gig and work schedule for the foreseeable future to barely leaving the house and teaching all of my students and conservatory classes through a computer screen for over a year.
At the age of 51, I have been playing music in public with other people for 35 years. Some of those years were busy, others not so much. Even during the years where I wasn't playing a couple of shows per week, I might have been in college playing in ensembles or teaching my own weekly classes and at the very least playing music with my students. I really hadn’t gone more than a week or two without making music with another human being since the middle years of the Reagan administration.
The first few weeks of my new normal were almost a nice break once you got past the economic uncertainty and the creeping terror of not knowing if your family was going to stay healthy and safe in the months to come. I suddenly had hours of my life back that used to be spent in the car or preparing for gigs. Amongst the ruins of my work calendar, I suddenly had time on my hands.
Like many of my peers, I realized that this could be a golden opportunity. Without the need to woodshed or maintain the repertoire for my working gigs, I could spend my practice time how I wanted. My social media feeds were full of musicians crowing about how they finally had the freedom to practice whatever they felt like, and they had the time to practice for as long as they felt like. It was like being back in college, except for the fact that we could also afford food. And there was no hanging out for jam sessions in the practice rooms at school or at a buddy's house.
I personally set up a schedule that included general technical work as well as a focus on the bluegrass and jazz guitar material I’ve always wanted to work on but never could find the time for. I was even working on solo acoustic versions of songs that I knew for my bar band gig so that I could play solo acoustic shows. It was fun for a while. It was different and a nice break from the grind.
One night I decided that I still had a venue of sorts to perform, so I streamed a “virtual happy hour” on Facebook Live, playing and singing some stuff for fun while reviewing the inventory of my bourbon collection for my new audience. I did this a couple of times a week until I realized that I would need to start feeding the gig repertoire beast again. I was as bored with the songs that I had arranged for this sort of thing as I imagined my virtual audience was and really did not want to turn into an online jukebox, so I quit doing that for a while. I went back to practicing what I wanted to and finding home improvement projects to catch up on.
Over the summer, I focused on building content for my new YouTube channel. I made lesson videos that I planned on basing my fall conservatory classes on, backing tracks that I thought would either complement those lessons or would generate regular traffic on my channel. Guitar gear demos are big business on YouTube, so I also tried a few of those over the summer too. Eventually, I started live-streaming lessons on YouTube that would start with 5–10 minutes of me jamming over backing tracks before getting down to business. I spent a lot of time with an instrument in my hands but completely in isolation.
One thing that I did NOT do, however, was to practice my singing. I’ve always considered myself a guitarist who has had to sing on gigs. I’m a decent enough singer with some training, but it has never been my focus. Over the enforced break, I really did not think about singing or practicing my voice in any meaningful way.
Nothing.
Nada.
Occasionally I would vocalize with a Zoom student, but it was as if I had sat on the couch and didn’t walk for a year with all of the physical deterioration that would come from that. My voice degraded to the point where I had no range or stamina while singing, and about a month ago, I realized that I would be in trouble if I didn’t start practicing as the return to gig life began to become a reality. I started working with a few YouTube warmup videos and practicing the songs to break some of the rust off, but it was slow going.
This past week I had my first rehearsal with the band that I’ve worked the most with over the years, and while I did prepare as much as I could, I was still pretty rusty. There are so many skills that come with playing live music with other human beings that you don’t think of or cannot practice in isolation that becomes painfully apparent once you are actually making a joyful noise together.
These seem like small things, like managing your specific guitar tones from song to song in real-time or where your harmony vocals are supposed to come in while also finishing a guitar solo and transitioning back to playing rhythm guitar. There are probably hundreds of these small things that exist on an almost subconscious level when you are on stage but are vital to making music in the moment. When taken together, these small things can sometimes make you feel as if you’re reinventing the wheel just to get it rolling again. All of the skills and abilities that you had developed organically and maintained through regular musical exercise with other human beings over time just need to be worked out again.
For me, there is no substitute for performing music in front of a live audience of any type. And it is even better if I am playing with other musicians. You are communicating in real-time with the other minds that you are making that music with as well as the minds of the people in the audience. If I have even just a few weeks between gigs, it takes a little bit to warm up and get the juices flowing again. And that is when I still get to play in person with my students during classes and private lessons. This was like going cold turkey for a year and a half and then jumping right back into the fray.
This group typically plays gigs that are three to four hours long. Our normal night in a bar is one ninety-minute set followed by two sixty-minute sets of much higher energy dance and rock music. It is a long (and loud) night if you are not playing regularly, and it takes a bit of stamina to get through. The other guys in the band have been playing shows with another guitarist who was more comfortable playing in public places as the COVID lockdowns began to lighten up, so they already have a few months of gigs under their belts. Still, even they tell me that they are just getting back to normal themselves.
This coming Saturday is my first gig in about fifteen months. Maybe next week I will write a recap (post-mortem?) of how it went, but for right now, I need to get back to practicing.
If you’d like to check out some of the content that I spent my pandemic creating, please check me out at YouTube.com/JacksGuitarTrax!
