Decisiveness

The biggest difference I hear when comparing recordings of amateur and professional bands is hard to define succinctly, but words like crisp, clean, articulate, and tight come to mind. But one word trumps them all: Decisive. Without decisive playing, what results is indecisive: A timid, murky, flaccid, spineless, insipid mush of notes. It's like having your mouth full of cold boiled-to-death broccoli.

Mediocrity: It's What's For Dinner

Turns out it can be difficult to encourage musicians to play decisively! There's (at least) two separate but related issues that undermine decisiveness:

• Throwing time and rhythm under the bus in the futile quest to get all the notes. Too many notes?
• So-called 'rehearsals' that are anything but. The wrong space and the wrong attitude create a destructive high-pressure environment that instills a fear of failure.

Combine those two points, and you get a self-reinforcing death spiral in which musicians are trained to avoid decisive playing. Inevitably they learn to 'play it safe' by using a hesitant, timid approach because nobody wants to be That Guy who makes a loud, exposed mistake. Most everybody waits for someone else to cue them for entrances and attacks, and that's what turns the band's sound into mushy broccoli. What's left is an 'ensemble' in name only. There's not much actual ensemble playing because everyone has retreated to the relative safety of burying themselves in their own part, only occasionally keeping an ear out for someone to cue them for especially exposed entrances and attacks. That's usually the drummer, and heaven help you if the drummer is himself a timid, hesitant musician.

So now we've defined the trap. Getting out entails reversing the process that got us in there to begin with. How?

• Shift the focus away from 'getting all the notes' to 'keep good time and rhythm'. Commit to keep going, no matter what happens- even if you have to stop playing and just remain mentally engaged as the rhythms and notes proceed. See my post on the Cooper color codes as applied to ensemble playing.
• Whenever you play anything, commit to playing it with decisiveness and authority. That's the only way you'll get any kind of useful feedback. If you played it correctly, that's great! Keep up the good work! If you didn't play it correctly, you'll have crystal-clear and immediate feedback that you can use next time around. Remember to mark your part with whatever you think might be helpful for you. Always make new mistakes- avoid repeating old ones. 
  • If you're a little gun shy and need help getting started, try using the "as-if" principle. Play as if you were already a decisive, authoritative, and experienced musician. You can even keep a favorite musician, mentor, or teacher in mind. You can even take on their persona or pretend to be them while you play. This really works.
• Stop rehearsing in public spaces, especially where people have to pay to be there. That removes the problem of making mistakes in front of an audience.
• Be as supportive of the other musicians in your band! No rolling eyes, sarcastic comments, etc. If a particular mistake is being made again and again, it should raise your curiosity instead of your blood pressure. The rehearsal is a laboratory and test ground for integrating 16 separate parts into a seamless whole. It probably won't happen on the first try! Or the second, third, or fifteenth either. Every failure can teach you something. Make sure you learn what it is! Become antifragile!

Don't you dare reach for the Cheez Wiz!

That last point is much much harder than the pithy few sentences I just wrote. It might entail a large change in the culture of the band, and that can take time. But perhaps not as much time as you're dreading it will. There was a (temporary) change in a band I played in, where open dialog between members was encouraged instead of the more usual top-down "critique and instruct" approach. For a short time, there was a palpable shift in attitude. Tensions dropped, people became more comfortable playing more decisively, making the inevitable mistakes as they went along, knowing that there would be a chance afterward to collegiality discuss what had gone wrong and why. It's too bad things couldn't have continued that way, but at the least it was a glimpse at what is possible.