Don’t sweat it and don’t signal it !
Do it again on the next verse, and people think you meant it.”
Chet Atkins
But dont pull a face when you make a mistake
Some interesting research by George Waddell and Aaron Williamon at the Royal College of Music’s Centre for Performance Science
A large audience comprising of a mixture trained musicians and non musicians was asked to judge a performance by a pianist
The cleverly produced video looked like a live performance in front of an audience
in fact there were 3 versions of the same “live performance”
Version 1 Where you could hear the player making a clear mistake but making no indication that anything had gone wrong
Version 2 Where you could hear the player making the mistake and see him grimacing
Version 3 A kind of control version where the player made a face but didn’t make a mistake
THe videos were shown to split audiences ( who had been asked to judge the performance )
The performance of the version where the player grimaced was marked down
The audience overall opinion of the performance was negatively affected by the mistake.
Whereas the one where the player clearly made a mistake but showed no reaction or emotion
and the audience were really not affected by the mistake at all
As musicians we are more likely to pull a face to show – “yes I know – sorry bummer “
Whereas it seems the audience read it as a performer who is prone to often making mistakes and marked him down accordingly ….
Food for thought – I am personally practising my poker face as well as my bass from here on in .
VIdeo of the performance here starting at 34 seconds
and a simple breakdown of the experiment from one of the researchers George Waddell on his blog here