“We as a band need to practice messing up.”

This was the statement my friend and I landed on over coffee the other day. He’s the worship leader at my church, and we were talking about ways for us to grow musically as a worship band.

The best bands are not the best because they never mess up. They’re the best because they know how to handle and hide mistakes. Sometimes we fear mistakes so much that our primary goal is avoiding them, rather than learning how to recover from them. You can try and try and try to never mess up, but it’s going to happen. The key in no longer fearing the mistakes is knowing how you’ll handle them. So we were brainstorming ways to actually practice doing this in rehearsal.

Believe it or not, Sunday rolled around and we didn’t have to intentionally practice messing up in order for a good old-fashioned, accidental mess-up to happen.

Now I want you to think about something for a moment… What’s the...

On a gig a couple of months ago, I made one of those “drummer mistakes” where the drummer goes one direction in the song and the lead singer goes another. Looking back, it’s pretty hilarious. There are really only two ways you can handle this type of situation, so I’ll share with you my example…

I was playing with three other guys I’ve played with pretty regularly over the last 7 years. We’ve played all sorts of cover gigs together since college, and we’ve learned to play very well together. Most of the time we’re good about catching each other’s signals and knowing where the other is going musically…But I happened to miss one of these signals on this particular night.

We were playing something sort of funky, and we were jamming on it while the electric guitar player soloed. I remembered a few times in the past that we had launched into a double time feel on a jam section like this, so I prepared mentally for our...

I was on a gig recently where I played something completely wrong. This was no small mistake. This was one of those scenarios where the drummer just launches into something else and the band’s left staring and wondering. BUT…there was still a silver lining, which is why this story is worth telling. ;)

This was the second show I’d played with this particular band, and we were covering numerous pop songs and even a hiphop tune or two. One such hiphop track was “Poison.” If you were ever into old-school 90s hiphop you probably remember this one. It’s one of those drum-machine-style tracks where the intro or the turn is a drum loop. Songs like this likely inspired Bruno Mars’ “Finesse,” where the song kicks off with a solo drum beat.

Rarely on gigs like this are there opportunities for drum solos. It really just depends on the band and whether they like to put their drummer on the spot and hope he can throw...