I seem unable to play a song without making a glaring mistake.

[MarMar]

I think everyone makes mistakes. I always felt I made more mistakes playing songs I didn't write in bands that weren't quite "mine" as compared to songs I had more of a hand in writing. As far as playing songs I wrote live, I always seemed to feel more comfortable playing them.

 

[MikePlaysBass]

That sounds a bit like performance anxiety. It's like the difference between walking a plank on the ground and doing it ten feet in the air. It's the exact same action, but the consequences of failure make make it seem so different. We all make mistakes, but we make them a lot more if we're too anxious about getting it right. Learning to relax on stage or when the recording light comes on takes doing it enough times to learn how to get and stay in the zone. That may sound kind of Zen, but it's true. It's what separates the pros from the amateurs.

Really know the song inside and out, not just the baseline, but all the parts. Then just trust that your fingers will find their way from all the time you've spent practicing both that song and in general. You really don't have time to think too much about what you're doing when actually playing live with others. That's when you get to experience the joy and satisfaction of the performance experience and playing as a unit and not as individual players. You seamlessly cover other's mistakes and they cover yours and the audience doesn't even notice 99% of the time.

 

[OogieWaWa]

I'm a late bloomer and didn't join a basement jam until I was 50 and I played my first show in a gigging band when I was 54, so I'm always the least experienced person I play with. By a lot. I don't have the advantage of having learned when my brain was young and sponge-like and then had decades of experience to be able to just feel where we are in a song and create magic. For me, I find that I have to stay sharply focused on that balance between "being in the moment" while still paying close attention..........

^^^I had to scroll back up and make sure that I didn't post this, at least the first half. Some good stuff there.

I have been playing for 14 years now, started at 50. Started singing 3 years ago. They made me. Doing both is hard; but I figure that's just age and I learn slower. Lots of mistakes early on. To make matters worse I'm starting to play a keyboard with bass while playing other parts, like piano or horn tones, while singing. A glutton for punishment, I suppose, but it's fun and challenging. And a lot of work.

I see a lot of really good advice here so far; and some pretty bad stuff, too, frankly. For what it's worth, you have a few very specific things that are happening. I think you have to figure out exactly what they are and precisely when they occur. Because it's not all of the time. And then address that/those specific issue(s). General solutions sound great, but don't usually address specific problems. If they are something practice can't fix, no amount of practicing will help.

I'd get verse order mixed up, or sing lines from other verses. It would be fine in practice, so more practice, the brute force method, wasn't the answer. Understanding the story and learning to tell it accurately was, because then the order of all the lines made sense. Music is just telling a story, right?

I couldn't do running 8s while singing, especially verses, they'd get sloppy and sporadic. I dropped to quarter notes. The guys didn't care, heck, they suggested it. Nobody noticed. Doing 8s during the choruses and leads made those stand out more, so our dynamics were enhanced. The problem instantly went away after one time through the song.

One more, a specific singing issue; leading lyrics, I believe they're called. Lyrics that start before a downbeat. Or conversely you could say the line starts on the last 3 or the 4 beat of the previous bar. I tried to think of them as being part of the end of that previous bar; didn't help a bit. I practiced. A lot. Ha.. I finally figuring out that one of the words coincided with the ensuing 1 beat worked. Just getting the lead-in words done before that word made sense, just like making sure your riffs are out of the way before you hit Bootsie's "The One". I'm still working on it, but I know specifically what to do.

Not that I don't have other issues, but these specific solutions to specific ones worked out.

BONUS TIP: for singing and playing: Consonants are the beats, vowels are the notes. And the beats can come mid-word. I highlight the specific letters on my lyrics sheets and they're a bright yellow on my tablet. It helped my singing a LOT.

 

[HolmeBass]

I had (and sometimes still have) this.

It peaked during my music college days. I literally practised and studied my ass off, learned tunes by heart etc.
but whenever there was an important gig or exam i would black out or mess up. All kinds of mistakes. Wrong notes, structure mess ups, timing flubs.. It drove me (and my teachers and bandmates) crazy.

For me it was all about lack of confidence and being intimidated by top cat other players in the scene or in the audience. I took every minor mistake as a personal failure. And whenever i'd flub once, i would get so mad at myself while still playing i was sure to mess up the rest of the tune gig as well since it totally threw me off balance.

Looking back, i was taking myself too damn seriously. Realising the gig was NEVER about me in the first place helped. And from the moment i accepted i would probably make a mistake or two, they slowly stopped happening all together. It's a mindset thing. Reading 'The Inner Game Of Music' by Barry Green and W. Timothy Gallwey was a huge eye opener in this for me.
Listening back to recordings of where i felt i TOTALLY messed up also helped a great deal. Most of the time i couldn't even distinct the 'mistake' anymore. In my experience we always put way too much weight to our little mistakes while playing. They are rarely as bad as we think when we hear it on playback.
Another thing which helped me in this process is talking with fellow musicians after listening to THEIR gigs. It happened more than once he or she would be genuinely disappointed in themselves after the gig, thinking he or she totally blew it while my jaws were still on the floor from their performance.

I'm a professional bass player. And even although this 'condition' still seems to hunt me from time to time it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. My advice would be keep on keeping on.

I was trying to figure out how to post exactly this message. It is a mindset thing. If you focus too much on not making mistakes, guess what- you're throwing a clam bake for everyone.

I read one of the greatest things to help put performance into perspective right here in Talkbass, although I have long forgotten who posted it: It's only music, nobody died.

So relax. Give yourself a break. Play for the positives: the groove, your bandmates, and whomever is digging it. Eventually you'll start making fewer mistakes, and you'll start making better mistakes. Small miscues rather than train wrecks. Things that preserve the energy, like saving it with a slide, a blank space rather than a wrong note, something dissonant that you can play right, and enjoying happy accidents. That's the kind of thing that positivity and self-acceptance help with.

Playing without mistakes is for machines.

 

[Papuzzo]

One thing I have learned from studying jazz is not to memorize anything and just learn how to interpret and improvise music. Yeah, it takes time, and you make a million mistakes along the journey, but after awhile even your mistakes sound good.