Playing Evaluation?

[lustersilk]

Besides music I am also a baseball umpire. Part of being an umpire is having other umpires, usually much more experienced, come watch you during a game and perform an evaluation. The evaluation is gone over together and then turned in to the association that assigns games.

Does anyone do this for playing music? I play a lot of showcase gigs where there are other musicians and I'm thinking of asking another bass player who I'm not close friends with to provide some honest feedback on my playing.

Would this be creepy behavior? Thoughts please.

 

[winegamd]

Well you can do what a lot of forum users on here do. Record yourself and ask for feedback. Or you can do that and take a lesson with a bass instructor and discuss your performance.

 

[the_stone]

If you're not close friends with them, you may not get an honest-enough answer, my thinking being that with someone who you know very well, you can trust them to give you an honest opinion, and hopefully they trust you enough to not take it personally if their critique isn't as positive as you thought it might be.

I agree with winegamd on asking a good instructor to critique you.

Also, you ask if anyone does this for music - it happens all the time in a school setting (recitals, end-of-term evaluations, etc...) but is much rarer in the "world." In a professional setting, the evaluation pretty much boils down to "would they hire you for another gig?"

 

[henry2513]

I post my crap here all the time. The only advice I'd give is to keep it honest, there's no sense in recording 10 takes of something to get it just right when asking for feedback on your playing.

I recorded myself and sent it off to someone, whose playing a greatly admire and respect, looking for feedback and he was was kind enough to answer back. The response I got was humbling but I got some great insights into my playing that I didn't have the maturity to notice and it led me to rethink my entire approach but now I'm a better player/musician for it.

If I had taken the time to edit my mistakes and do numerous takes I wouldn't have ever gotten the valuable advice that I did get.