https://unlocktheguitar.net/blog/band-rehearsal-how-the-pros-rehearse-for-a-show/

I've been a pro musician, all my life and I've been in a number of different bands so I'm qualified to answer.

How do pros practice or rehearse? On stage! If you can't rehearse on stage, where CAN you practice or rehearse?

Actually practicing and rehearsing are two entirely different things.

Practice you do by yourself, rehearse you do with the band.

Practice is learning the material. I don't necessarily play the song through from end to end at first. That's crazy unless you can play the song end-to-end already.

Different people learn different ways.

First I warm up a bit. Then I go through the song I'm learning until I hit a rough spot. If I have difficulty fingering a passage, I'll play it as fast as I can WITHOUT MAKING A MISTAKE for 2 minutes. Not making a mistake is most important as yu don't want to get the mistake under your fingers. Then I take my hands off my instrument and do something completely different for 2 minutes, not musical. Then I repeat play for 2 minutes, rest for two minutes. I find I learn passages faster this way than if I keep hammering at them continuously.

Then I start at the beginning until I either get to the next rough spot or the end.

If I have the luxury of having sheet music, I can sightread pretty much anything except those difficult parts I have to do the 2 minute routine on. But if I have the sheet music, I'll look through it and count out any tricky rhythms before I pick up my instrument. That way I'll be ready while reading.

For me practice is learning new songs, or new skills on the instrument.

Years ago practice also meant memorizing scales, arpeggios (on sax) and chords (on guitar). Now I have different skills to learn, and that depends on what new learning adventure I find myself on.

Rehearsal is something completely different.

In a truly professional band, every player has already practiced and learned their parts. Each can play the songs from beginning to end at the desired tempo. Rehearsal is coordinating the playing of the band members, listening to the other members, melding with the other members, so that the song is played as a cohesive unit, not individual musicians.

In rehearsal the band mates can bounce ideas around, modify the arrangement, and improve the song or personalize it to the band's unique sound.

Anyone who confuses practice with rehearsal, needs to learn the difference.

Insights and incites by Notes

I haven't been in a full time serious professional show setting for years but this is how we did it.

First, we were booked nationwide in Class A rooms meaning casinos, hotels, big night clubs. Those rooms are not open during the day so we had rehearsals pretty much every day. The exception was when we were in Hawaii for 6 months. We settled on 3 days a week so we had time to go play on the beach.

Rehearsals included full charts. The band leader was a classically trained pianist who wrote all the arrangements as a score. I transcribed all the individual parts. Obviously that meant everybody could read but no charts allowed on the gig it was all memorized. The closest I could get was maybe a little 3X5 card sitting on the B3. The leader always had a grand piano supplied and he had everything down cold.

We were doing current songs but they were Vegas show versions of them not dance covers. Nobody in the band had any problems handling "difficult passages". Two times through the chart was pretty much enough because we all knew what we were going to work on and had already worked on it in our rooms or wherever. For me, if I needed to work on something there were no small portable keyboards in those days so I might show up downstairs a half hour early to sit at the B3 or stay later after rehearsal. Not all rehearsals were about new material they were about keeping sharp, watching the showy details, maybe changing a comedy bit. That's different from just playing the music correctly. Still, there could be things like we didn't handle a segue cleanly last night so we worked on that or the leader wanted to tweak an arrangement.

This was a full time, professional (zero BS at all) tightly run ship. We were booked by MusArt Corp and everybody knew one call to the agent and anybody could be replaced within 48 hours by a very experienced and very good player. No getting drunk, no making "deals" in the parking lot, no smoking weed in the room. Be on time, dressed, ready to go. Every day. These gigs usually involved a Food and Beverage Manager or Floor Manager who called our agent every day with a report. Causing problems of any sort could be bad.

Once that was finally over, I had married and had a 6 month old daughter I went back to local bands and man, was that rough on me. After some time I accepted the fact that nobody is going to rehearse like that and create something that tight again doing local gigs in LA. Everybody knows all the songs already but with slightly different arrangements, is good enough to basically fake it, it sounds "pretty good" but I know this was missing, that was missing, if we only had a day we could work out this so much better, etc. Frustrating but I stopped letting it get to me years ago.

Bob

On sax I can read almost anything, on guitar I have to woodshed difficult passages. I've been playing sax since I was a kid and played in both jazz and symphonic bands. Guitar is my 7th instrument.

Granted it's easier reading music on sax, flute, piano, and many other instruments than it is on guitar, but that won't stop me.

I've been in bands where certain musicians wanted to practice at rehearsal instead of on their own. This disrupts the rehearsal session and doesn't respect the time of other band members.

All musicians should know the difference between the two and act professionally.

Insights and incites by Notes

Yep, there is a difference between practice and rehearsal.

I was never in a band that was a tight as Bob described.... but I've been in a few that were pretty nicely run. And I tried to run mine like that too when I was the leader. Easy going but do your job and play the parts accurately and with some feeling, and yeah.....show up on time and be sober.

To address the question ..... it was a pet peeve of mine to have handed someone a tape of some new music a week ago, and when they show up to rehearse, they hadn't even listened to the tape, had no clue what the songs were that we'd be working on let alone the details such as key, breaks, intro, outro....
I would always learn my parts at home before coming to rehearsal.

We used to get songs and work out how we wanted them. Each person was given chord charts or whatever and would learn their part. Depending on the show we were doing we’d often have a few minutes as we were setting up to run through a song.

Things such as harmonies (we used a lot of 3 and 4 piece harmonies) were often put together in the truck on our way to or from out of town shows (also as anyone that does harmonies usually does, any decent concrete bunker, stairwell or empty echoey room was not to be resisted.)

In later years (once we were using decent mixing desks) all our shows were taped and we’d go through and discuss parts on the way home or sometimes take a tape home to work on a part.

After 20 or so years playing with the same guys one gets to understand the team he is playing with. Often things just fell into place with little extra effort one knew where he fit in.

Tony

I'm curious to know if the guys that use the 'pros method' to REHEARSE, ACTUALLY PRACTICE as described in the 'amateur' section.

Practice is a part of life. There is always something new to learn, some new skill to acquire, some new song to learn, and/or some new instrument to learn.

I've been a pro most of my life, and although I don't practice the same things that I did when I was beginning, I still practice.

I could live to be 200 and there would still be something new to learn. That's one of the things that makes music so interesting.

Insights and incites by Notes