mattayou wrote
So often when I am out (at friends houses etc) we are sitting round the braai & someone will bring out a guitar and expect me to play.
The trouble is I never know which songs to play and end up going totally blank! As a result I end up just messing around and not actually playing full songs. Or else I play the songs ppl want but i don't know the words ? Yet at home I have tons of songs I can play!
Anyone else experience this?
Kind of. I occasionally play in front of an audience - them sitting looking at me and vice versa - and I'm starting to enjoy that. But playing at a braai is worse. When I play at TJs it's my set, me doing what I want to do and people listening to that or switching off. But at a braai there's this expectation of golden oldies. "Surely you can play..." and there's not enough hours in the day to explain that no, actually, I don't play that and I don't want to play that, let alone the reasons for my deviance.
I have tried to explain to people that it takes me a while to learn a song and get it to a stage where I can sing it through with reasonable confidence of not faltering too obviously. Reasonable people will usually accept that. I did screw myself once by, after a beer too many, using somebody's PC to download lyrics and chords for
Lola and belting that one out.
The other aspect to this is that there's more pressure when you play for somebody other than yourself. You can't stop and recover and restart if you flub. You have to remember all the words and all the chords. Which, of course, you can do, but you allow the situation to get the better of you.
