The 8% Rule

Last Saturday night I played guitar, both solo and accompanying my friend Rob Balder, at a gig at Balticon, a sci-fi/fantasy/gaming convention in Baltimore. It was not one of my best performances. Rob and I did a new arrangement of a tune we had done before, and it never hit its stride, it felt slow and square. Another tune I sang well but my guitar work was kind of iffy, it was the first time I’d done it in front of an audience. (I did a fine job on one song, where all I did was play guitar instead of having to sing as well, and I just executed the song.)

I can pick out greater and lesser reasons for my struggles. There was the strangeness of the venue: we performed in a hotel lobby between the front desk and the bar, so there was constant traffic through the audience, no backstage area, and a very cramped space. The sound system was very small with no available inputs for my guitar, and there were ony 2 microphones, which meant that I had to hold the guitar right up to one mic and sing into the other, and on songs where I was not the lead singer, I had to have the lead singer hold the mic up to my mouth – and if he didn’t, I may as well not be singing at all. The speakers were aimed solely out at the audience with no monitoring system to allow the musicians to hear ourselves. These factors can influence a musician’s comfort level and make mistakes much harder to pick up and correct.

I did one song in an entirely different, though equally stressful environment: I collaborated with Paul Fischer on a parody version of a song written by George Hrab, an extremely funny and talented singer / songwriter, and sang our version in front of him during his weekly podcast which was being recorded in a suite with about 100 people crammed into it. (The original is called “FAR“. By the way, George is my new favorite person.) Earlier in the evening George had performed a long set on the lobby stage, and had done “FAR”, and I’d watched him voice the chords on the guitar /entirely differently/ than the way I had picked it out. So I was very intimidated by standing 2 feet from him and playing my dinky version of his song, with all the wrong voicings.

Something funny happened then, though. I’d practiced that silly parody song enough to know how to play it even with all the other distractions. And I have a lot of confidence in my singing – I can hit notes, and my voice has a particular tonality that I trust even in a crowded room to cut through the hubbub and make people listen. My collaborator Paul was the host of the show,and he encouraged full-audience ownership of the song by holding up cue cards telling everyone when to sing along. And God bless George Hrab, he read the lyrics off the page of my cheat sheet with me and sang /backup/ on his /own song/. And that song went over like you wouldn’t believe. I even figured out about 3/4 of the way through that I had my guitar tuned wrong! I am ashamed to admit that I hadn’t retuned my low E back up from D after the previous song, but it ultimately didn’t matter, the song was so much fun no one cared. Link to the podcast and move along to about the two-thirds mark to hear it. (Caution: colorful language …)

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What the hell is this gig report doing in a testing blog? I’m getting to that, please return to your seat until the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign.

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I ran back into George later in the evening as he was packing up the lobby stage. He asked me how the rest of my playing went, and I told him about the troubles I had and the issues with the weird venue and the gear. He nodded sympathetically while he loaded everything up on a cart, and said, “Music only takes up 8% of your thought process while you are playing. The rest is on-the-fly problem solving, and unresolved angst.” (Then he pulled out his guitar and very kindly showed me the proper voicings for his song, and made me play them back for him to be sure I had them under my fingers. A prince among men, I tell you.)

So, to recap – George and I had played and sung under identical conditions, on the same stage and through the same gear. George had sounded fantastic and looked comfortable and had done a brilliant job. Me – not so much. Why? The answer was in that 8% of the thought process that was available for music. I rolled out a lot of new stuff, and in my basement and even in rehearsal it sounded fine, but it took a lot more than 8% of my thought process to get it to sound that way. If I’d asked myself how much it did take I probably would have said more than 8%, but I never did – I didn’t fully understand the budget constraints I was under. And on stage, that 8% was aggressively enforced.

I needed more practice. I needed /a lot/ more practice, orders of magnitude more practice. I needed to practice so much that I could do a bang up job on any song in the set with less than 10% of my operational musical capacity engaged. That’s what George had done, which is why he sounded so great.

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Good for George Hrab, but what’s in this for me? Glad you asked. Riddle me this: How is testing any different than this experience report? When you are under a deadline, and you roll out a test tool or technique that you are new at, don’t you find that the testing itself takes up only a small fraction of your thought process, and suffers for it? Your audience is still looking for that polished professional job though, so practice, and plan for the day of the performance so that you can squeeze the best possible testing out of the 8% of your brain that will actually be available for it.

And I truly hope you have as graceful an experience with your testing as I did on that podcast. I received stakeholder ownership, support from the top, and respectful listening behavior modeled towards me by the alpha dog on the team. Anytime you get all that, your testing is sure to be a great success.