Last weekend Elisa and I were invited to a special celebration that Ron and Karen Whitmore had at their home. A Celebration of Life for Ron’s mom. Performing were Terry Diers, Leslie Satcher, Jay Boy Adams and Kent Blazy. Kent was the writer of “If Tomorrow Never Comes” that Garth Brooks made famous as well as writing six more Number 1 hits. Jay and Leslie are both inductees in the Texas Songwriters Hall of Fame. It was awesome for me to be in the room and get to watch such wonderful musician perform. I was also an honor to get to chat with each of them for a few minutes.
What I Learn Just by Being in the Room
As I sat there and enjoyed the performances I realized that practice isn't the only way to get better at music. Sometimes, just sitting in the room while a great musicians play can move your own playing forward in ways hours of solo practice can't.
Learning Without Touching an Instrument
As I watch these skilled musicians up close, I was absorbing more than I realized. I saw how their hands move before a difficult passage, how they breathe before a big phrase, how their posture shifts when the music gets quiet. None of that shows up in sheet music or a recording. It only shows up in the room.
This is sometimes called observational learning, and it's a real, well-documented way humans pick up skills. Watching someone perform a task activates many of the same neural pathways involved in doing the task yourself. Researchers have found evidence for "mirror neuron" systems that fire both when we perform an action and when we watch someone else perform it. Your brain doesn't just watch—it rehearses.
Picking Up What Can't Be Taught
Good musicians make thousands of tiny decisions every minute they play: when to hold back, when to push forward, how to shape a note, how to recover after a mistake. These decisions are often subconscious even to the musician making them. But when I watch closely, especially over and over, I see patterns emerge. I started to notice things like how they handle a tricky transition, or how they use silence as effectively as sound.
I found that I also absorb something harder to name: feel. Tone, timing, phrasing—these are the things that separate someone who plays the right notes from someone who plays music. That feel rarely comes through in a book, on a record or a metronome. It comes through in presence, in watching someone shape sound in real time and seeing the decisions land.
Confidence and Calibration
There's another quiet benefit to sitting in the room. Watching a great musician up close resets what I thought was possible. It shows me what a relaxed hand looks like during something difficult. It showed me that skill isn't tension and effort, it's often ease. That recalibration is hard to get any other way. I can't read my way into knowing what mastery actually looks like.
The impact on Ego
As the set first started, my ego kicked in for a minute. I was looking for mistakes. I was trying to find a way that I could claim I could do that. But as I watched and really listened I discovered that yes I could make those chords (they played a lot of open major and minor chords which I play all the time.). But I also saw that they “expressed” those chords in different ways that were obtainable. It allowed me to not only learn but to understand that I can play good music. That it was not a competition but a way to “express” ideas and emotions.
The Takeaway
I don't just have to play to get better. Being present while someone great performs gives my brain material to work with: subtle timing, physical ease, decision-making, feel. It won't replace my practice, but it can shape it. Next time I have the chance to sit in the room with a great musician, I will take it. I am learning every time.