This has always happened to me....in everything I do....I'll have good days and I'll have bad days. When I raced (running) I would have some days where I would just call my miles "trash miles" because the run was awful and worthless....and when this happened on race day it was atrocious as all my training went for nothing.... Now this happens with my playing. Sometimes I wake up, pick up the fiddle or mandolin and everything is just perfect....other days...I can't even get my fingers on the right strings. This was the case last night. Sailor's Hornpipe is one of my favorite tunes to play on both instruments....I play it all the time and know it like the back of my hand, yet last night I couldn't even get the pick to pick right......AYYYYYYYY .....you know God has a sense of humor ......I think He does this (give us good and bad days) to get a chuckle... (Obviusly His sense of humor is a lot better than mine.... )

Amen! Like the time I played Soldiers Joy instead of Boil em Cabbage? Yeah...bad things happen. But its especially bad when you're (or rather when I'm) at violin group helping with the little ones, and then end up messing up on a book 2 song, cuz the 6 year old cellist in front is staring at the ceiling and is distracting me. (horrible excuse I know) Coincidentally, did you ever notice that bad hair days tend to go hand in hand with bad spelling and bow/pick hold days? Weird.

try doing that in front of 200 people----practiced a tune with our praise band at church, was an easy tune, but we play it in a few different keys, G and Bb...we were supposed to play it in G, during practice before the service i had the G music, and somehow i ended up with the Bb music....so the band was in G, and i was capo 3! You do that once, fortunately i was able to recover.