Playing Without Mistakes Options

[SeveredSurvival]

so it's understood that to truly master something, you need to be able to do it effortlessly, and with a musical instrument, that means in a flow state where you should no longer have to actually "think" about what you're playing. but I find this is one of my biggest challenges with guitar, and for different reasons.

with improvising, I often find that the desire to get "out of my head" and give myself away to the gods of rock, in a moment of truly speaking through my axe, more often than note will funnel my playing towards cliche and familiar sonic territory after maybe a few measures of inspiration if I'm lucky.

with learning a piece like a solo transcription, which I've been doing lately and will use as an example, I feel like when you really learn something thoroughly, you're on this teeter-totter of forgetting the individual licks you learned over hours and hours of grinding and just letting it come out, but for me at least, I find I can actually distract myself! I'll literally begin thinking about things I have to do, and for a while, if you've learned the piece well enough, you can kind of do it on auto-pilot for a bit and even pull yourself together some times and get back into it, but often you'll get lost or at least lose the spirit of what you're playing.

what are your thoughts on this? do you have any tricks for not overthinking your playing in the moment without totally losing the overall mission?: playing your piece flawlessly, and in your own voice.

PS: does your mentality change when you're trying to mimic the exact subtleties of another's playing? particularly if you're attempting to play in a way that forces you to modify your usual phrasing or style.

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