5 Tips For Rock-Solid Performances

When it comes time to perform music, do you feel nervous? Like “oh, I hope I can pull this off!” Or do you feel relaxed, knowing that your musical abilities are resilient to anything that might come up?

Today, I want to share five tips for how you can mix it up in the practice room to make sure you can handle anything when it comes time to perform.

So I nearly titled this episode “how to become a bulletproof performer”. But I feel like that phrase is owned by Noa Kageyama – and with good reason!

If you don’t know Noa’s stuff, check it out. And actually, I’ll put a link in the shownotes to the interview I did with him back in the day.

So I feel like “bulletproof musician” is his turf and I’m not going to use that phrase! But that’s very much what we’re talking about today – how to be really resilient when you’re actually performing live.

And in last week’s episode “Are you a robot?” I talked a bit about blurring the lines between practicing and performing. And I was talking there more from an angle of musicality and emotion and expression. But it’s also a huge deal for this issue of being fragile when it comes to performance.

And so if you’ve felt like, you know, you get everything right in the practice room and then you step on stage or you go to the jam session or the open mic and it all kind of falls apart, that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, and what you can do in the practice room to really prepare for being rock-solid when it comes time to perform.

And recently, also in Dr. Molly Gebrian’s masterclass, I shared an excerpt from that on a recent episode where she was talking about breaks during practicing. But something else she talked about in the masterclass was interleaved or random practice, where you’re mixing different pieces of music during the same practice session and not doing a big block on A and then moving on to B and then moving on to C, but really weaving them and interleaving them much more regularly, much more frequently.

And what was fascinating was she really emphasised that for her, it didn’t just let her learn faster, it had a huge impact on her performance.

So that’s a couple of times recently where it’s come up, and I know it’s a biggie for a lot of our members at Musical U, where they feel very comfortable with a particular piece alone in their bedroom, but then they’re super nervous to actually perform it for people.

And obviously there’s a huge bundle of stuff that’s at play there! But one of them is definitely this idea of whether it’s going to be fragile or fall apart, or whether it’s really a resilient ability you’ve developed.

So how can you become an ultra-resilient performer? Someone who can handle practical things that might come up, or emotional stuff that might happen when you’re performing live, or musical things like playing the wrong note or getting out of sync with the other musicians, or those little mistakes or errors or tripping points that can completely blow the performance if you’re not resilient.

Because I don’t know about you, but I would much prefer to be a rock solid performer at like a “level seven”, than get myself to “level ten”, but feel really fragile with it and always really anxious that it might fall apart during the performance.

And in fact, just to share a quick personal anecdote, one of my most painful musical memories was when I finally got a solo part, a lead part in a school production. Back in my school days, I had been singing in all kinds of choirs and barbershops over the years, and I was one of the “good singers” in the year. But I never got picked for a solo and it drove me crazy.

And I eventually got the feedback from one of the teachers that it was because I don’t – because I didn’t – say my S’s right. And if you go way back to episode one of Musicality Now, or “The Musicality Podcast” as it was back then, I talked a little bit about this.

You know, I grew up with a bit of a lisp and my S’s are still a bit funny. And I hope it doesn’t bug you. It sometimes bugs me.

I say them better now. But anyway, back in my school days, it was much more prominent and it meant I didn’t get picked to sing the solo in church. I didn’t get picked for the lead parts in the musicals we did, and so on.

And then I finally did! And I got to play the Mikado in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. And it was a really big deal for me.

And anyway, I won’t go on and on with the story, but long story short, in one of the four performances, the one where my dad was in the audience, I just, I zoned out in the middle of my solo. Like, I think I had two songs where it was a solo, and in one of them there was just an instrumental break between the verses, and in that instrumental break, my mind went somewhere else and I missed my next entry.

And it was brutal! And I did manage to pick it up and I continued without destroying the whole performance. But it’s one of those things that can really nag at you afterwards. And I think I did an okay job in the moment of rescuing it, but I could have done it a lot better if I knew some of the techniques, some of the tips I’m going to be sharing with you today.

And I do just want to say what I’m going to be sharing won’t be comprehensive. There are so many things you can do to make yourself more resilient. It’s something that we cover in depth in our Superlearning Practice Plan, for example, and our Supernatural Performance course, and in the Performance and Superlearning chapters of the forthcoming Musicality book.

So there’s a whole lot that could be said. But for today, I wanted to just distil out five simple tips. These are five things you can start doing in the practice room today to make yourself more and more resilient as a performer.

So as I go through them, just try and latch onto one of them that you can take away and apply.

And really, these all come from a spirit of mixing it up in the practice room so that you can handle anything when you come time to perform. And that’s because really, the root issue for a lot of that performance fragility is you’ve practiced in one very particular way, and then things don’t go exactly according to plan during the live performance. And if you haven’t practiced handling that, that’s when it becomes a real issue.

So these are five ways to mix it up in the practice room so that you’re used to things going a bit differently, basically.

So number one, starting with that point about, “level seven, resilient” versus “level ten, fragile”, it’s something that Gregg Goodhart taught in our Musical Superlearning course, our first training on superlearning techniques, he gave one killer tip that I think is so powerful, which is:

If you’re aiming to perform a piece at a certain tempo, practice so that you can perform it 10% faster.

So supposing it’s like 100 BPM that you’re aiming for on stage, practice until you can play it comfortably at 110 BPM. And I know that might seem out of reach, like, if you’re working on repertoire where even just getting it up to speed is a struggle, the idea of going beyond that might seem impossible, particularly if you’re working against a deadline and trying to get things in shape in time. But when you use all of the superlearning techniques, and especially these metronome techniques where you’re playing around with the tempo, not just making it a bit faster each day and trying to get it, there’s all kinds of different things you can do with the metronome that actually make it much faster to get quicker.

And so that can really unlock 10% faster for you, much easier than you might imagine it would be. And what’s beautiful here is, as he taught it, if you know that you can play it at 110, then it feels very chilled to play it at 100! It feels like the easy path, even though that’s what you were originally aiming for and what you want to produce on stage.

So that’s tip number one, is just think about getting it a little bit faster than you’re actually aiming for, and then you’ve got a lot of leeway for anything that might come up, because that target tempo actually feels comfortable for you now.

So that’s a biggie. Generally, though, what’s going to make you resilient to changes and the unexpected is to actually practice those things.

So tip number two, this comes from a masterclass Marc Gelfo gave, Mars Gelfo now. He’s the creator of the Modacity practice app, which really facilitates a lot of the advanced practicing techniques we talk about. Great app. Check it out. I’ll put a link in the shownotes.

But Mars, in his masterclass, gave possibly the simplest and most elegant form of what we call contextual interference I’ve ever come across. So contextual interference is a superlearning technique where basically you change the way you’re playing something to trick your brain into paying attention again. And there’s a whole host of techniques, but this one is super simple.

It’s just to move.

So a lot of us fall into our practice habits. We sit in a certain spot in a certain room, hold our instrument in a certain way, look in a certain direction, look at the same sheet music we look at every time, and then we practice.

And then inevitably, that’s not where we’re going to perform it! Like, unless you’re just performing to record it, you’re going to be out in a different environment, you’re going to be sitting differently, you might be holding your instrument differently, you may or may not have that sheet music, or you might be reading from a screen rather than printer sheet music, or vice versa.

And so the tip from Mars was just to really, you know, if you feel yourself stopping making progress in the practice room or just as a matter of practice, as a matter of rule of thumb, every once in a while, move, go somewhere different, play in a different room, turn your chair a different way, face a different direction.

Depending on whether you play a grand piano or not, that may or may not be feasible! But change something in your surroundings, and that, again, just makes your brain pay attention in a new way while also making you more resilient to all of the variety that can actually happen between your practice room and your performance environment.

So super simple, really effective.

Tip number three: play a different instrument.

So again, depending on the instrument you play, this may or may not come up for you in practice. But a pianist, for example, will often have to sit down at the venue’s keyboard. Or a drummer, for me, I’m particularly aware my drumkit may or may not be the one I’m going to perform on.

And even if that’s not the case for you, if you have the opportunity to play a different instrument than you normally use, that’s a really powerful one. Just to make sure that your fingers can handle things being a bit different, or the setup, your instrumental setup being a bit different than normal.

So for me, on the drums, for example… It’s funny you will fight against this by nature! So on the drums, for example, I want my hi-hat in a certain place, and I want my kick drum set up just so, so that I can hit those double kicks really easily. And it can be helpful to get things just the way you like them, but it does tend to make you very fragile.

And so I made a very conscious choice a while back to not be pernickety about my kit setup, and I’ll intentionally just kind of nudge things sometimes. Or if my kids, you know, knock one of my drums a few inches to the side, I won’t fix it, because what I really want to be able to do is sit down at any drumkit and play with the same comfort level. And that goes as far as, you know, adding or removing drums and cymbals and forcing myself to figure out how would I rearrange my drum part accordingly.

Again, totally instrument specific, but if you normally practice and perform on electric guitar, try playing acoustic once in a while with the same repertoire. If you play a wind or a brass instrument, bring your own mouthpiece, but borrow someone else’s instrument once in a while.

It’s a really great way to just kind of force your physical performance skills to be very adaptable.

And whether or not that actually happens in practice, it makes you more resilient on your own instrument.

Tip number four: environmental changes.

So this just means even if you’re not going to move, change what surrounds you visually or auditorily.

One of our Next Level members recently shared that they had started practicing with the radio on in the background, and so people were talking, there was music playing, and they found it was a really great form of contextual interference to make their brain pay attention more and again, make them more resilient to whatever might come up during a performance.

If an audience member gets up and walks out, or someone shouts, or there’s some kind of noise in the background, or one of your fellow musicians starts playing in the wrong key or something, you know, if you’ve practiced having those sounds and those sights interfering with you, you can handle it if it comes up during performance.

Another great example, one of our members shared once that they had actually asked their spouse to start interrupting their practice! So they asked them to just kind of randomly walk into the practice room and ask them a question. And their aim was to keep playing and not be disrupted.

And I thought that was really clever because you don’t know when it’s going to happen. You don’t know what it’s going to be. You don’t know whether that question is really going to snag your brain or not. But it’s, again, going to make you super resilient for anything like that that might come up during a performance.

Tip number 5: musical changes.

So we had a past episode on the podcast on “Handling a musical mistake with grace”. I’ll put a link in the shownotes. There’s some good tips in there for, you know, what to do when you play a wrong note during a performance.

And of course, there’s the psychological aspect of this, to get practice at not having your brain spiral and not kind of freezing up and not, you know, having that inner critic start laying it on thick and distracting you from the rest of the performance.

And in a past video, Andrew shared a little bit about the idea of “making a mistake on purpose”. And that’s a great idea here, too. You know, even if your aim is to play the thing note-perfect, as written – once in a while, play a wrong note and just make sure it doesn’t throw you off too much.

Or again, those environmental things can be great for that, too, because they’ll trip you up and then you get practice at recovering and making it work.

This is one of those big benefits of musicality training, even if you are kind of a performer in your heart and you just want to play the thing as written. If you explore ear training and playing by ear and improvisation, what’s great is you get a lot of instinct for how to recover from those musical mistakes.

So you can, you know, fill in a note or two. You can find your way back to the right chord progression, or whatever the case may be, in a way that the audience might not even realise you played a wrong note.

So that’s a really fun one. It ties in with our Creative Superlearning methodology at Musical U. This idea of bringing creativity into your practice to make you better and better at playing it as intended.

Those are the five tips, five ways to mix it up so that you become a really resilient performer.

Just to recap:

1. Number one is to practice to a higher level than you’re actually aiming for so that you have a bit of buffer there. You have a bit of give for anything that might come up during performance.
2. Number two is to simply move. If you’re always sitting in the same spot, facing the same direction, holding the thing in a certain way, try doing it differently.
3. Number three is to change instrument if at all possible. Just get used to having to adapt to your instrument not being exactly the way you like it.
4. Number four, environmental interference, whether it’s the radio on in the background or asking someone to interrupt you randomly or having your phone timer go off with a surprise ringtone once in a while.
5. Number five, musical interference, when something goes a bit off with the music. If your other musicians play a wrong note or go off track, or you stumble on your fingering and play a wrong note, do you have the instinct and the creativity to respond as well as the psychological practice of coming back to the moment, not getting caught up in that negative self-talk, and recovering so that the audience may not even realise you made a mistake.

Again, I recommend you pick just one of these. Hopefully one of those hit home with you and you were like “oh, that’s cool. I could start doing that”.

Start doing it and you will be amazed how much more adaptable and resilient and rock solid your performances become.

That’s it for this one!

Coming up this week, we have some really fantastic episodes lined up for you. We’ll be sharing our mini-interview with Sarah Niblack of Spark Practice, who I believe is viewing on Instagram right now! Hey, Sarah, good to see you.

And hey, Julie. I see your comments there on Instagram. I’m glad you enjoyed the episode.

So Sarah gave a phenomenal masterclass recently. We’re going to be sharing her mini-interview as well as a little clip from that masterclass, and I’ll put a link to her website in the shownotes for this episode if you want to go ahead and check out her stuff. Highly recommended. And it’s in this theme of performance skills and mindset for performance.

Then this week in our “Inside The Book” episode, I think I’m going to be able to share with you some of the draft cover designs for the book and I really want to get your input. We’re going to narrow it down to THE cover, the book cover, and I would love to get your input on that.

Then on our “Meet The Team” episode this week we are going to be featuring our newest team member – who is also watching on Instagram! This is great fun. And I am so excited to introduce her to you and share more about how she came to join the team and what she does with us here at Musical U.

And wrapping up the week, as we love to, our latest Coaches Corner episode, episode number eight, which as always, is packed with juicy nuggets, tips, tricks and techniques from inside the Next Level program, things that you can take away and apply in your musical life.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And I’ll see you on the next one.

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