Performance nerves killing me!

[lpa53]

Originally Posted by amyFB

... e) letting my self go into the song while I perform it, dialing OUT the audience and focusing my attention on me and my playing.

That's a big one! Totally agree. Now I wish I could do it!

[lpa53]

The late great Michael Johnson had some thoughts on stage fright, which he wrote about in a series of article for Performing Songwriter magazine.

A short snippet:

"Stage Fright: I sometimes ask my wife for some kind words before a show I'm nervous about, and without fail she says, "Have fun!”, which usually pisses me off. I think that I should be feeling something more noble than "fun" about my life's work. She's right, though. A labor of love should also be child's play. But I forget. So don't take yourself so seriously. Make it an act of love or something. After all, you do have something to give, don't you?"

And a longer article "Dealing With Stage Fright">

[JeffreyAK]

I never had problems playing guitar in front of people, but by the time I picked up guitar I'd been playing trombone for years in band, solo and ensembles, student solo performances, etc., and early-on I was petrified to play in front of people. I remember vividly a time in 6th grade when I had a solo, and I had nailed it in practice many times but when it came time to do it in concert, I started to choke. I saved it by recognizing that I really was blowing it, and only because I was scared, so somehow I summoned some focus and saved it.

I think speaking in front of people is similar. I do that a lot, sometimes auditoriums full of them, and that used to scare me to death but it doesn't bother me at all anymore. A lot of it is just self-confidence coming from past experience.

[DaveKell]

Originally Posted by JeffreyAK

I think speaking in front of people is similar. I do that a lot, sometimes auditoriums full of them, and that used to scare me to death but it doesn't bother me at all anymore. A lot of it is just self-confidence coming from past experience.

This was a strange thing about me. I had performance nerves horribly I've overcome to some extent by weekly jam session attendance for several months. As for public speaking however, I never had issues with that and was always eager to do it. This has recently given me an opportunity I'm signed up for to travel extensively to speak at men's health seminars. It's gonna be a great additional retirement income source.

[6L6]

I’ve always felt it’s easiest to play in front of people I don’t know.

Practice, Practice, Practice. And while you Practice, pretend you’re playing to an audience you want to impress.

Hit the Open Mic scene where you live. These are generally very friendly venues where you’ll get lots of support.

Hang in there!

[M Hayden]

Originally Posted by 6L6

I’ve always felt it’s easiest to play in front of people I don’t know.

I agree, to some extent. I also think that audiences seeing shows that cost them nothing are paradoxically more difficult than paying audiences. Maybe paying audiences re conditioned to behave better bc there’s an expectation of better performance stemming from having paid for it.


Either way, nothing subs for practice and face time in front of audiences. Both will acclimate the performer to, well, performing.

All good thoughts to all the performers suffering badly from stage fright.

[troggg]

All I can tell you is that I've received some of the best audience reaction for songs I thought I didn't play all that well.

When people aren't paying top dollar to see the best known performers, and maybe they haven't even paid one dollar, they're just there for the experience, not so much for perfection.

Take my last time out, at the closing of the local wine bar, when a whole bunch of regulars could only play 2 songs and the place was packed like never before. I thought I did pretty well with the first song and was feeling confident. Then I noticed there was a lot of talking going on over the second song (which I'd never played before). So much talking in fact that the host stopped my performance to remind the crowd it was a listening room. So I resumed halfway through the song, made a million mistakes, but still kind of kept my head about me, although I dummied down some of the singing.

From a technical standpoint, it was a complete suckfest ... but wouldn't you know it, all sorts of people came up to me and told me what a great song it was. It was probably obvious I wasn't thoroughly familiar with performing the song -- and no one cared.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that at venues which aren't "big time," people are awfully forgiving and are just looking for something that rings their bell and they can relate to as opposed to judging how close you can come to attaining perfection.

[JAMKC]

Really great thread. I’m much newer to playing than most who posted but even get nerves playing in front of my teacher. Probably not ready for anything more but I recognize already that I’m going to have to deal with this as I move forward.

[pf400]

I started to "go public" by busking...me alone playing instrumentals with looper. Graduated to playing at family weddings. Yes, try to ignore the audience, and play it how you practiced it, no differently. Take the compliments to heart, file them away for future reference...this will reinforce your self-confidence. Hope this helps.

[1neeto]

I joined a band with less than two years of guitar playing experience, I could not believe I passed the “audition”. So here I am, 36 years old, in a band of kids in their mid 20’s. For 3 months we were going to the studio and practiced twice a week for 4 hours, we wanted to gig asap.

3 months passed, I had grown leaps and bounds as a musician, I now knew a good two hours of songs from beginning to end and felt ready to gig, so we landed our first gig. I invited all my friends, most being musicians themselves, they were excited to see me get on a stage. Gig day was here and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Holy moly, I wasn’t mistake-free on all the songs, I still fumbled a few chords (F and Bm go figure it’s always barre chords) so this fear of not being perfect started to take over me. I told this to my band mates we we decided to hit the studio a few hours before the gig. That helped tremendously, I was “on it” in the studio and got my confidence back. So after warmed up we headed to the venue and saw the stage, and it started once again, the lights, being in a platform a foot higher than everyone else, other musicians. The fact we were the opening band made things easier, I’d hate it to watch a better band play before us lol!

So it was performance time. Most of my friends showed up and were giving me lots of encouragement, but nothing could prepare me for stepping on that stage, have those lights right on my face and have a good 40 people staring right at me. Palms were sweaty, and shaky, I already sound checked so I knew my gear was ready. Drummer gave the cue and just like that I strummed my first chord, and it all disappeared. It was 100% fun from then on. I wasn’t perfect, I made tons of mistakes, but reality is that most people don’t even notice mistakes as long as you ride through them. It was a blast and I’d love to do it again.

[rwesleycarr]

I don't know if this will help but reading these few books really helped me deal with my stage fright!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NWq4Qtcras

[Gordon Currie]

I love that people are sharing about this so openly, this is important towards (someday) banishing the MYTH that there are many, or even some, that do not experience stage fright/anxiety. Everyone experiences it, yet some find methods to gain some control over it so it no longer defines them. THAT should be your lifelong goal, not somehow eliminating it - which I can say with absolute certainty can and will never occur.

Silly Moustache has very useful points in this thread and also in a thread he started a few weeks back - please take the time to read it as well.

Realize it has almost nothing to do with music and is all about performance. Knowing that can open you up to wisdom from ALL performing arts. Dancers, speakers, comedians, magicians all suffer and (hopefully) find ways to cope and even briefly transcend it.

Reframing can be an infinitely powerful technique here. For example, what is a mistake to you? Is it hitting a note that is outside of the scale and therefore sounds 'bad'? Or is it hitting any note (no matter how it still works) that is technically incorrect? There's a big difference there, but many of us lump all mistakes into the same category.

The quantity of notes of your average guitar song can easily number in the thousands. Blow 10 notes per song and you're still nailing 99%. (Audiences remember the 99%.)

Another thing - are you up on stage to play perfectly, or to share something that is unique and beautiful with others? Sure, we all want to do both, but in this life it helps to pick ONE thing to prioritize.

Every guitarist (and musician) I've idolized and seen more than once has made 'mistakes' I can notice in performance. Makes NO difference to my enjoyment. Why can't we allow ourselves a tiny bit of the forgiveness we routinely extend to our favorite performers?

I started performing in 1970, and was crippled by stage fright for the first decade. By the 80s I had found ways to cope, although most of the time I didn't enjoy being on stage. In the 90s I took a break to have a career in high tech. Near the end of this I joined Toastmasters to address my crippling fear of public speaking. I had NO idea the two were, underneath all the differences in details, essentially the same thing.

In Toastmasters I saw ESL people go from supremely unconfident and petrified to competent and confident communicators. I'm certain this had (and continues to have) amazing and positive effects on their personal and work lives. I myself gained a lifelong set of tools and confidence that is priceless.

I now enjoy performing like NEVER before, and rather than practice for no mistakes, I practice for flow, communication and the ability to recover quickly when the inevitable finger slip or stumble occurs. The sweaty hands and rapid pulse will never disappear, but are now joined and overshadowed by joy, excitement, confidence and sometimes even moments of ecstasy.

The commitment to improving in coping with stage fright is commendable, and I encourage the OP and anyone else to spend as much time practicing PERFORMING as practicing SONGS. If you haven't done something 100 times with a commitment to improve, then you can't say you failed - only that you gave up. Easy to say, often scary to do!

[tonyo]

Good thread. My career includes a long stint as a trainer at a corporate level. Public speaking has always been easy for me, have spoken to crowds of a few hundred at corporate event at the Sheraton, also lots of demos / presentations / training courses. I'm also an accredited laughter yoga practitioner, something that requires you put your ego a long ways away. Always had minor nerves before a large presentation and noticed that I tended to speak faster than planned. My presentations / courses were always quite meticulously planned by me.

When I started playing guitar, within less than a year of starting I was doing open mics in front of dozens of people and typically not really suffering from any nerves. That was playing simple fingerstyle patterns.

When I started playing more complex fingerstyle / travis picking, that was when the performance anxiety hit me and hit me fairly hard. When I'd play a more complex song, somewhere in the first verse I'd miss a note or two and the nerves would hit big time. It was the scenario similar to banging your head against a brick wall, it felt really good when I stopped at the end of my set.

My wife, who's normally my fiercest critic, said the songs sounded just fine, but my internal critic knew better. I was determined to beat it yet she said why bother, when you play in a small group or around the campfire you never struggle, just be happy with that.

For me, I couldn't be happy with that. I'd long dreamed of being "that guy" performing up in front of others. When I was in the audience I just wished I could be "that guy". So I persevered.

What I did was back to the basics. Always start with one of my simpler fingerstyle songs and a song that I knew better than any other. That helped big time.

I'm also finding the more I do open mics, the better my dealing with the nerves gets. I'm also fortunate that I've only played to friendly audiences, never have I gotten grief / complaints about what I've played. I've got several friends who've had quite unpleasant comments from others in the crowds they've performed at, in one case it was a drunken slur, and that's really bothered them (understandably).

If any of you are in the audience, be kind. It costs nothing and the performer already knows all too well where they could have done better.

[troggg]

I don't think that playing open mics alone would get someone past performance anxiety. That would be because:

1) You rarely have a place to warm up. It's hard to appear "shot out of a cannon" when you're sitting around too long without being able to loosen up.
2) The longer you sit around and watch more performers, the more confused you get about what songs you'll play. If you're not sure you picked the right song, it's hard to commit to it. And it's always hard to figure out if you should stick to the songs you rehearsed or go with the flow and play more to what the crowd seems to want.
3) An audience comprised of mostly other performers is not what you'll face elsewhere.
4) I don't know about anyone else, but around the time my 3 or 4 songs are over is right around the time my confidence is really up and I want to keep going.

Which isn't to say that open mics aren't somewhat helpful. They most certainly are, not the least reason being they're usually regularly scheduled events you know you can perform at as opposed to seeking out venues where just you'll play.

What's more than somewhat helpful is playing longer sets which greatly increases your chances of settling into longish time periods where you start to relax or even get to actual relaxation and enjoying what you're doing and playing off the crowd.

Even if the longer set is for your girlfriend, it's still experience playing what you want to play with other human eyeballs checking you out. It also gives you a chance to try out more tunes in an effort to figure out what your most reliable songs are going to be.

[tonyo]

Originally Posted by troggg

I don't think that playing open mics alone would get someone past performance anxiety. That would be because:

1) You rarely have a place to warm up. It's hard to appear "shot out of a cannon" when you're sitting around too long without being able to loosen up.
2) The longer you sit around and watch more performers, the more confused you get about what songs you'll play. If you're not sure you picked the right song, it's hard to commit to it. And it's always hard to figure out if you should stick to the songs you rehearsed or go with the flow and play more to what the crowd seems to want.
3) An audience comprised of mostly other performers is not what you'll face elsewhere.
4) I don't know about anyone else, but around the time my 3 or 4 songs are over is right around the time my confidence is really up and I want to keep going.

Which isn't to say that open mics aren't somewhat helpful. They most certainly are, not the least reason being they're usually regularly scheduled events you know you can perform at as opposed to seeking out venues where just you'll play.

What's more than somewhat helpful is playing longer sets which greatly increases your chances of settling into longish time periods where you start to relax or even get to actual relaxation and enjoying what you're doing and playing off the crowd.

Even if the longer set is for your girlfriend, it's still experience playing what you want to play with other human eyeballs checking you out. It also gives you a chance to try out more tunes in an effort to figure out what your most reliable songs are going to be.

Another thing that helped me with open mics and having open mics solve my anxiety problem was rehearsing at home with an amplified / decent setup. Before I got a good amp, I had an acoustic amp and it's sound was so ordinary that I never rehearsed with it.

That means when I did an open mic, my playing position was different, my guitar was suddenly amplified and my singing was into a directional mic. All of which were different enough to be the some of the issues trogg referred to.

Then I got a good amp (AER) and rehearsed at home standing up and singing into a mic. I did a LOT of rehearsing before my next open mic and was the most relaxed I'd ever been at the next open mic. I was able to relax much more as I wasn't creating a different sound to what I had at home.

Then open mic added the challenge of it being in front of a whole lot more people than at home and that added some anxiety.