How to feel less nervous during public performances

Performing music live in front of an audience can make it difficult to stay calm and focused. At Riverside Music Studios, we strive for our students to have a joyful experience making music, and help them learn how to feel less nervous during performances.

It starts at home. There are many methods that help both children and adults avoid stress during practice and music lessons. Playing at a recital or concert is much more challenging!

Accept that your live performance will never be “as good” as it was at home, in your music lesson, or in the practice room.

Perfect playing does not exist, not for you and not for anyone else. We must accept this before we go on stage! Your playing will not be perfect and you WILL make mistakes — small mistakes, big mistakes, and silly mistakes that you’ve never made before. Some of these mistakes may crushing mistakes that you were hoping to avoid.

If we rate your very best playing that you ever did before the concert as 100% then on stage you will be incredibly lucky if you hit 90% of that. Accept it: perfectionism is not the best friend of performance art. Making mistakes is an integral part of performing arts.

If you do hit closer to your “personal 100%” playing live, then this will be a huge reason for celebration!

Stay in the present when performing on stage.

When performing live you should forget about the past completely. Only the present moment and the future should be on your mind. Everything that happened in your playing a tenth of a second ago must just vanish into nothingness.

If you allow yourself to dwell — even momentarily — on mistakes that you just made, this will take away from your current focus. Focusing on mistakes is likely to cause more mistakes.

The time to analyze your playing is after the concert. Don’t allow yourself to go there before the very last note you play.

Don’t change anything drastically in your life routine in the days before you perform.

To help you avoid being nervous during public performances, your diet, sleep schedule, and general work load should be the same as normal in the days leading up to the event. If you make significant changes, for example practicing twice as much and sleeping less, your body will subconsciously start to prepare for some fight or flight scenario. There are some bodily reactions that we can’t fully control mentally: stomach problems, being sweaty, shaky hands, etc.

Stay in your normal daily routine to delay these body reactions for as long as possible. You will still experience some of the fight or flight response before you perform live, but this will lessen your suffering.

A few weeks leading up to the performance, practice by playing straight through your pieces

Playing through means no stopping, no fixing of any mistakes, and in tempo. Play exactly how you would do it on stage. Be in the “performance” mode rather than in “practice” mode.

If you have a relative, a friend, a roommate, or even a cat to listen to you, then great – always try to play for more than just yourself! Practice makes perfect and practicing to play in front of other people makes it better too. 

As a pianist, focus on memorizing your left hand

A big source of stress (usually and especially for classical musicians) is having to play by memory. This happens mostly for playing solo and primarily affects piano players.

Keep practicing the left hand alone and fully commit it by memory on its own. This will provide a stronger foundation for memorization and will help you to get out of any pickles easier. Statistically speaking, most mistakes and memory slips happen in the left hand. Humans are designed to pick out the top melody more than the lower notes, so it’s always easier to memorize the melody in the right hand and harder to memorize the accompaniment in the left hand. 

Remember that times are changing!

You can spot an iPad on the piano stand in front of many top-tier players now. Playing with the music is no longer frowned upon or at least to a much lesser degree than even 20 years ago. Don’t try to be a hero for no reason and play with the music if you can. You will have a much more pleasant experience!

Learn to work with the adrenaline!

Lastly, we have a little trick in a short video:

16 years ago I saw one of the very first teachers of Riverside Music Studios sending all his students outside our space during their lessons. They would then come back breathing heavily and go back to his teaching room. Turns out that he was sending them to run up and down 5 flights of stairs and then having them perform their pieces right away.

The idea here is to elevate your heart rate, simulating the effects of adrenaline that you get during playing in public. You’ll get a higher heart rate and slight change in your motor skills and mental concentration much like you get when you go on stage. Time after time, when you do this little trick at home, you will learn how to deal with these effects, calm yourself down, and get in focus from the very first note you play. 

Oh, and one more thing that will really help you avoid being nervous on stage during performance- please don’t rush!

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