David Motto’s Practice Tip of the Week:
6 Steps to Prepare for Any Performance
From Learning to Mastery
Once you can control all the notes for an upcoming concert, audition, gig, or other important situation, the practice room needs to become a performance preparation room. During this phase, you go from learning to mastery.
Mastery means automatically performing your music from start to finish and feeling in control the entire time. One of the components of mastery is the ability to perform without stopping — no matter what!
Why is this level of mastery so important?
Because stopping is not an option during a live performance!
The 6 Steps
Here are six specific practice room steps to take if you really want to be a performance master:
STEP 1: Visualization A
Hear the music in your head and feel yourself successfully performing it. Instrumentalists will do this visualization without their instruments. Vocalists will do it without vocalizing anything at all. Any difficult issues during your visualization will probably be real issues on stage. Make sure you feel comfortable throughout this visualization!
STEP 2: Visualization B
Picture yourself performing flawlessly on stage in front of your audience. Feel calm, cool, and collected. Know that you are in control!
STEP 3: No Stopping
Run each section without any pauses whatsoever. This may mean initially going more slowly than you want. So be it. You’re working on mastery, not winning a race.
STEP 4: Control Each Section
Be able to run each section of your music — in any order. If your song has six sections, try each section in random order or backwards from the last section to the first.
STEP 5: Tighten the Transitions
When each section is under control, make sure you can easily transition from one section to the next. Run the last few measures of one section into the first few bars of the next section. This transition itself can even become a Practice Loop.
STEP 6: Put It All Together
Perform the sections in order. However, you don’t have to start by going through the whole song! Again, if your music has six sections, you can do sections 4, 5, and 6 or sections 2, 3, and 4. Try different combinations. Eventually, you’ll easily be able to play sections 1 – 6 (which is the entire song) flawlessly!
Preparing for Performance Success
These techniques will prepare you for performance success. Once you can run all 6 sections of our example song, you are actually doing the same activity as you’ll be doing on stage. You’ve gotten to the end of the practice process!
And, if you keep up the two Visualizations throughout this process, you will be building confidence. This confidence makes you mentally and emotionally ready to be on stage so that all your efforts aren’t simply focused on physical control of your music. Your thoughts and feelings matter when you’re on stage!!
At that point you’ll need to take things to the next level – which I’ll cover in next week’s Practice Tip.
To Your Musical Success!
David Motto
