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| Getting Ready to Perform By Kristina Olsen I once took a performing workshop from Gamble Rogers in Texas in the middle of the day in the middle of summer. The heat treated us like cookies in the oven; we melted, changed shape, and lost our form, and I couldn’t imagine how I would be able to concentrate on what he was going to say. I can still remember the dust and the heat waves, and 12 years later I can still remember nearly verbatim the words he spoke. He changed my life as a performer. The first thing that Rogers said was, "You owe your audience everything. Your audience has just given you their most precious gift, the gift of their time, and you owe them everything for that." Everything else he said that day reinforced that statement. Rogers was a wizard of a performer, and he always gave his audience that kind of respect. This month I’ll recount as much as I can of what he said about preparing for a performance, and I’ll add other tips I’ve gleaned from watching countless performers succeed and fail, and from the countless times that I’ve succeeded and failed myself. Next month, I’ll focus on ways to keep your audience interested once you’re in the midst of your gig. VARY YOUR SET When you build your set, you need to remember that one minute on the stage for you is like an hour to an audience. They are sitting in a chair that is getting more uncomfortable by the moment, so don’t play songs in the same key or with the same rhythm back to back. The audience will know intellectually that they are hearing two different songs, but subconsciously they will think it is one long, boring piece. It is easy to lull the audience into a trance. You must break up the keys and the tempos to prevent that. Playing more than one instrument is a great way to sonically vary the show. You can also vary your show by playing in different styles and at different volume levels. Break up the music with funny stories and end with your strongest song. Hey, you want an encore, don’t you? Keep your sets short. Leave your audience wanting more. If you are an opener, this goes quadruple. If you want to sell a lot of CDs or cassettes, do a short, tight show. This can be a difficult rule to follow because it is so fun to be on stage that we would stay there all week if given the chance. PRACTICE IN POSITION When you practice playing your instrument, practice in the position that you perform in. That means always using a strap or sitting in a chair that’s the same height. I know many people who play sitting down at home and can’t figure out why they flop when they go to the gig and play standing up. Your muscles memorize tiny movements when you play. If you shift your position, you use different muscle patterns and your body feels like it has never played the piece before. In general, it is a good idea to perform standing up. It gives the show more energy, you breathe better (which gives you more energy), and in most venues it means that your audience can see you better. LOOK 'EM IN THE EYE Eye contact is one of the best ways to connect with an audience. It feels great to close your eyes, especially when you are singing a vulnerable song, but when you’re able to open your eyes and sing directly to your audience, they feel the vulnerability, and the connection is much stronger. On songs with more of an angry edge, the eye contact shows that you are not frightened of what you’re saying. Most performers will look at their hands or their instrument throughout the piece when they don’t need to look. Their hands know exactly where to go on their own, but the muscles have also memorized that turn of the head to go along with the finger moves. It feels like a whole new piece when you play it without moving your head. Looking at the instrument is a way to avoid the awkwardness of looking at the audience, but eye contact is what the audience craves. They want you to sing to them. A great exercise is to join up with another performer and play songs for each other without ever breaking eye contact. This is a very scary and sensuous exercise. The person who is listening must also not break eye contact. PLAY OPEN MICS I still go to open mics to try out new humor and new songs. I make a special point of listening to the other acts at each open mic. It is great to watch other performers and monitor your mood throughout their shows. It is pretty much the only school of performing that we have. Most of the audience members at an open mic are performers, and you won’t help your career much by talking through their sets and bolting for the door as soon as you’re done playing. Open mics are difficult performing situations because no one is really there to hear you. This provides you with an excellent challenge: if you can get this audience to listen and respond to you, you have really succeeded in performing. Many of the best performers interject funny spoken parts between their pieces. Not only do they give their audience the incredible gift of laughter, but they break up the somnambulistic state of mind that music can induce. You say, "But I’m not funny." Almost every performer has at one point in his or her career done something that really cracked the audience up. The way I started getting funny parts into my shows was by memorizing things I said by accident that made the audience laugh. Open mics are a great place to try different things out, kind of like a performance lab. You don’t want to test bits in your one really big show. That is where you use all the stuff that you know works. So, at your lab gig, when you hear the audience laugh, make a mental note of it. Think about it when you are off stage. Why did they laugh? Try it out in another lab show. Did they laugh again? If they did, can you take the laugh further? Can you make it more funny? It’s a lot like editing a song you have just written. You keep stripping it down to the bare essence. Too many details confuse the audience; you only want the information that is building your laugh. PREP YOUR GUITAR Get to the concert site early so that your instruments and strings can acclimate and won’t be in a state of flux while you are on stage. Figure out how long strings last for you and make sure your strings are at their peak for your show. My strings last for about a week of performing and are at their best after I’ve played on them for about an hour. I have many friends who have to change their strings for every performance. Do you use electronic equipment? Christine Lavin changes her batteries before every single show because she never wants to have battery problems on stage. She takes her audience’s time very seriously. Do you break strings on stage? Steve Goodman was incredible at turning a tune into a wild improvisational string rap as he changed the broken string and then slipping seamlessly back into the tune where he left off. It left his audience breathless with excitement. If you do break strings, have a spare guitar on stage ready to go or be practiced at entertaining your audience as you change the string. (Most musicians practice only the pieces they are going to play; you can and should practice your performance as well.) Do you change tunings? Some performers have a spare guitar for altered tunings. David Wilcox, who changes tunings on virtually every song, has memorized the distance the gear must move to get to the new tuning. He retunes the strings while the audience is applauding. He can’t hear a thing; he’s just memorized how far to turn the gears. Then, when the audience is finished clapping, he can check and fine-tune his strings in an instant without wasting his audience’s time. It’s incredible how accurate that is. We musicians don’t think twice about the fact that we have memorized extremely precise movements of our hands on the fingerboard, like jumping six frets in a millisecond without looking, but how many of us ever thought about memorizing the detuning of a string? BE A PRO AT SOUND CHECK Be on time to your sound check and make sure that your sound requirements have been sent in advance with a map of where you want everything on stage. Learn as much as you can about sound, and be flexible so that you can do a great show with a terrible sound person. The sound will be different every night. Some performers carry their own mics to try and keep things more consistent. Get used to playing without monitors if at all possible. Monitors are great, but they are the most common source of feedback. And if you can’t hear anything but your monitors, you won’t know what is going out to your audience. I’ve seen bands spend the whole sound check getting the monitor sound just right. They were perfectly happy on stage, but they had no idea that the sound going out to the audience was terrible and didn’t understand why their show failed. I once played a festival where the monitors were so loud that it hurt my ears, so I was barely playing my guitar. Of course the front-of-house sound person had virtually no signal to work with, and my tone was atrocious. Here’s a really important tip: Never insult your sound person. This is sometimes hard because occasionally you will get an arrogant sound person who knows nothing about sound and won’t listen to you at all. But remember that these people have the ultimate power. They can make you sound really bad if they want to, so it always pays to be as diplomatic and pleasant as possible. I worked as a sound person for a number of years and had mostly good experiences, but there was one band that decided I was an idiot before they even finished unloading their gear and took every opportunity to put me down. It took great self-control not to screw up their sound that night, and I’m sure I didn’t do the best job possible. Don’t use your sound check as a time to rehearse. The sound person and other performers waiting for their sound checks won’t appreciate it. Even the best sound people can’t read minds. Tell your sound person what you want. For example, I don’t like a lot of reverb, I like my guitar to be bright, and I want a mix of 20 percent pickup and 80 percent mic on my guitars. A lot of people do a monitor sound check first, then add the mains. I recommend doing the opposite. Ask the sound person what instrument he or she wants to check first. Usually you run through each instrument separately first, then play a bit together. The sound changes radically when the audience comes in, so you will have to trust your sound person and stay flexible. Check arrogance at the door. Yes, you may be brilliant and you may be the next big thing, but there are thousands just like you, and word spreads like wildfire about the ones who are consistently nice and considerate to the people they work with and perform for.
Additional reading: Working the Room by Kristina Olson and Stage Presence Workshop by Janyce Boynton |
