Sheet Music Guy !

During my time making content for this site, I’ve gained a lot of respect for performers. A good performances appear effortless, which really hides the amount of work that goes into them……whether it be for a piece of music, a dance, a speech or a presentation. In making the videos for this site, getting a good performance of a 3 to 3.5 minute song takes an average of 1.5 hours, and even then there might be edits involved. If you do the math, that’s about one quality performance out of 30, leading to a rather pathetic batting average of 0.033. Real performers have one shot. One. How do they do it?

Well, although I’m not quite there yet, the fact that I’m taping myself and reviewing the results quite closely really gives me a good idea of what works and what’s important. Based on these experiences, I believe all good performances in any medium are based upon the same fundamental structure, which I will attempt to outline here.

Although it’s numbered, keep in mind that this is not a list. The numbering denotes importance, but it’s built like a pyramid: To do #1 properly you need to achieve #2, to get to #2 you have to be proficient at #3, etc.

Anyways, here we go!

1) Passion

It should come to no surprise to anybody that this is at the top of the list. Any successful person you talk to, regardless of whether they are in the performing, artistic or corporate community, will emphasize having passion for what you are doing to be a key to success. Even if you execute flawlessly in a performance, with perfect tone, rhythm and phrasing, if you’re not doing it with heart, your audience will be able to tell. Even with all that work, a performance with no heart at the very best can only be good. Similarly, if you perform with enough passion and conviction you can actually override any technical shortcomings that you might have. In short, having passion and doing your thing with meaning and heart is by far the most important part of any performance.

The really cool thing is, when everything about your performance is spot on and you’re really putting your heart into it, you can feel it for yourself as you’re still playing it. Your own performance will have an emotional effect on you, as you’re still performing it. For me, when I’m doing a take and it gets there, I know that this take is the one….and assuming I don’t psych myself out before the finish, that one take will almost always shine above the rest of them when I’m reviewing the final tape.

2) Rhythm

As opposed to #1, I don’t think Rhythm receives nearly enough attention that it deserves. Any type of performance, whether it be music, dance, a speech, presentation, or comedy, will have a natural rhythm. Once the rhythm is established with the audience, the performer can play with the audience’s expectations of the rhythm, for dramatic effect. However, if there is no clear sense of rhythm to begin with, then there’s no rhythmic expectation to play with, which means it’s much harder to be emotive. Your audience will be so distracted in trying to lock into your rhythm, (which doesn’t exist,) that the rest of the performance will be meaningless. Rhythm is key.

Rhythm comes from within, not from without. For example, say you start nervously, and your heart is racing. If your heart is racing, your internal rhythm is going way too fast, and whatever it is you’re doing will sound like you’re rushing through it. The thing is, anything you do after that point to try to slow yourself down will actually come across that way exactly; that you are trying to slow yourself down. You can actually hear yourself actively fighting to pull yourself back in. It’s like reigning in a pack of wild horses, when those horses should have been going the correct speed to begin with. My old piano teacher yelled at me about this for years, and only now do I understand what she’s been talking about. That’s why they always tell you take a deep breath and calm yourself before doing any big public presentation. You have to calm yourself down and set your internal clock to the correct rhythm before you start. Otherwise you’ll spend the rest of your performance trying to fix (or find) your rhythm, when you should be focused on more important things like performing with heart.

For me, I know from watching my own tapes that this is one of my bigger problems, and stops me from getting into #1. For faster songs especially, I have a tendency to just run faster and faster. The first 5 takes or so of any performance I do are always garbage, just because I’m still nervous and have to adjust to the fact that I’m being taped. My tempo is all over the place. The horses are crazy. After that, I usually spend about 30seconds to a minute before each take just sitting, focusing, and setting my internal rhythm, before I can actually begin.

3) Know Your Content

Ideally, you should know your material like the back of your hand. This way, you don’t have to think about the content of your performance, and can focus your energy on the important stuff (heart and rhythm). If you’re playing a piece of music, you shouldn’t have to think about the notes. If you’re doing a speech, you shouldn’t have to think about the words or the topic. All the content should be automatic, and to get it to be automatic, you have to drill the content into your head by practicing endlessly. Eventually, you will be good enough to fake it, but that comes from experience, and experience usually comes from….well….practicing endlessly. Practicing endlessly is unavoidable, unfortunately. On the bright side, getting the content down is guaranteed if you practice enough and put the work in, while to achieve #1 and #2 need you to get to a certain ‘place’ come showtime. Knowing your content is actually the easy part, because all you need to do is put in the hours.

The consequence of not knowing your content is that you will instantly lose your focus on the performance, because you will at some point forget what to do, and panic to figure out what note (or word, or dance move) is supposed to come next. Even if you do find the right note, you still have to get back your focus and back in the groove, all while you’re still playing the piece in question. Not only is it hard to get back, but you’ll find it wasn’t as good as it was before you stumbled, and you’ll still be a little shaken up from the incident. Put the work in. Know your content.

For me, it takes about 2 weeks of spare time to come up with a SheetMusicGuy performance. A few evenings in the beginning go towards making the arrangement. One weekend afternoon goes to taping the performance. The rest of the time in between goes to practicing my own arrangement, and drilling it into my own head, so I don’t have to worry about the notes I have to play when it comes down to the taping. If you look at it that way, most of the actual time spent is in learning the content.

4) Technical Ability

Your technical ability your level of mastery in the medium of your performance. This is the foundation upon which everything else is built. If you’re a pianist, this is how well you play the piano. If you’re giving a speech, this is how well you speak English. The better you are at your medium, the more tools you have in your toolkit, and the better you can execute on all the other steps above.

When choosing the difficulty level of a piece for an upcoming performance, the best advice I can give here is to aim low. For music, pick pieces that you are very comfortable playing. When in doubt, pick something easier, especially if you don’t have too much time to learn it. Save your ambitions for the other things on this list that are more important. If you choose something that is too difficult for your skill level, you will put all your efforts into just hitting the right notes; you won’t be able to even get to the important emotional stuff.

This is not to say that you should not play challenging pieces, because if you do that, you’ll never get better. Play challenging pieces for yourself, on your own, so you can continue to grow your skills. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t perform those challenging pieces until you reach a point where you don’t find them technically challenging anymore. By then you will be playing even harder pieces on your own anyways. This phenomenon is widely known in the scientific community as “Leveling Up”.

I feel that the technical difficulty of a performance piece should be about half of your total technical ability. When the spotlight’s on you and the cameras are rolling and everybody’s watching, you’re going to get a bit nervous. You will have a to focus on, and you don’t want the difficulty of your content to be one of them.

The arrangements I have on this site, for me, have an extremely low difficulty level….and it still takes me a few hours to film a 3 minute song because of all the other factors at play. Pick something easy, keep your content simple, focus on the more important stuff.

Tone and Showmanship

A couple of other important factors I want to mention are Tone and Showmanship. Tone falls under Technical Ability, as it is a key tool in your tool kit for you to use to express yourself…..especially in public speaking. It should also be part of Knowing your Content, because part of knowing your performance piece is knowing the appropriate Tone to be used, and when to use it.

Showmanship can fall under Content, because you might consciously choose to add certain physical elements to your performance as part of the piece itself. A public speaker may plan to use certain hand gestures, and a Rock Star might have a few “Rock Star Moves” that they may choose to deploy at certain parts of a song. Alternately, Showmanship might also fall naturally under Passion, because once you get really into your performance you are bound to naturally express yourself in some way physically…and the audience is sure to pick up on that. Either way, it’s not a bad idea to have a few ‘moves’ in your toolkit that you can use when you see fit…whether it’s planned or in the spur of the moment.

I wanted to highlight both Tone and Showmanship because they are essential parts of a good performance, although they already fall into some of the categories above.

And that’s it! I hope this article has been able to help you with some part of your life, or at the very least provided a nice distraction from your day at work / school.

Thanks for reading!