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 The Joyful Musician Blog

You can play it perfectly alone — then something arrives the moment you're being watched. That gap isn't a technique problem, and it isn't a flaw in you. Here's what a music performance anxiety coach actually does, and how to tell if it's the right help.

Most musicians preparing for an orchestra audition are not under-working. They are practising hard, doing what they have always been told to do — and still arriving in the room feeling like the playing that comes out is a thinner version of what they can do. The problem is rarely the amount of work. It is the shape of it. Here are three preparation mistakes that come up again and again, and what to do differently — none of which requires more hours.

The nerves are almost always worst in the waiting. Once you're playing, something usually settles — but the stretch before that, the hours and minutes before you walk on, is its own kind of difficult, and it's the part most musicians leave entirely unplanned. A pre-performance routine isn't a lucky ritual, and it isn't a way to make the nerves disappear. It's a set of practised things to do with the waiting, so you're not at its mercy. Here's how to build one.

In 2013, a researcher published a paper that seriously upset a lot of people in classical music. She showed that audiences — including professional musicians — judge musical performances based on visual information more than auditory, even when they insist they're listening. Here's what the research means, what it doesn't mean, and what to actually do with it (without sliding into the fake it till you make it trap most coaching advice on this falls into).

In 2022, I ran a six-week ACT coaching programme with four professional singers — and measured what happened. Spectrogram analysis, seven validated instruments, a blinded panel of eight judges. Here's what the data showed.