What to Do in the Hours Before You Perform
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Jun 23, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: 51 minutes ago
* Where I describe clients in my blog posts, I've changed names, instruments, and other identifying details to protect their privacy. Sometimes I'm describing one person, sometimes a pattern I've seen across several. The essence of the experience and what we worked on together remain true.
The nerves are almost always worst in the waiting...
Once you're actually playing, something usually settles — you're occupied, you're inside the music, the worst of the anticipation has burned off. But the stretch before that, the hours and then the minutes before you walk on, is its own particular kind of difficult.
And it's the part most musicians leave entirely unplanned.
Think about how much deliberate attention goes into preparing the playing — months of it, structured and detailed. And then the day arrives, and the hours before the performance are just… whatever happens. You get there. You wait. You warm up a bit. You try not to think too much. The most psychologically demanding window of the whole experience is the one part of it you improvise.
This is what a pre-performance routine is for. In this post, I'm not talking about a lucky ritual, or a way to make the nerves disappear — I want to be clear about that, because most advice on this quietly promises calm, and that isn't the goal. For a professional musician to deliver a captivating performance, the nerves have to be allowed to exist (otherwise, a totally calm performance would be... utterly flat).
So a routine is simply a set of deliberate, practised things to do with the waiting, so that you're not standing in the wings at the complete mercy of it. Plus, it gives the anticipation somewhere to go.
What a Real Pre-Performance Routine Looks Like
I worked with a cellist who built one of the most considered routines I've seen, and it's worth describing because of how specific it was — because that specificity is the whole point.
Her routine had:
A particular piece of music she listened to on the way in.
A particular game on her phone to occupy the waiting-room time.
A brief, deliberate warm-up.
A physiological sigh (a quick, structured breath) at a chosen moment.
A particular ring she wore, every audition, with no other purpose than that.
And a phrase she returned to, a clear sense of the performer she was walking in to be.
If you haven't seen some of these ideas anywhere else, there's a good reason for it :)
None of that is a checklist item you could find in a typical audition prep book... and that's exactly why it worked. It wasn't generic at all. It was built for her — assembled, tested, and refined until it worked consistently. Because the value of a routine isn't in any single element. It's in having a sequence you've done so many times that, on the day, your mind has a track to run on instead of a void to fill with worry.
A few of the elements are worth pulling out and explaining further, though, because the thinking behind them applies to anyone.
The Ring: Giving Yourself a Cue
The ring sounds like a charm, I know.
But she chose to wear it because, after enough repetitions, it became a cue — a small physical signal that told her mind and body which mode they were stepping into.
Putting it on was a way of saying the audition self is on now. Athletes do versions of this constantly. It works through association: Do the same deliberate thing enough times in the same context, and the thing itself starts to summon the state.
(Similar to how some people can't function without a morning coffee, but the second they take a sip, they're suddenly more awake... even if the caffeine didn't get a chance to be absorbed yet! )
You don't need a ring yourself. It could be anything chosen and repeated — a specific warm-up phrase, a particular way of tying your shoes, a single deliberate breath at the stage door. What makes it work is not the object, it's that you've practised it, and your system has learned what it means: We're getting ready for a performance.
The Waiting-Room Game: Occupying the Mind on Purpose
A phone game sounds almost too simple to mention, but I'd rather argue it isn't.
The waiting room is where the spiral has the most room to grow. Left unoccupied, the mind fills the time with rehearsal of disaster... and, often, with listening to the other candidates and measuring yourself against them. A deliberately chosen, mildly absorbing activity (a game, a puzzle, a crossword) in this case isn't avoidance. It's giving your attention a job, so it isn't free to spend the wait building a case against you.
Plus, choosing it in advance matters too: You don't want to be deciding what to do with that time while you're already in it. (Decision-making takes up a lot of mental energy that could better be spent elsewhere!)
Testing for Information
This is the part I most want you to take from the cellist's routine, because it's where most musicians go wrong without realising it.
Her warm-up included a short period of what she called testing. But notice what she was testing for. She was not checking whether her high notes were good, whether her vibrato was even, whether the fast passage was clean, whether the intonation was solid... she was checking how things felt that day — how much effort things were taking, how the room sounded, what the instrument was giving her.
Here is the trap, and almost everyone falls into it. The default warm-up is secretly an audition before the audition (we're all guilty of this). You test the exposed note, the tricky shift, the vibrato — and you're really asking am I good enough today?
And because nothing ever feels completely perfect, you find the thing that isn't quite right. A note that sounds slightly less ringing than you'd like. A passage that feels a touch effortful. A bit of tension somewhere...
And just like that, the audition is mentally over before it has begun — you walk in already convinced today is not your day, and everything after that only spirals downward.
The reframe is to test only to find out what the day needs. Instead of asking "is this good enough", this looks like "what's true right now, and what should I do about it?"
If the room is dry, you know to adjust. If things feel effortful, you know to ask for less force, not more. If your sound needs a moment to warm, you give it one.
This way, the same five minutes of warming up becomes information you use rather than a verdict you receive.
(This is the same principle as treating a run-through as data rather than a test — something I've written about in the context of audition preparation — applied now to the warm-up room.)
The Things That Are Easy to Skip
There are a few more elements that belong in most routines, and they happen to be the ones musicians tend to treat as optional.
A little deliberate movement. We tense up under pressure, and tension is the enemy of the suppleness most instruments actually require. So a few minutes of gentle stretching, of letting the shoulders and neck and hands release, earns its place.
A structured breath, like the physiological sigh the cellist used — breathing exercises are often used to promote calm, but this one's aim is to give your body one clear, practised signal it recognises... which, in this case, is it's time to perform.
Plus, something most musicians never build in at all: A small, deliberate dose of enjoyment. A light conversation, a few minutes of music you love, anything that reconnects you with the fact that you do this because, somewhere underneath the nerves, you want to. The seriousness of an audition has a way of crowding joy out entirely. I believe it's worth protecting on purpose.
And a gentle little reminder, somewhere in the routine: How this audition goes is not a verdict on whether you belong in this profession, or on your worth as a person. That sentence sounds overly coddle-y, I know, but that's not the goal. The musicians who can hold it are the ones who walk in able to actually play.
(I wrote more about this in Why Wanting It Too Much Is Holding You Back.)
Practise the Routine, Don't Just Plan It
One last thing: A pre-performance routine only works if it's been practised — if you've run it before mock auditions, before rehearsals, before low-stakes performances, enough times that it's worn in.
A routine you assemble the night before your audition is just... a list. But a routine you've done thirty times is something your mind and body already trust.
You can't learn to rely on it in the one moment you most need it. The reliance has to be built in advance, in the ordinary low-stakes settings where it doesn't feel like it matters.
And when you do, the hours before you perform stop being something that happens to you, and become something you know how to move through.
If you'd like help building a routine that genuinely fits you (your instrument, your patterns, the specific way the waiting tends to go for you), that's part of the work I do with musicians in private coaching. Way beyond a checklist handed to you, but something assembled with you, and practised until it holds.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
