Do You Play Better In Practice Than Performance? These 7 Reasons Explain Why

Most musicians practise in a setup that’s great for developing technical skill. But it’s very different to the conditions you’ll come across in an actual performance.

This is a big deal. One of the keys to being able to deliver consistently when it counts is to practise in conditions that are as close to performance conditions as possible.

And yet, we take great pains to exclude some of the defining characteristics of performance from a typical practice session. Some vital things which tend to get overlooked are your ability to:

• Play everything in context [i.e. that you can cope with both the physical strain of getting through everything all in one go, and the cognitive strain of switching/remembering sections etc]
• Play everything ‘cold’ [i.e. no more warm-up than you’d typically get in a performance]
• Get everything right on the first attempt

Going down the typical practice route of breaking things down into small chunks and repeating them many times over is great as a starting point. But it’s training your ability to play things in that one specific situation.

When you’re in a situation that poses some sort of threat, your body reacts accordingly. Various hormones are released, and these can change things for you in three distinct areas:

• How your body functions physically
• How you think
• Your emotions

Although music performance doesn’t carry any physical threat (unless, perhaps, you’re playing with Charles Mingus) you probably still perceive it as having consequences. This will tend to trigger the “fight or flight” response.

Again, this is about the vital importance of practicing in conditions that are as close as possible to the ones you’ll perform in. In this case, while the external physical conditions may not change, your body will literally feel and move differently when the pressure is on.

If, like most people, you don’t practice in conditions that trigger this pressure reaction then it’s no surprise that things go very differently in performance.

There’s another potential problem here on top of that lack of familiarity. It’s easy to feel as though something’s “wrong” with you if you get that uncomfortable response to pressure. This is completely untrue – it’s a perfectly natural and healthy reaction. But, since it doesn’t get talked about a lot, musicians are often unaware of this.

It’s not necessarily that the change makes things better or worse – just different. It’s as if you learned to drive in a car with automatic gears and the steering wheel on the left-hand side. But then suddenly found yourself in a car with a manual shift and the steering wheel on the right-hand side.

There’s nothing wrong with the new car, but you’d find it very uncomfortable to drive until you’d had some time to get used to it. Most of us don’t spend anything like enough time getting used to the feeling of a performance situation.

You might not realise that practice and performance call for completely different mindsets. This wouldn’t be a problem, if it wasn’t for the fact that musicians typically spend a lot more time practicing than they do performing.

This means that you probably spend a lot of time cultivating and reinforcing your practice mindset. And hardly any time developing your performance mindset. You may not be aware that you’re doing this, but it’s happening all the same.

​While getting stuck in a practice mindset can simply be a result of spending too much time in practice mode, there’s a deeper issue that can trigger it too. If you lean towards being self-critical then you may find yourself repeatedly being pulled out of the moment by your desire to dwell on the past.

​It can get to the point where the practice mindset dominates things to such an extent that you get stuck in it. You never really make the switch to a performance mindset when you hit the gig.

A typical practice mindset focuses on noticing little details in order to polish every aspect of your skills to the highest level.

A performance mindset should be more about the big picture.

A practice mindset reviews what’s just happened and looks for ways to improve it.

A performance mindset is always fixed in the present moment. No thoughts about what’s already happened – whether that’s noticing something you want to improve, or congratulating yourself on what went well.

The most important thing in any performance – the only aspect that you have the power to change – is always what’s happening RIGHT NOW.

A solid practice mindset will serve you well in developing the skills which lead to awesome performances. But, without the ability to switch to a performance mindset when it comes to the gig, all that careful nurturing of skills in the practice room won’t translate into performing consistently at your best.

And you certainly won’t taste those magic moments where you find yourself “in the zone” – effortlessly playing far above your normal skill level.

We’re back on the subject of practising in conditions that are as close as possible to the ones you perform in. You’ve probably noticed a bit of a recurring theme here. No apologies for mentioning it again and again – it’s hugely important.

No matter how much you wish it could be otherwise, gigs happen out there in the messy real world. The conditions are never perfect like they tend to be in the practice room.

In this case, though, it’s not really about learning to deal with the physical side of things. It turns out that handling the emotional impact of challenging conditions is much more of a stumbling block for most people.

It’s how you react to any difficult conditions that can really throw you off the rails.

As soon as you start thinking that the conditions aren’t how you’d like them to be, you trigger an unhelpful response. You wish things were different.

You can start to fall into a “victim” mentality.

When you do this (whether you go just one step down the victim path or all the way to the end) you immediately compromise your ability to play well. Your focus is no longer in the present moment, and on what you need to do to play great music. It shifts instead to your dislike of the conditions.

Once that happens, the battle’s pretty much over. Even if you have all the technical resources that you need to deal with the situation, your mind has decided not to focus on doing that but to give all its attention to how “unfair” things are instead.

Playing music is a very complex skill.

Regardless of which instrument you play, you need to make really precise physical movements. And you need to string a whole series of these movements together in the right sequence, at the correct tempo.

While you do all this, your brain needs to deal with the conceptual side of things as well. Either creating improvised lines, recalling music you’ve already memorised, or reading from sheet music.

It turns out that this is way too much for your conscious mind to handle. It’s simply not capable of controlling all that at anything like a fast-enough speed to play music in real time.

The only way to make this work is not to try and control things, but just let your subconscious handle it. And this is exactly what practice is all about. You repeat a skill often enough until you can do it without having to think about it.

So, where’s the problem, then?

The issue is that performance can seem like a time where you SHOULD be in control.

If you deliberately make the extra effort that it takes to actively monitor everything you’re doing, it feels like a good thing. It feels responsible and diligent.

It feels like you’re taking that little bit of extra care that can kick your performance up a notch and give you a touch more reliability.

Unfortunately, though, the reality is that you’re throwing a spanner in the works. You’re giving work to your conscious mind that’s much better left to the subconscious.

You play at your best when you focus on processes rather than outcomes. This keeps your mind locked firmly in the present moment and on the specific actions that you need to be doing right now.

When you skip ahead and think about the outcome that you want, you drag your focus out of the present moment and into the future.

Alternatively, thinking back to what you’ve already played (whether it went well or badly) takes your focus out of the present and into the past.

You start judging, hoping, or wishing things were different. You’re no longer simply concentrating on what you need to be doing right now.

The main reason this happens is because you care about the outcomes.

[This can certainly crop up in the practice room too, but it tends to be a bigger deal in performance because the stakes feel higher]

​You care whether you just played those last few bars well or not.

And you care about whether you’re going to nail that particularly beautiful moment that’s coming up shortly.

This is completely understandable. Completely natural.

But it’s not helpful.

There’s one specific angle to this that tends to come up a lot. That’s the desire to avoid mistakes at all costs.

If you’re focused on doing everything you can to avoid mistakes then you invite a huge number of negative side effects into the performance as a result. And you probably have no idea that you’re doing this.

Self-belief is huge for musicians.

What you believe you’re capable of tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Henry Ford put it,

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”

There are two main ways that confidence affects how well you play.

The first is that what you expect to happen usually determines what DOES happen.

If you expect things to go wrong, they’re much more likely to go wrong.

If you’re thinking “don’t mess up the next phrase” then you’re more likely to mess it up.

Just like if you’re in the middle of a game of tennis and someone shouts “don’t hit the ball in the net”, you’re more likely to hit it in the net.

What’s going on here is that your subconscious tends to deal in images rather than words. And you’re presenting it with an image of failure.

That vital word, “don’t”, doesn’t translate into an image easily. Your subconscious doesn’t necessarily get that this is something that you want to avoid.

It just picks up the image and interprets it as a target to aim for.

So when you’re worried that you’re going to fail, then you make it more likely that you WILL fail.

Whatever level you’re at, chances are there’s at least one area (probably several) where building up your self-belief will significantly benefit your music.

The second impact on your playing comes from the fact that your self-belief affects how you perceive things after the event.

Your brain is constantly processing huge amounts of information from the world around you. There is far too much of this for you to be aware of it all consciously, so most of it is filtered out. It’s your mindset that determines what gets through these filters. Which specific pieces of information make it to your conscious awareness.

When you’re confident in your abilities, you tend to notice the positives in what just happened, and the imperfections aren’t so likely to register.

When you lack confidence and self-belief then you tend to notice what went wrong and you ignore all the things which were actually good.

Either way, this acts to reinforce your current state of confidence. Unless, that is, you act to break the cycle.

A lack of self-belief can be general. Or it could be specific to very particular situations. People whose confidence and abilities are rock solid in most areas may have a couple of spots where things are shaky to say the least.

Whatever level you’re at, chances are there’s at least one area (probably several) where building up your self-belief will significantly benefit your music. And not just the level you play at, but how much you enjoy playing as well.