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Updating for May:

The May 1st open mic had more sour spots than I had planned for, but I knew that taking an entire month to iron them out would not be an effective use of time.

Something that has become apparent is that by committing to one open mic a month, I spend 4 weeks preparing for two songs regardless of their difficulty. At first I thought this restriction would ensure that there would be time to get any two songs down solid through deliberate practice. In reality, easy songs (like Dead Flowers) would be gotten down quickly in a week and hard songs (like Blackbird) would still not be performance ready after 4 weeks.

Another thing is that the primary goal of open mic is to harden up my performance nerves. Learning more technical material and expanding my catalog of songs can be done later when I have the strengthened capability to pull them off. Right now performance is paramount, and that will only improve through performing more times per month than once.

Knowing this, I changed up my practice and performance routines. Since there is absolutely nothing to lose at open mic, I decided to play every two weeks instead of every month to take advantage of repeated exposure to being onstage. I would not push myself into doing harder material trying to impress the audience (they never seemed impressed by hard stuff anyway). Taking a cue from my retreat practice, I’d let myself practice as many songs a month that I felt comfortable with instead of imposing a limit trying to focus more time on two of them.

I also bought a small PA system so I could get accustomed to how the microphone and guitar responded to my singing and playing in real time. It’s a terrible waste of time to practice for weeks and have it shot because of a trivial technical glitch that could have been avoided.

May 15th: Rocket Man (Elton John) and Wagon Wheel (Old Crow Medicine Show)

I took a step back and chose two easy songs that I had very little difficulty with at the retreat and chose to emphasize getting their amplification right as I practiced them. Rocket Man revealed itself to be much more difficult to sing than I gave it credit for when every little detail was amplified, and I also found out that to sound right, my face had to be glued to the microphone the entire time. No wonder my voice was hit or miss at performances sometimes! Something as trivial as moving my head while performing would drop the sound, force the soundboard guy to try to correct it, and confuse and disorient both of us leading to me making a mistake.

Adjusting my guitar playing technique to the PA went much more smoothly than I had anticipated. Being more assertive with my left hand and keeping to tighter timing did a lot to quiet noisy strings.

There were definitely butterflies when I got onstage, but I felt a better sense of command over them because I had done something to mitigate the most significant problem not being able to work with the PA system. As soon as the the sound check was done and the first line of Rocket Man went off well I knew that practicing with the microphone had definitely paid off- in fact I pushed myself a little harder than I was planning because my fears of the house PA system turned out to be overblown.

Wagon Wheel came off amazingly- I had been hesitant to ever play it because it’s probably in the top 3 most played acoustic songs ever. However, the boost in confidence I had over the PA let me throw myself into the song much more fearlessly and the audience absolutely loved it.

May 29th: Let it Be (The Beatles), Where is My Mind (The Pixies)

For Let it Be I decided to give another shot at putting in a lead fill since it’s in the Key of C which if the best one for using open string fill techniques. I also added a lead fill to the end of Where is My Mind as an outro so it wouldn’t be a sudden change in the volume of the song.

Practicing the lead part of Let it Be was difficult until I realized that it was exactly double the tempo of the rest of the song, meaning that if I played the chords to every other beat of the metronome I could go into beat for beat timing when the solo started. Another thing I observed from other people doing lead fills was that they only added texture for small intervals- if it went on for more than one measure the song’s energy would drain out. I alleviated this be making sure there was at least one chord or double stop in each measure. This also addressed the fear that my confidence would wane if the song started sounding thin as I played it. By having a rock to grab onto in the form of a chord for every measure, the lead part felt less daunting.

I put much less practice pressure on Where is My Mind- because it’s an irreverent song I wanted it to have a natural feel when it was performed.

As luck would have it, the open mic host had an iPhone camera stand pointed at the stage that fit my phone model. I realized that I could record myself to scrutinize later on, specifically to see if getting the lead fills perfectly was as crucial to the songs as I thought.

There were two mistakes in Let it Be, but taking a nod from the Bulletproof course I let the camera do the work of being the critic and focus only on performing the song. When I watched the tape afterwards, neither mistake was noticeable or even significant- letting go and playing through looked much better from the outside than it felt on the inside. There were older people in the crowd who loved getting to hear the song, and that carried much more weight than fretting over a missed note did.

Where is my mind ended up being a huge crowd pleaser. The lead guitar part is very prominent during the last scene of Fight Club where most people know the song from, but it’s almost impossible to work in on one guitar- even Frank Black does not do the lead part when he plays it solo. Rearranging the song a little, I threw in a twist by adding it to the end of the song as an outro when people thought it had ended with the root chord. I could tell that the audience felt the spontaneity and loved it!

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Updating for April/May

I’m back for an update. I did not do an open mic in April because the primary focus was hardening up a 15 song setlist to play at my yoga studio’s annual retreat.

Week of April 20th Performance: Two 7 song setlists at Yoga Retreat

Practice:
Because I was the only one playing, I gave more weight to quantity than quality in preparing the setlist. With open mic, you have a song window to wow the audience with, but with an extended setlist you can more naturally build up to those high points. I reused about half of last year’s classic rock centric setlist and balanced it out with more pop elements to try and include things that more people would like (Billy Joel, Outkast, Elton John, etc.).

In practicing the set, I avoided the focused practice routine using a metronome, voice recorder and centering and just repeatedly drilled the songs in the ascending and descending order of the setlist. In this case, the focused practice routine would not be practicable because of the amount of material I had to have down for the set.

Performance:

The Bulletproof musician course notes how varying levels of perceived pressure result in varying levels of activation anxiety. In this case, it turned out to be very low. Compared to last year, there were not as many people on the retreat, I had more performance experience under my belt, and I had a better command of the material. I was even able to notice that trivial factors like being able to set up my playing space and settle in beforehand were beneficial. The performances (I did it twice in the week) went very well with zero mistakes. Performing felt effortless for all the right reasons in that I didn’t spend any mental energy on anything but playing.

Takeaway:

One year ago when I did my first major performance at the retreat, I went in blind. The only experience I’d had was playing for friends and family members on a very informal basis. Having formalized a performance practice and taken on higher pressure situations since then, going back to impromptu performances felt freeing in that I had much more muscle available to put into the music with less distracting overhead to deal with. I’m being optimistic in that continued open mic playing will put me at a similar point in formal performance situations a year from now.

May 1st Performance: Hotel California by the Eagles and Lights by Journey

Having just performed at the retreat recently, I decided to jump back into an open mic night with two fresh songs off my setlist.

Practice:

There was about a week between getting back from the retreat and the open mic, so I did a focused practice routine on arpeggio and picking parts for the songs to enhance them for a bigger effect in the short playing window I had onstage. I also put a little more emphasis on my vocal quality because it would be crucial to pull off the Journey song. I was still out of the groove of centering, practicing with a metronome and using timed practice sprints, so practice mainly consisted of practicing the lead fills in isolation and then rehearsing the song with vocals included.

Performance:

Having just done a low pressure performance in the past week, I became much more aware of how difficult the open mic scenario actually was in practice. You’re a name on a list, and when you’re called you have a short amount of time to get onstage, plug in, adjust the mic, strum a chord for the sound check and start playing. These things sound trivial, but being bombarded with this amount of uncertainty in 30 seconds will sap confidence in a way that follows you through the rest of the time onstage.

For Hotel California, I opened with the iconically known arpeggio intro. This was not hard to do in the practice room, but onstage the presence of amplification introduced a factor I was not entirely prepared for. Arpeggio picking requires hitting strings precisely at root notes and letting them ring out until the next chord shape. The amplification distorted my perception of the arpeggios as they were being played, causing me to hit a couple of wrong strings. The strings meant to ring out in the measure were unexpectedly louder than the plucked strings, throwing me off guard even more and making me play more tentatively. When the strumming parts started I felt much more on solid ground.

Vocally, the song felt more out of reach than in the practice room. It’s in a very high key and not easy to pull off, but my voice did not sound like itself in the PA system, causing me to be unsure and sing tentatively.

Another thing I was not anticipating was that the change in season had let a lot more natural light into the venue. In the winter and spring, the spotlights on stage and darkness indoors pretty much drowned out the whole room except for the tables directly in front of the stage. With sunlight later in the day, I could now see the entire room looking at me and could easily see people getting up to go out and smoke. I did, however, pull off the song with no more than a couple of sour notes in the intro.

For the Journey song, the amplification would pose an even larger problem. I performed the song in the original key of D, and although I was able to hit the notes vocally, it took a level of ferocity to hit them that overpowered the guitar part. I was able to hear the PA system clipping and feeding back from my voice, and a glance over at the soundboard showed that the sound guy was having a hard time keeping the guitar and microphone balanced.

When the picking solo part came, I missed the right string a couple of times and pushed through some muted notes. It was energetic, but definitely not clean sounding.

Takeaway:

The more open mics I play, the more aware I become of how my practice habits have to consider the technical aspects of the venue. When playing in my practice room, I feel confident in my hand and vocal technique because I know what a given action will sound like. Onstage, the amplification adds another degree of uncertainty that my voice and playing technique do not know how to deal with unless the song is simplistic enough to crank at full throttle.

The amplification issue is definitely the largest choke point in progressing as a performer I’m dealing with right now, so I’m going to invest in a small PA system and see what results I get adapting my playing technique to it.