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RE: Beta blockers and other performance enhancing drugs
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Brendan
Posts: 353
Joined: Oct. 30 2010
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 RE: Beta blockers and other performa... (in reply to Leñador)
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Nerves were ruining my enjoyment of playing. They're still a problem, but they don't kill the joy like they used to. Here's what I did:
Read the Inner Game of Music.
What Ricardo said: practice the material religiously against a metronome. Play it at a wide variety of tempos including achingly slow, at various capo-settings, on different guitars, on various chairs, sitting on the porch, etc, to reduce the vulnerability of your competence to small perturbations in the playing conditions.
Always warm up at the gig. Never accommodate the people who expect you to pick the guitar out of the case and just play. In your pre-performance warm-up, do your fiddliest arpeggio and tremolo exercises, so slowly that you are playing them perfectly. If you make the smallest mistake, go slower. Doing very fine muscle movements very slowly will calm you down, and will re-couple you to your guitar. After half an hour of this, your fingers will know where the strings are, and you will know in your tripes that you can in fact play the guitar.
Vital point: do your pre-performance warm-up in total isolation, just you and the guitar. That way, you don't feel embarrassed at playing one note per second as you do your exercises, and you won't catch nerves from the dancers, who will spend this time working themselves up into a right old tizz.
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Date Nov. 10 2017 9:05:31
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mark indigo
Posts: 3625
Joined: Dec. 5 2007
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RE: Beta blockers and other performa... (in reply to Leñador)
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quote:
This time in my brain I'm thinking "Uh oh, falseta coming and my hands are still shaking, what am I gunna do?"
If 3-4 drinks or beta-blockers will actually stop you having these thoughts, then fine (well, not really IMO), but I have to suggest it's these thoughts you need to work on.
Much better to be able to perform without any chemical help.
I know it's harder when you are only playing in public occasionally, but that does at least mean you have plenty of time to get it sorted before the next gig!
All the stuff people have been saying about preparation and practise etc. is crucial but addressing nerves is worth doing, even if you only gig occasionally.
I was told that the shaking is due to lack of oxygen, and that this is related to one of the instinctive responses to fear.
As well as fight or flight there is, apparently, a third option, which is to freeze (and hope the sabre-toothed tiger walks right past not noticing you hiding behind the tree, I guess....  ).
In the freeze response we hold our breath and/or breath really shallow.
I don't know if all this is true with good science to back it up, but the guy that told me about it said he would run round the block before a recital to combat nerves!
I find just slow, deep, calm breathing helps, both before and during playing works pretty well.
You can combat the negative thoughts with deliberate positive ones - you can say to yourself "easy" or something like that to blot out the crap thought.
I found out by accident a way to "practise" performing in preparation for a gig when I started to get nervous a few days before a performance in a theatre.
I was practising at home and found myself thinking about what it was going to be like with all those people sitting in rows quietly listening
(instead of round tables in a restaurant eating and drinking).
The kind of negative thoughts you describe started to crowd my mind and I started making loads of mistakes.
I thought to myself "hang on, I can do this, this is easy" and carried on practising. Playing improved.
Then I started to drift back to thinking about the big stage I would be on and the rows of seats.... playing got worse.
So I tried to bring my focus back to breathing naturally and just playing the music.... playing got better.
The theatre gig went ok. I won't say I wasn't nervous on the night, or that I played perfectly, but it went ok, no disasters.
It's something I have been playing around with and working on ever since, it's a work in progress.
Now I intentionally imagine the scenario with the audience etc. before a gig, and combat the nerves before I even arrive at the venue.
On the night I keep my focus on breathing easy and just playing the music. Hear it in my head and let my hands follow.
If negative thoughts drift in (eg. "WTF am I doing here in front of all these people trying to pull off this falseta I can't really play") I can switch right back.
Sometimes I might think "easy, easy" to break the bad thought and put my focus back where I want it. It seems to work for me.
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Date Nov. 10 2017 16:28:11
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mark indigo
Posts: 3625
Joined: Dec. 5 2007
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RE: Beta blockers and other performa... (in reply to Ricardo)
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quote:
if you can't laugh it off or if we take ourselves and this specific problem too serious, there ends up a mountain that was once a mole hill.
While my advice might seem "simplistic", I find it the only real solution.
It's all in the mind. You either trick it, or it tricks you.
I checked your previous post,
quote:
Practice with a metronome religiously, all your falsetas everyday so you become like a machine...
you want to go on stage only with expressive feelings don't think about anything just let your well rehearsed body take over at that moment. It's 100% mental.
I don't think your advice is simplistic, and it's certainly not wrong.... it's absolutely necessary to be totally prepared....
....but people who are at a high level and prepared are still poleaxed by fear, and that is the other part of the equation, also mental.
That is the thing that we have to conquer and overcome if we are afflicted by it, because that fear can interrupt the machine-like well-rehearsed body, however well prepared we are in terms of mechanical practise.
whether it's lack of oxygen as a result of restricted breathing caused by tension stimulated by fear, or whether it is "the body poisoning itself with adrenaline", either way it can be a serious problem, and as such needs to be taken seriously and addressed.
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Date Nov. 16 2017 15:10:45
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I had a good amount of live performances now but I never ever made use of performance-enhancing "drugs" of any sort. the stagefright kind of fades away after 10-15 minutes and after that I'm completely comfortable. but then again performing solo is something completely different. this experience is something I still need to make. 
