How to take your Performance to the Next Level

so I'm not a particularly spiritual person I'm not even really that much of a touchy-feely kind of guy which if you've seen any of my videos where I do almost nothing but sight scientific studies while talking about music and this relation come as much of a surprise and I get that it's weird to hear that coming from a guy who studies music for a living but I want to talk about this one time when I felt something really profound when it came to music it almost felt like supernatural and it involved twinkle twinkle little star well technically it was a voodoo doll mama it was the theme in variations by Mozart so it opens by just playing twinkle twinkle little star but as you go through each of the twelve variations on the theme the piece becomes more and more technically demanding now in psychology there's this concept called the hierarchy of competence and it's a model that psychologists use to describe how people learn a skill at first you experience unconscious incompetence then it's conscious incompetence then conscious competence and then finally unconscious competence so stage one unconscious incompetence is when you suck so bad you don't even know how or why you suck in some cases you might not even think you suck at all in short you have no idea what you're doing this can be a really frustrating stage because no matter how hard you practice or study you can't really figure out why you're sucking at whatever you're trying but once you figure out how and or why you suck then you've reached stage two conscious incompetence you know you suck and you maybe even know why you suck you might not have the skill but you know what you have to do to get better and that's what's important and when it comes to music there's only one guaranteed way to move from stage one to stage two and that is get a teacher with a teacher you don't have to worry about trying to figure out how and why you suck because the teacher will catch all those problems for you and then show you how to correct them this is why teaching music can be such a frustrating and thankless job you have to figure out why your student isn't doing well then convince them that they aren't doing well and then somehow get them to do all of the drills and exercises even though they aren't really that much fun in order to get better you have to change and change is always painful this is what makes prima donnas the absolute worst students and inevitably terrible musicians if they think that what they're doing is already perfect then they'll never leave stage one and whatever skills they will have managed to develop up to this point will have been by sheer luck this is what makes me wince whenever I hear people talking about teaching themselves music if you teach yourself music you can't catch yourself making mistakes because you won't know what kind of mistakes you could potentially be making not talking about missing a note or something because you might catch that if you're learning something by ear but I'm talking about your posture and the tension that you carry when you're playing your instrument your articulation your phrasing your dynamics how you're bringing out the voices of a chord all the things that no one really talks about that you could easily miss if you aren't careful you can't teach yourself while you're acting as a student professionals who don't have access to a teacher will frequently record themselves playing as a means of getting around this problem you can be the performer on stage and then become your own teacher when you listen to your recordings you might notice in a recording that you're actually speeding up when during the performance you had no idea but if you're professional and you hear that specific problem then you'll already know that you need to do some slow metronome drills to fix that problem because that's how your teacher showed you and that's how their teacher showed them and their teacher showed them and so on and so on but then again if you teach yourself from the very beginning the solution or even the problem might not always be so apparent recording yourself to step outside your own performance is always interesting to watch I can't count how many times I've seen a YouTube video of somebody reacting to the sound of their own voice in a recording when they thought they were better than they actually were the sad truth of our society is that someone like this is gonna get made fun of for thinking they were better than they actually were there's a whole industry selling this phenomenon when in fact discovering how you suck should be rewarded dude sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something because it means that you're growing and climbing towards step 3 conscious competence this is where you might still be running into a couple problems but more importantly you know how to deal with them you know the problem and you know the solution you hit the practice room do the drills and all the exercises and scales and arpeggios until you just want to set your metronome on fire and more importantly you know why you're doing all these drills and how they're gonna help you but when you sit down and you go into super say in focus mode you can make it through that 10 minute piece maybe there's still a few rough edges that you can sand down like like one scale that could be a little cleaner or you don't quite bring out the voices of that chord exactly how you want but you can make it through the piece and have it sound more or less the way it's supposed to as a student so long as you listen to your teacher this is where you should be operating and with enough time and focus you should hit stage 4 unconscious competence the absolute most dangerous stage there is during this stage you can play the whole piece while having a conversation with someone about where you want to go for dinner whatever you're doing has become effortless and you become the most vulnerable for things to go wrong when you spend that much time learning a piece of music or really any kind of skill you've engaged in something called procedural learning which elicits your implicit memory in other words a task that you're trying to accomplish to the efficiency that you desire is so complicated that your brain has to automate it in order to get your body to do it and you develop the ability to complete this task subconsciously you see this all the time in the world of sports like whenever a quarterback wants to throw a football he doesn't think okay I'm gonna flex my bicep to allow for my tricep to have as much potential motion as possible and when I flex my tricep I'm also gonna slightly relax my thumb such that the friction between the laces on the ball of my fingers will transfer the linear force of my flexing tricep to a rotational force on the ball that will allow the ball to fly farther and faster no he's just gonna think I gotta throw the ball if you had to do all of that thinking every time you wanted to throw a ball then quarterbacks would look more like dota players everything is literally moving too quickly for your higher functions to process it your brain has to automate that process just like with a piece of music this is where concept called body mapping comes into play I haven't been able to find any literature on body mapping but it's a term that everyone at my school used and I can't find anything else that explains what it describes in the same way when you're playing an instrument you don't think about the individual muscle fluxes in your fingers you just think about the notes you want to play the musician has spent so much time with their instrument that they don't have to think about the keys or how to breathe they just think G and a G will come out their brain has mapped their instrument to become a part of their body this is how and why blind piano players know where they are in the keyboard they've spent so much time on the ivories that their mind has an imprint of where the keyboard is in a 3d space in their mind a great analog for non musicians would be like when you're in your car you don't think okay flex this arm and move this hand up six inches you just think I need to turn left you don't think of yourself in the car you think of yourself as the car if someone gets too close to you on the freeway you don't think he got really close to my car you think he got really close to me but musicians do this to a much greater level for example when a saxophonist learns how to play their instrument intonation becomes a problem they don't just play an A they have to play in a that's perfectly in tune and depending on the construction of their specific saxophone they'll have to alter their oral cavity so that that specific note is in tune so when they think of that note it's not just a combination of key presses but it's also how they breathe and shape their mouth and throat and you can see that whenever they play but I say that this stage is dangerous because this is where you can begin to unlearn music if you aren't careful yes you could carry out a conversation while you sit down at the piano and that is a phenomenal demonstration of skill discipline and dedication but if you aren't paying attention you might miss a note or your dynamics might start to change or maybe your finger just doesn't hit that last note of the chord every time all those neurons that you spent all that time connecting will slowly start unlearning the piece or worse learn the piece wrong then you run the risk of subtly and steadily moving back to stage 1 you start making mistakes in your brain that you might not ever realize but even worse than that once you get to stage 4 you start to run the risk of choking on stage everyone's seen it someone gets on stage starts playing stops for seemingly no reason can't continue then walks off stage when a process is automated in your brain it's automated because the manual parts of your brain aren't fast enough to process that complex task when you're in a situation where you might force yourself to re-engage those higher functions you will override those automatic functions and your fingers won't automatically go to the notes that they're supposed to you'll freeze and you won't be able to remember what to do next this is what happens when musicians freeze on stage something happened they realize they were on stage and they began trying to consciously play that complicated piece of music and suddenly their muscle memory failed them you see the same thing in athletics all the time whenever someone throws an air ball they aren't playing basketball they just realize they were standing in a giant room with thousands of people staring at them in the world of eSports this is called tilting this is when you stop playing the game and you suddenly realize that you're sitting at a desk and you could see everything behind your computer screen in the world of single-player games they call this phenomenon breaking immersion if the game does something to remind you that you're actually playing a game you might start realizing that your performance begins to suffer you don't think about pushing the a button to make Mario jump you just make him jump but as soon as you think of the controller in your hands you'll start to struggle if you want to know what it's like to choke on stage as a musician I'll show you I'm very sorry for what I'm about to do but this is what it feels like to choke on stage you are now manually breathing you're now manually blinking and you can now feel your clothes now I can tell you what you're thinking you're screaming a bunch of expletives in your head and you're desperately trying to figure out how to get back to not thinking so hard this is exactly what a musician is going through they're desperately trying to figure out how to turn their brain off and just let their fingers go on autopilot and this is where twinkle twinkle little star comes in when I was learning this piece during one of my after I performed the whole piece from start to finish from memory my professor took the score opened it up looked at my smug face and said so it looks like you've memorized all 10 minutes of this piece yep I replied with the most arrogant smirk a twenty-year-old could muster good then what's the second note in the right hand on the seventh measure of the third variation I stopped turned to the piano and started playing the variation before she interrupted me no no no no I didn't ask you to play it what is the note I froze I closed my eyes I started humming and she stopped me again and said you know it doesn't really look like you know this piece very well does it see the idea is that if you have to rely on it muscle memory will always fail you whenever you're stressed out or under pressure whenever someone in the audience coughs or you think about the uncomfortable shoes that you had to wear with your suit while you're on stage your fingers won't know where the next notes are the trick is that you have to memorize the whole piece photographically every note every dynamic every articulation so that when you do freeze on stage and your fingers start forgetting you can close your eyes see the score and go back to stage three you'll get back into your groove and you'll naturally fall back into stage four and when I was on stage performing this piece what ended up happening was almost magical because this is where I think the psychologists have it wrong I think you can hit a stage five where you're unconsciously competent and you can carry out a conversation while playing your piece but you don't you remain dedicated to what you're doing you can use the remaining higher functions in your mind to focus on the expression in the meaning of the performance after spending so many countless hours restructuring your brain to remember a piece of music by the time you play the piece with absolute focus on what you're doing you open yourself to explore the higher expression of that performance and this is something that you can only get to with time I've heard of some people calling this flow where you're performing a complex challenge but have the skill to cope with that challenge and as objective in scientific as I'd like to be I honestly felt like I was casting a spell it was one of the most profound musical moments I'd ever experienced and it was when I was in college on stage worrying about a grade playing twinkle twinkle little star so why didn't I record it thanks for watching I'd like to thank my patrons for making these videos possible with a very special thank you to Anna Burch AFN man Ethan Rooney Florian urged Kirk Daniel Colquitt Hayden Elza and Donovan Hodges if you like what you saw here be sure to subscribe and check out my other videos follow me on Twitter and twitch TV musical questions answered live and if you really like what I'm doing here consider supporting the channel on patreon that's gonna be it for me for now thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Sideways

Views: 248,756

Keywords: Skill, Talent, Learning, Procedural, Implicit, Competence, Tilt, Tilting, Freeze, How to take your Performance to the Next Level, Performance, Practice, Music, Music Theory, Mozart, Twinkle, Star, Little, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

Id: eG1_Fcaq280

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 30 2018