How To Improve Your Stage Presence

'there's nothing worse than dead silence' my band used to be called dead silence. :(

"Practice as if you were the worst, play as if you were the best!"

10. NEVER apologise for making a mistake. All it does is draw attention to the fact that you made a mistake which may otherwise have gone unnoticed.

1. Eliminate silence Classical musician: ight imma head out

You missed smashing the guitar, throwing it in the crowd, starting a mud fight, and setting the stage on fire.

After being disgusted by ourselves in a video our manager took of us at a gig, we started practicing in front of mirrors. Started getting standing ovations after that. Wierd? Yes. But if you can't entertain yourself...

Sunglasses, it sounds like a joke, but it helps me so much as I'm shy and not having to look at the audience while 1.they don't know I'm not looking at them 2. You look like slash

1) Entertain- that's why you"re there. 2) Engage. 3) Be Dynamic 4) Be on and be prepared. Know the set!

maybe make a samurai gutarist video on starting a band?

I have a show tomorrow and I’m 13 so it’s like my 2nd one so I’m pretty nervous. The band is playing a bunch of AC/DC songs. I need to be more aggressive with my playing and my stage presence for the show. This helped a lot, thank you

10. Start the show like Flea Woodstock '99 to gain attention

My dad has been a rock/ heavy metal guitarist for about 38 years and his biggest advice to me was the PROJECTION of your playing. He had a story about Jimmy Page playing with the firm. He went to the show with some friends got some drinks and sat down. About 20 minutes later the lights went down. The audience was just talking, drinking and facing away from the stage. But then at one moment everyone just went completely silent turned around and there was jimmy on stage. He said he just felt his presence there immediately. Then he counted off and fucking leveled the place.This is an art form, projecting your mind and presence onto the crowd is almost as important as learning to play the instrument itself. In fact, your technique and playing should be directly in service to this skill. There's a reason rock guitarists play mostly simple music, because you need to fucking MEAN it. It should be just as mental intensive as playing classical or jazz and if it's not you're doing it wrong. It sounds very spiritual and metaphysical, but if you can develop this skill you'll find it works. I've seen my dad do it time and time again, you must be captivating. You can tell immediately if a musician is really in the zone and focused. You have to put your shadow out into the world, you should be able to intimidate. I find metal screamers are very good at this, I remember seeing a deathcore band and the vocalist jumped off of the stage right into my face and I was just terriefied of this dude. The way he moved, it felt like he wanted to kill me, and I believed him!! Dad also stressed that you can't be afraid to play HARD, in the climax of a solo you should play hard as you can without hurting yourself (though it wasn't uncommon for him to have his whole forearm black and blue after weeks of playing 2 shows a day). Strum hard, pick hard, you need to make sure your instrument gets as much emotional input through its signal as possible. But never ever lose control, and if you do fake that you have it all under your thumb. Make sure people know exactly what is on your mind. Performance is the ground zero of creativity, you need ALL of your mentality and senses in the moment.

"Have good outfits" Pantera has left the chat

The answer is one and only, guitar spins.

I'm 14 and I'm doing about a 2 hour Gorillaz cover show as mostly a singer, but also a pianist, guitarist and playing the melodica. This helped me a lot, thanks!

I wear combat boots with a frilly dress on stage. I'm a man

1. headbang

One of my most favorite things about writing a live set is creating blocks of 3-4 songs with killer transitions to make for 20-30min of seamless nonstop music. This is my favorite part about seeing bands live and seeing the little things that they did that changes the live performance of a song from the studio version. Jamaican and European reggae bands do this very well!

Remember the family guy episode where Peter was playing drums and making eye contact with the guitarist and they made too much eye contact and they had together married. Lol

Two more: no noodling, no tuning (with volume)