https://www.musical-u.com/learn/are-you-practicing-on-stage-instead-of-playing/
A surge of excitement rushes through your veins as you stride towards your instrument.
Glancing into the audience, you see familiar faces: friends, family members, perhaps that special someone… This is it. There’s only one option now.
You must play well.
You want to avoid mistakes.
You want your playing to be interesting.
To be well-timed. To be moving.
In short, you want your playing to be “good”.
So what our intuition tells us to do is this: to closely monitor our performance and make sure our playing is as good as it can be.
We actually have a name for this: we call it practicing.
Practice is all about putting your playing under a microscope, finding flaws, and fixing them.
Of course, on stage is the wrong time to be doing this.
You only get one shot and there’s no fixing mistakes. So instead, we should do the opposite: relinquish control, let the music flow, and just play!
Read on to learn to recognize the differences between practice and performance.