MOCK PERFORMANCES

first mock performance

The successes of my first mock performance were:

Stage Presentation

Vocal Pitching and Pronunciation

The chords

Interaction with the audience

How you present yourself on stage is important as its the image of the artist that is portrayed towards the audience. Therefore I wore something colourful to show the audience how my music is also colourful and to present my artistic image in a way that I would be comfortable. I also ensured that I looked out to the audience during my performance, to present myself as confident when performing. These small factors within each performance turn the music into something more than just playing the piano, but also performing to the audience. I believe I did this successfully as I presented my songs in a way that also reflected my image on stage, as the dynamics within the music got louder, I moved more to show how the music was also affected me.

The next success is vocal pitching and pronunciation. I believe this is musically, extremely important as you want your voice to sound crisp and clear to the audience. Especially with my songwriting as I focus heavily on the lyrics therefore I want more of the meaning to get across to the audience. This would mean that my music would convey more emotion from the lyrics to the listener, as you can hear every lyric. Within this I like to develop the melodies of the lyrics to make the melodies unique and memorable as this then also shows the variety of emotion with my music.

Another success with my Mock Performance was playing the chords on the piano correctly and in time. even though my songs are original and I was playing this to a new audience who didn’t already know my original music, it wouldn’t have mattered much to improvise or change the song slightly if the nerves got better of me and I forgot some of the sections within the songs. However due to practicing beforehand, I tried my best to ensure that I was prepared as I could be for this mock performance, because even though forgetting parts of the songs wouldn’t matter to the audience if improvised, it would matter to me. This is because I always want to play to the best of my ability to show the audience a preview of my skills as well as my EP.

Interaction with the audience can be fairly difficult for me, as when I’m speaking to the audience I feel less confident than when I’m singing. However because I wanted to use this performance as my mock, and make it as close to the Final Performance as possible. This meant that I wanted to ensure that I introduced each song. Since my music was all original, I wanted to ensure that I gave the audience an insight into my original music. I believe I did this successfully as I introduced every song.

The improvements that could be made in my first mock performance were:

Talking more of the songs/meaning

Promoting my EP

Refining the parts in the songs I played incorrectly

The first improvement that I could have made is adding a brief section about the meaning of some of the songs when I was introducing the songs. The reason I believe that this could be an improvement as it ensures that the audience are more involved and engaged in my performance. This would mean that more people could be interested in listening to my EP. Therefore, for my Final Performance I am going to ensure that I add some description about some of the songs to engage the audience more.

In this performance I mentioned about my EP but I didn’t announce when it would be available or where. This meant that I didn’t promote my EP when I had to opportunity to require more engagement of the EP. This would have also been the perfect opportunity too as I would have gained a lot more interest or contacts if I had done so, due to the size of the audience and variety of people. To improve this in the future I am going to ensure that ,during my Final Performance, I am going to promote my EP and tell the audience a bit about the EP to get them more involved in the process and product. This would mean that I could engaged some new people, who have never listened to my music before, to be interesting in purchasing or streaming ‘Underwater.’

My last improvement for this performance is the fact that I played small parts of songs incorrectly, such as Dive. As I played the timing of a chord incorrectly which meant that I also sung a lyric incorrectly too. This result meant that it knocked my confidence slightly on stage, however due to lots of practice and previous experience performing, I was able to continue and use the stumble as more power and energy to fuel the rest of the performance. For the future I could ensure that I practice smaller sections of the songs and go over parts within the songs to make sure that I am entirely comfortable playing it. I could also ensure that I perform more and book more gigs to gain my confidence whilst on stage to therefore gain more experience within performing to minimise incorrect placement of chords or stumbles within my performance.

overall

Overall I believe that my performance was successful as I presented my songs well, interacted with the audience and performed professionally. This meant that I could present myself to new audiences and be confident whilst doing so. However I also believe that a lot of improvements could have been made by ensuring that I involve the audience into my music more to ensure that I engage them, especially with original material. For the future my main from this Mock Performance is to complete my Final Performance to a professional standard and use this Mock Performance as guidance towards presenting myself on stage and playing the pieces correctly. For the future I will also attempt to play at more gigs to gain more confidence and present my EP to new people in a physical way rather than online.

second mock performance

The successes of my first mock performance were:

Performed with confidence

introduced the songs

performed weakest songs

The first success from this performance is that I performed with confidence, this meant that I could perform my songs well due to not being as nervous as I have previously been when performing. Therefore when performing I was able to get into the rhythm and flow of the songs more and perform to the best of my ability. Over the past projects I have been able to gain my confidence throughout, which has been good to see the development of my confidence through these past two years, it has shown me a different side to performing, which is positive.

Secondly I introduced the songs, I believe that this made my performance more successful due to engaging the audience in my music. This then gives them an insight as to what my music is all about. It makes the audience listen to the song more because they listen for the meaning of the song, or they create their own meaning. I believe that this is somewhat important and necessary in a performance, even though it’s my least favourite part, as it gives more meaning and purpose to the songs that you’re performing.

For this Mock Performance we had to select 3 songs to perform, therefore I chose my weakest songs from my set list that I would be performing for my Final Performance. This meant that I would have more practice for the songs and therefore bring them up to the same standard as the rest of the set list. By also rehearsing these songs, it will make my confidence increase as I won’t be as worried of playing the songs incorrectly and I will be playing in the moment. This therefore made my performance successful due to being able to perform the songs better than I expected. This gave me more hope towards my Final performance due to being more confident.

The improvements that could be made in my second mock are:

only performed two songs

didn’t include promotion of EP

didn’t look out to the audience enough

visuals

Since this was a shorter Mock Performance, it meant that, to let all the other acts have chance to play, we had to shorten down our set list to 3 songs. This then didn’t give me the opportunity to perform my full set again, yet luckily I had my previous Mock Performance to run through the whole set. If I didn’t have the first Mock Performance and only had this Mock then I would be worried about my Final Performance. This is due to not having enough practice on stage/performing the full set list. Therefore in the future I am going to ensure that I prepare more than needed to ensure that I am fully comfortable with every song that I will play.

As I didn’t know when my EP would be released I felt like I couldn’t promote it fully as I was unsure of date. This meant that I didn’t fully announce the full information of my EP and where it would be released. For the future I am going to ensure that I have more time between writing, recording and releasing to ensure that I can promote my music as much as possible. I felt like, in this project this was increasingly difficult as the time between the start of the project and the end date made it difficult to release my EP properly and have enough time to schedule for promotion.

An improvement that could be made for the Final Performance could be to look out into the audience more. In this performance I felt this was difficult to do as the piano was positioned away from the audience, however I could have faced the audience more when introducing my songs to include the full audience in my performance rather than just a section. For my Final Performance I could arrive in plenty of time to make sure that the piano is positioned at the right angle to be able to face the audience and perform successfully. As well as this, whilst introducing the songs I can look out into the audience to ensure that I am including the full audience and whilst I am singing I can look out to the audience.

For the future I could also think about the visuals on stage, my stage presentation such as, what I was wearing and how I was moving to the music was one aspect of visuals and the presentation of my music. However what I could also do research in for the future is a coloured backdrop whilst performing that presents what my music is about, as well as lighting. These together would have completed the performance and made it more successful. This is due to engaging the audience and having a whole performance that includes the whole stage makes it look professional.

overall

Overall I believe that my second Mock Performance was successful and unsuccessful in many ways, however I believe that it was more successful than unsuccessful. I believe this because I performed the songs well and with confidence. For me the improvements could easily be improved with more thought into the performance and more preparation, such as lighting and sound. I also think that since I chose the songs I was less confident about it gave me another chance to rehearse these songs to ensure that they would be more confident for my Final Performance.

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