Hey gang! I’ve been building a repertoire and trying to get the songs to the point where they are performance ready. Not perfect, but perfect enough for a casual situation. I don’t seem to be able to get there. I’ve tried a number of different tactics: super, super slow with gradual speed increases, focus time blocks on parts of the song where I make mistakes, sing-only, sing and play integration, and then mock performance. I record myself to see if the pressure of a mic will help desensitize me to the pressure. Nothing seems to work to get me to the point where I would feel comfortable even in a casual situation let alone something like an OM. I can consistently practice 2 hours a day and sometimes more. Lifetime I’m probably 1500 hours into learning. Any advice?
Welcome to the forum Colin
Do you every play just for the fun of playing? There is a big difference between practicing a piece and playing it. Most people never practice just playing.
If you never play for fun you’ll never get that relaxed state where the mistakes don’t matter and when preforming you only get on shot so you need to have the confidence to play through mistakes.
Then you practice the parts where you made the mistakes to figure out why your making them.
Yeah - my routine includes basic skills (scales, blues studies, blue grass studies), learning a new song, perfecting a song (this in the bulk of of the session in my current routine), and then ‘experimentation’ which is sometimes noodling and other times playing a song totally outside of my interests so i can get exposed to new things. I reserve 1-2 days a week for just playing - so no structure, just experimenting and playing songs I know.
If you practice around 2 hours a day and have about 1500 hrs that’s about 2 years. If your into Bluegrass that’s not a lot of time to get really good. Lots of fast lick to get up to spead.
Maybe your just being to hard on yourself. The only way to get comfortable play at OMs is to put yourself out there and do the best you can.
Post a video in the AVOYP Section of your playing and get some feed back.
I performed my first open mic when I’d been playing for just shy of 11 months. In hindsight perhaps I wasn’t ready but I learned heaps. I don’t believe I’d put in any where near the hours you have.
Perhaps just jump in and do a performance, similar to what I did. That open mic was something like 13 or 14 years ago, I remember we were driving and saw a sign that the cafe had an open mic so away we went.
Just a suggestions that may or may not work for you.
Hello and welcome to the forum!
Straight out of the gate: it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Learning how to play the guitar will take it’s time, no way around that.
How do you get ready for a stage performance?
From my experience, you just have to do it. Whatever may come. Jump right in there.
It gets better along the way. As with playing, you need to build up some experience.
You’re in luck there is an upcoming webinar on this topic soon.
Performing is a skill in itself that needs to be practiced, but in a different way - One of the key things you need to do is to play your songs from start to finish without stopping. When something goes wrong, keep going. I think that learning to keep going when you forget a lyric or mess up a chord change is key to getting performance ready - knowing that you can push though mistakes lowers the pressure to be ‘perfect’ (spoiler - a performance is never perfect!) When we practice we train ourselves to stop when we make a mistake so we can play it again and correct it - this is fine when learning the song, but doesn’t work for performance.
Also don’t wait until you are ‘ready’, you never will be. Just do it 
You’ve received good advice above. A couple of other thoughts
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if you don’t already, play and sing along to the tracks on whatever streaming platform you use. When you make a mistake keep going. Review afterwards - could you have kept going without the track? If not what do you need to improve.
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An extension of 1 above. Get the song into one of the AI programs that split it into parts. Mute the vocal and guitar parts (so you may be left with drums and bass). Play and sing along to it and keep going. Do the review / self reflection at the end of the track.
I’ve used Moises to do the above. I think I used Transcribe+ on IOS to do this in the past. LALAL.AI does similar I think. Others are avaliable I think.
I hope you get it sorted as open mics are fun.
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If you never play for fun you’ll never get that relaxed state where the mistakes don’t matter and when preforming you only get on shot so you need to have the confidence to play through mistakes.
Then you practice the parts where you made the mistakes to figure out why your making them.
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I start to understand the concept with the song Im currently working on
its a very good advice !
I dunno…sometimes you just can’t replicate all the elements of a live performance. I did my first open mic recently and even though I could perform the songs in question completely to my satisfaction at home, it was harder live. I wasn’t even nervous - I think it was just distractions and all the new elements my brain was processing so my music suffered. I actually did well when my wife was at the mic singing and all I had to focus on was my guitar part. But when I was at the mic singing, it all fell apart.
My wife was shaky the first time she was up there. But since her first time, she’s been averaging between 2-4 open mic performances per month for almost the past year and she’s pretty comfortable now. She’s still not terribly comfortable just picking songs right before - she still wants a lot of time to prep for an open mic. But that’s getting better.
Thanks for posting this! I just did my first live OM this past weekend and wasn’t very happy with how it turned out but am looking forward to this webinar!
I agree with this guy. While I just started back after being away from it for 20 years I noticed the chords came back like I hadn’t stopped.
But to your question, I think if you can play blindfolded in silence or even around family while they’re cooking or doing other stuff you’re close to the muscle memory you need to play live… But like the previous student said, there’s nothing better than getting up to do it NOW - whereever you’re at. Just explain “it’s been a dream to plan for people outside of your practice time and that you don’t have it as perfect as you’d like but tonight you will hear the best I can do at this moment in time and tomorrow or next week that will likely improve higher but this is where I am now. I hope you like it and don’t mind any mistakes - I’m always working on them.”
Thank you to everyone who’s weighed in so far. I’m very grateful! Definitely lots of things to work with here but it sounds like the consensus is ‘Get out there and play’. Thank you!
Best advice I’ve got for someone about to perform - get a spare cable.
FWIW, my bridge to building the courage (alas maybe not the skill) for performing small gigs at wine bars and restaurants in the area was busking on the public walk outside of a friend’s outdoor restaurant patio seating. Customers and passersby were the shifting audience. As noted above, it forces you to play the songs through from start to finish, regardless of the butchery that might ensue. But as nervous as I was (and still am) busking, it’s notably less than being in front of folks sitting indoors at tables all facing moi. Even though I play about one formal gig a month, I still busk just to experiment with different song arrangements and maintain the butterflies that aren’t going away. So try busking as a bridge is my advice. Again, FWIW.
Not that I’ve attempted busking, but even thinking about doing that makes me incredibly nervous where getting on a stage doesn’t really get to me in that way.
Lots of buskers in my town, too. Some of whom have actually gotten kinda big.