nerves before you play

Nerves are not a character flaw and they are not a sign that you have under-prepared. They are a measurable physical event. Your heart rate climbs, your breathing goes shallow and high in the chest, your fingers feel slightly further away than usual, and your internal clock speeds up without asking permission.

Which means the goal is not to stop feeling nervous. Professionals do not. The goal is to make sure a slightly shaky version of you can still deliver the piece, and that is something you can practise.

adrenaline is predictable, so plan around it

Three things happen to almost everybody. Fine motor control drops a fraction, so the fastest passage gets scrappier. Breath gets shorter, which is critical for singers and wind players and still matters for everyone. And tempo creeps up, often noticeably, because your sense of time is running fast.

Once you expect those, you can prepare for them. Practise the hardest bar slower and more often than the rest of the piece, so that losing a little precision still leaves you above the line. Write your breaths into the music instead of improvising them. And choose an opening tempo that feels a touch too slow in the lesson room, because on the day it will not.

rehearse the entry, not only the piece

Students rehearse bar one to bar forty. Hardly anyone rehearses walking across a room, sitting down, adjusting the bench, looking up, and starting. That sequence is where a lot of performances come unstuck, because it is the only part nobody has done before.

So do it. Stand up, walk in from the door, sit, take your time with the stool, breathe, and play the first eight bars. Then stop and do it again. Four or five repetitions and the start of the performance stops being unfamiliar territory.

the week before

Three things are worth more than extra hours of practice in the final week.

Play it cold. First thing in the morning, before any warm-up, straight through. That is much closer to performance conditions than the fifth run of a long session, and it will show you which passages only work once your hands are already warm.

Play it to one person. A sibling, a parent, a friend who does not play. One pair of eyes produces a surprising amount of the same physical response as fifty, which is exactly what you want to practise in.

Record one take on a phone and do not stop when it goes wrong. Performance is partly the skill of continuing, and you cannot build that if every mistake triggers a restart.

if it goes wrong halfway through

Keep going. Audiences hear a stop far more clearly than a wrong note, and examiners are listening to the whole performance rather than hunting individual slips. Most of what feels catastrophic from the stool is close to inaudible from six metres away.

This is a real skill and it is learnable. Practise starting from the beginning of each section rather than only from the top, so that there are several places you know how to resume from. Students who only ever practise from bar one have exactly one entry point and no way back in.

what helps over a year

Exposure, in small doses, more often. One recital a year is not enough to get used to anything. Playing in front of other people regularly in smaller settings is what makes the big ones manageable, which is a large part of why we keep putting students in front of audiences through Band Club, the community choir, camps and school performances.

Exam week helps too, in a quieter way. Recording an RSL performance in a prepared room, with a teacher who has done it before, is a controlled version of the same pressure. The nerves are real, the stakes are real, and the setting is calm.

If performing is genuinely frightening rather than just uncomfortable, say so to your teacher. There is a lot of middle ground between a solo recital and never playing for anyone, and starting with two people in a lesson room is a perfectly respectable place to begin.