Why Your Playing Sounds Better at Home Than in Lessons or Recordings
1. Why It’s Different
For many players there is a big difference between what you can do in practice by yourself and what you can do when a teacher or an audience is watching. At home, you are relaxed and not “performing”, whereas when you are in a lesson or a performance your brain shifts from a more exploratory, creative mode to a preservation and performance mode. I too have experienced this many times and I also used to say in my lessons, “I played this better earlier.”
There is good reason for this, but it doesn’t have to be (and likely won’t be) forever. As you get more comfortable and trusting of yourself, the gap between how you view your playing in different situations closes.
But what causes it?
Well, when you are being watched, your self-monitoring increases, you have a heightened attention on mistakes and that means that you will sometimes lose the flow of your playing. The same thing occurs when you record yourself: you are suddenly much more aware that the performance is going to be observed and therefore you become more aware of every detail in your playing. It’s that awareness that interrupts you.
So it isn’t really your playing or your skill that changes, but it is your mental state that changes and affects your playing.
2. What’s Actually Happening
While many people think it’s just them that have this issue, I can anecdotally tell you that from the thousands of lessons that I have taught, perhaps 60% of them have come with some variation of the warning label: “I could play this at home” or “I played this 100 times at home and I can’t play it now”. So what is actually happening in your brain?
Well, after some research (you’re welcome), I found that when you feel under pressure your brain recruits extra cognitive systems, which are: conscious control, problem-solving and perfectionism. This means that you are in an overthinking mode which disrupts the way that you would usually approach playing. This is called “The Implicit-Explicit Interference Effect”, which refers to the situation where you are trying to perform something explicitly (consciously) which hinders your ability to perform the same thing implicitly (automatically).
From my own experience of performing in a lesson or on stage, this does ring true. You can almost feel yourself being hyper-conscious of everything you are playing, unlike in practice when you aren’t overthinking everything.
Alongside this, you might also have an adrenaline response (depending on the situation), narrowed auditory perception (tunnel hearing), heightened self-criticism and physical tension.
Essentially, if your brain tries too hard in what you perceive to be a performance situation, then it stops trusting your automatic playing, and then your hands become less reliable and your performance changes.
3. Building Consistency
The best and most reliable way to fix the problem is exposure. In order for a situation to feel comfortable and relieve some of the pressure, you need to get used to it and build your performance tolerance. So maybe try playing for people more often, record yourself playing a little each day, or try to think of performances/recordings as a reference point in your long-term playing rather than something final.
You can also try to become familiar with being unfamiliar. Meaning, if you have access, try playing on different pianos occasionally or at different times of the day. Change the lighting or change where your piano is located occasionally to make the environment different. This will help you get used to being in an unusual place, even if it’s on a small scale.
Try not to rely on your automatic playing so much in practice. If you play on autopilot in practice, then when you feel pressure and you become hyper-conscious, you are much more likely to make mistakes. So try to practise by analysing the music and using your analytical and visual memory as well so that you aren’t just relying on your motor memory. You can also make sure that you practise the music starting in different places so you become much more consciously familiar with different parts of the piece.
Lastly, you can also shift your mindset. Mistakes are always going to be a part of playing, so accepting that mistakes are part of the process and nothing is final will help take the pressure off. You can also focus on telling a musical story with the music rather than thinking about the individual notes.
From my own experience, I became a much more reliable performer once I had built up experience of performing a lot. It becomes a more natural environment to be in and so I was able to be a little more automatic. However, the more you do perform, the more you realise that each performance isn’t so important and it’s just another step in your long future of playing.
Matthew Cawood
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