When you play a music sheet that is very very fast, it gets impossible to read and play the sheet at the same time.

you will notice a lot of top flight piano players don’t play from a music sheet, they play from memory. If they have a sheet in front of them …. then that might be there just to tell them where and when to play their parts in an orchestra.

Sax is the same, if you learn to play a tune from memory, you stand a better chance of playing it in time, than playing it in time from a music sheet. The advantage of doing it from memory, is that you can still play it from the music sheet and you will find less mistakes when playing the music sheet once you can play the tune from memory

You’re dealing with overcoming Stage Fright which is a good article, where as i was talking about the problem of playing extremely difficult music sheets ex chopin piano music, pieces of music which tend to be played very fast, where it is very difficult to read the sheet, never mind play the sheet. For me it’s impossible to play these music sheets, however it is very easy to memorise these tunes and play them without the music sheet – these are the type of music sheets i would memorise.

In my sax lessons, in the past i was forced to play music sheets at various speeds for various reasons not covered here, including very slow, normal speed and above normal speeds.

I’ve suffered from stage fright all my life, and still do – there are only two options that work 1) you do one to one with a person trained to deal with overcoming your nervousness or 2) use medicine prescribed by a Doctor.

Years ago i had to stand up in front of a crowd of work colleagues and do a presentation – i overcame this fear by practicing at home in front of my parents.

When i got married i had to stand up and make a speech, i went to my Doctor and he prescribed a drug to slow my heart rate down, to take before the speech, it worked a treat. Never used the drug again in my life.

i’ve played in a band and in an orchestra, and it’s a lot easier for me to do that, than stand up and do a solo performance. Once the spotlight goes on me, the stage fright kicks in.

when i play the sax, it depends on who is in the audience –
if it’s people with no musical background, then a lot of pressure is off, as half the time they won’t notice a lot of mistakes, in fact the only thing they will notice is if you are way out of tune.

if it’s people with a musical background, that play musical instruments – the pressure increases as they will pick up every fault, however they will be more forgiving than you possibly realise.

if you’re playing in front of top flight sax players, the pressure is even more intense, as you know however you play you wont be able to play like them, but they are even more sympathetic than you think.

The more often you expose yourself to playing in stressful situations the less it starts to bother you over time. My guess is Johnny’s first attempts at recording took several takes. The Beatles when they did their 1st recording sessions it took them lots of retakes even though they had been playing for several years.

I think if you were to record all the time, you would overcome the stress.