What Ruins Live Shows?
- Live
- 26th March 2018
- Autumn Palmer
What is the single biggest thing that ruins live shows? Stagedeath. Sounds melodramatic right? Maybe so. So what is it, and how can you avoid it?
What Is It?
Stagedeath is the lack of all activity on stage for five seconds. No music, no build up, no voices. “5 seconds?“, you might say. “Is that all?” But think of it this way. Sit back and count five seconds. Now image a band stood on stage, not playing, not speaking for that amount of time. Five seconds of silence will seem like an eternity to your audience and ruins many live shows.
Why Is It So Bad?
For emerging artists, maintaining momentum through your live shows is essential. You’re a new artist, you have to be exciting, enthralling, and above all entertaining. Five seconds of silence to tune your guitars or drink a glass of water, and BAM your crowd is gone, and your show is ruined. Maybe not physically, but subconsciously their minds will be elsewhere, and recovering from stage death is a task in itself.
In this modern digital age where people can be entertained at the click of a button, the attention span of a standard human being has lowered, and we have become fickle to a ridiculous degree. You need to keep up the show and keep your audience engaged. It’s hard enough getting a crowd to actually come and see your show, so it is vital to make sure you can give them what they paid for.
How Do I Avoid It?
So how do you actually avoid stage death? There are numerous ways to make sure your show never loses its life. Plan out your set. Decide at rehearsal who is saying what when, which songs are going to flow straight into each other, and who is going to tune their guitars at what point. If all your guitarists are tuning at once, your drummer is adjusting his hi hat stand and the singer is having a drink, there you have a risk of stagedeath. Of course, you can’t always control when things will need doing, but provided you all communicate on stage, you should all be able to avoid it.
For some more information on artists that avoid stage death well, check out our live show reviews of Calva Louise, Scarlet, and The Blinders. These bands are doing stage shows right.
You may think that it is good to give your crowd a breather every now and then, but for a new act that no one has ever heard of, momentum is vital. Keep live shows alive, avoid stage death.