How to Maintain a Great Stage Presence on Stage

Series Summary

Stage presence is the power to command attention and engage an audience while on stage. Many scholars believe stage presence was stolen from the Olympian gods by Prometheus, alongside the secret of fire. According to the myth, human beings lacked the ability to cook food and also suffered without the art of speaking to crowds with any degree of gusto or theatrics. Musical performances were boring; singers would stand on stage and sing without rapper-like hand motions or Jagger-esque microphone tricks. Even pointing the tip of your guitar up in the air during solos was unheard of. But Prometheus, the primordial mortal, gave his own freedom to give humans that glimpse of something more, something that would make Britney Spears and Madonna kiss on stage, something that would inspire Justin to grab Janet's top, something that would bend Iggy Pop over backwards: stage presence.

In this free video series, our expert teaches you all about stage presence. He gives professional tips about first impressions, how to walk onto a stage, introduce a song, handle talking and telling stories between numbers and more. You will also learn how to improve your stage presence as a guitarist. Our expert gives guitar-solo tips and suggestions for engaging the crowd. Acoustic instruments and pianos are also discussed. Adding subjects like microphone tricks, showing confidence and big finishes, our expert gives you all you need for expert stage presence!

Video Transcript

"ALEX BOYE: Welcome. My name is Alex Boye on behalf of Expert Village. We're doing a video on how to perform on stage. Now, most people suck on stage, let's be honest. People suck on stage. How many times you ever heard people say, "I bought his album and his album is absolutely amazing!" and then he goes on live and it's like, "Wa-wa-wa" all the time! And so, I want to talk about some things I've had some experiences about performing on stage for about 15 years. I want to talk to you about some things that I've learned that's really effective performing on stage. First of all, I take the performance as a restaurant. When you go to a restaurant, imagine if you had just one menu. That would suck wouldn't it? That'd be like the worst thing. So you'd call and you're like, "I would like to have the only menu this day." And so, there's no variety. There's nothing and it's just the same thing over and over again. Eventually, people not going to want to go. It's the same thing with your shows. You have to have variety. When you go to Mickey Dee's, there's more than just a Big Mac there. There's a whole bunch of variety. And that is one of the most important things when you're putting on a show. You've got to give them variety. You don't give them the same thing over and over and over again. And so, we're going to talk a little bit about some of this variety and how we can give it to them, right? For example, when you go and you order a salad, alright? After you'd have like about 10 bites of the salad, it gets boring, doesn't it? The same thing with a ballad. A ballad and a salad, the boring, most boring thing. But when you move from the salad and you take your meat and you start chopping in the meat, then you go back to the salad, that salad is good again, isn't it? And that's what we have to do with our performance. It goes with meat, salad, meat, salad. Not a ballad over. I've been to concerts where people do ballads all the way through. It sucks. So, on the other side now, we're going to talk a little bit more about what type of songs that we should be choosing."