Performance Practice Quotes

The best practice you can get is on the bandstand, but in between gigs I feel I have to stay in shape.

We're very much perfectionists, so when we're putting on a huge show and want to play to the best of ability, we rehearse intensely. And I have a guitar pretty much in my hand for at least five hours before doing a show. I'm just noodling and mucking around and working on some of the songs here and there.

The best recording is the one you bring with you in your mind.

If you believe that how you do your work is as influential as the work you do, then a theatre rehearsal, which is a microcosm of the world, is the perfect place to model social change because if it doesn't work this time, you can try again on the next production.

My favorite way of learning for acting has been doing it, not talking about it.

Open mics are a great way to rework your material to see what punchlines land best.

Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!

If you want to be a doctor, a lawyer you must go to college. But if you want to be a musician or such, study your craft. Study music.

My band can tell you, I'd rather do anything than rehearse.

When working with classical musicians, it is important to be clear as possible in the score about what my intentions are. Because there isn't a lot of rehearsal time, especially at the ballet, it's best if everything is written in the score.

It's so easy to practice out of context. For example, if you're learning a scale, you take that scale and you sit in your room and you go up and down the fretboard, over and over. You've gotta do that, because you need to get that scale working. But you have to keep in mind that that's not the finished product. That's the starting point.

Well, the teacher I studied with for nineteen and a half years was a man named Paul Gavert. He was a great lieder singer, so basically I'm a trained lieder singer because of that teacher. The teacher I currently study with - since 1995 - is Joan Lader, who also studied with Gavert.

I love rehearsing, but a lot of directors don't, and some actors don't.

As much as we like to pretend we're just getting on stage and whatever, it's like, no, I practiced in front of the mirror my whole life.

When I was growing up, I grew up in church--my father was a pastor--so when I was growing up in Trinidad, I'd close all the windows in the church and go in the church every day after school and get a little microphone and pretend all these people were in the pews, and I would sing to them.

They flat their fifths, we drink ours.

I think there's a fallacy that's been concocted by the music teachers' profession, to wit: that there's a certain sequence of events necessary in order to have the revealed truth about the way one produces a given effect on a given instrument.

I love the feeling of letting fly, of pushing as far as I could go with my voice. The only way you can really graduate how you do it is by doing it regularly to people who don't have to be super impressed. You can do it in the studio all day long but you don't get the flashback that you get onstage.

It feels like my job is to support people. I support great artists. When I worked with a symphony, I sat in the third chair, not the first chair.

I experience a high on stage that I get nowhere else. I feel its like going to the gym so I won't lose my skills.

I played saxophone, so I was into jazz. I learned from each audience and each teacher that I had. I can't really tell you any rules or anything, but the way I develop my beliefs is really just by personally learning from different situations.

For my part, if I had the power I would insist on all oratorios being sung in the costume of the period - with a possible exception in the case of the Creation.

Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound.

Conducting! A subject, truly, concerning which much might be written, yet scarcely anything of real importance is to be found in books.

I'm always writing; I'm always jotting things down on paper or making notes in my iPhone. Then I'll make myself sit down and kind of shape it up, but there's really no other way to practice other than onstage.