Why You Tense Up When You Record Yourself

A while ago I went into the studio with my group, Ananda, to record our meditative improvisations. We had a good reason to be there. Over years of playing together the music had grown much livelier than anything on the recordings we already had, and we wanted to capture what it had become. We did a few takes, and they were nice. Too nice. Too tame. Everything we had come there to record had quietly stayed home.

Nobody had played badly. There were hardly any mistakes to point to. What was missing was the thing that never shows up as a mistake: the aliveness, which is the whole reason anyone would want to hear us in the first place.

If you’ve ever recorded yourself, you know this from the inside. You play a phrase beautifully in the practice room, you press record, and the next pass comes out tighter, smaller and more careful. Your hands are the same hands they were a minute ago. What changed is that this time, what you play is going to last.

Recording engineers call it “red light fever,” and it is a different animal from ordinary stage nerves. A concert ends. The people who heard it go home with a memory, and memory is forgiving: it keeps the feeling of the evening and lets most of the details fall away.

A recording keeps every detail, permanently. The microphone also hears differently than a person does. It catches every scrape, every late entrance, every note a hair under pitch, and when you listen back, those small imperfections get amplified in your mind until they are all you can hear.

Put those together and the pressure to get it right climbs, and what that pressure does to a musician is predictable. Attention narrows to the notes. The hands sweat. The neck, the arms and the breath tighten. The tightness produces more mistakes, or, on the takes where you manage to avoid them, a recording that is merely technically perfect and missing the aliveness people actually want to hear. That was our Ananda session in a sentence.

When I work with someone in the studio and things start falling apart, the first thing I ask is what they were thinking about while they played. The answers are remarkably consistent: “I have to get the notes right.” or “I hope I don’t mess up.” Sometimes it’s the voice of a harsh teacher, or a parent, or some painful moment from childhood. Dig all the way down and the belief underneath sounds something like this: if I make a mistake, nobody will love me.

That belief has a spokesperson, and you’ve met it: your “inner critic.” It’s the voice that starts listing everything that went wrong the instant a take is over, and that grades the next take before you’ve played it. Most musicians assume they need that voice. It feels like the thing keeping their standards high, and the idea of easing up on it brings up a real fear of getting sloppy, of losing the edge that got them this far. I wrote about this fear in my book, Soulforce:

The presumed connection between excellence and the inner critic gives rise to a common objection to trying to heal its associated wound: will such healing take away your edge, your creative drive? To some, the very idea of healing the inner critic brings up real fear, with a voice that says that any kindness or compassion for yourself is self-indulgent and naïve. What this perspective ignores, however, is that your inner critic is an enormous drain on your life force energy, and that healing your inner critic is necessary to your fullest creative energy and inspiration.

Your inner critic expends a great deal of your energy just trying to keep you safe. When you heal the inner critic, you unburden yourself of this energetic drain. Thus unburdened, you regain the creative energy and other qualities that were otherwise previously occupied. The result will be a new sense of vitality, playfulness, and creative insight.

In a recording studio that drain is audible. The energy your critic spends protecting you from the permanent mistake is energy that would otherwise go into the sound, and the listener hears exactly where it went. Vitality and playfulness were the two things missing from our tame Ananda takes, and no amount of care in the playing was going to put them back.

The critic also works from a very small definition of a good take: one with nothing wrong in it. That definition is merely technical. Technique matters, and it’s necessary for mastery, and on its own it isn’t sufficient.

In the book I describe mastery as three strands woven together: technique, ease and soul. When “perfect” only means the absence of mistakes, you miss the larger perfection that becomes possible once ease and soul are part of the picture. Everyone intuits this when they’re listening to someone else. In the moment of pressure, with your own red light on, the mind drops everything except the notes.

The usual remedies for red light fever leave that definition untouched. People try harder. They do take after take until they’re too tired to be nervous, and sometimes that works, because exhaustion lowers the volume on everything, including the music.

Producers tell you to take a walk or a break, and that’s very good advice that helps, but only for a while, since it doesn’t reach the belief or change what you’re paying attention to when you come back. Some people take beta blockers. A lot of people simply beat themselves up, which hands the critic another shift. Pretending you aren’t being recorded has limited value too, because part of you knows perfectly well the light is on.

What changed things for Ananda was much simpler, and I’d almost call it obvious if it hadn’t taken us several tame takes to find it. We stopped and talked about it. We made room for our feelings about recording and got them out on the table, and naming the pressure, and treating it as normal, took a good deal of it off. Then we talked about the effect we wanted our music to have on the people who would hear it. The next few takes were livelier, and a lot more fun.

That second conversation is the part you can take into your own recording, even with nobody else in the room. It goes back to first principles. What do you hope this recording will do for the person who hears it? What impact do you want it to have? What’s important to you about it? When I ask students these questions, they almost always answer with something that moves them: they want to make someone feel something, or to have fun, or to share a piece of music they love. Once you have your own answer, ask what frame of mind fits it, and choose a belief to play from. A few that have worked for many of my students: I’m at ease with myself, and I have plenty of time. Things go better when I listen to myself deeply. What my audience really wants from me is my heart and soul, and that can happen even when I make mistakes. The recording will go better when I’m at ease with myself. Use one of those, or write the sentence that’s true for you.

Here is a way to test it this week. Pick a short phrase you know well. Play it once with nothing recording, and rate the tension in your body from zero to ten.

Then press record on your phone, decide you’re going to send the recording to someone whose opinion matters to you, play it again, and rate it again. Notice what you were thinking. Before a third take, ask yourself what you want the recording to do for that person, choose your belief, press record, and rate it one last time.

If your third number comes down, notice that you didn’t touch your technique to get there. If it doesn’t move, nothing has gone wrong. It means a different tool fits you better, a pause, or a shift in where your attention rests, and working out which one is half of what a teacher is for. Either way, listen to the third take before you listen to the second, and see whether you can hear the person in it.

Joseph Arnold
Violinist, Alexander Technique teacher, and author of Soulforce
SoulforceArts.com

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