There are so many benefits to online piano lessons with Musiah but one you may not have thought of is that Musiah is great for helping students to overcome stage fright and performance anxiety.
At the end of each of the 13 levels of the Musiah piano course, there is a performance challenge designed to teach students to become accustomed to preparing for piano performances, piano exams, and other similar deadlines as well actually playing piano on stage in front of an audience and managing issues which every performer experiences to some extent such as performance anxiety, a.k.a. nerves or stage fright.
As one Musiah student recently wrote: “I'd been dreading the performance and feel much more comfortable now about continuing the course [knowing that there are more piano performance challenges to come].”
Musiah’s piano performance challenges are much like flight simulator training for pilots. Pilots spend countless hours over the course of their career preparing for real life emergencies by spending lots of time in a virtual environment known as flight simulator. In the simulator, they can crash the plane as often as they like and nobody dies, there are no multi-million dollar planes that need to be replaced. It is simply training of the purest kind.
Similarly, Musiah’s piano performance challenges prepare the student for the real life challenge of playing piano or keyboard on stage in front of a live audience. The great thing about the Musiah piano performance challenges is that you can fail as many times as you like without suffering any real-life consequences such as embarrassment, shame and self-doubt — all of which can be very damaging particularly to young piano and keyboard students in a more traditional piano learning scenario where students are sometimes required to play piano on stage — and let’s face it, in real life, things do not always go as planned.
By contrast, Musiah piano lessons remove the pressure of performing and allow the student to go through the experience as many times as is required until the student is comfortable enough to maintain control over their thoughts and nerves throughout the performance.
What actually happens in a Musiah piano performance challenge is: The student has to play three piano pieces back to back from the level they have just completed in time with a full backing track in front of a “live” virtual audience. If the student plays their pieces well enough to pass the piano performance challenge, the audience (who move restlessly throughout the performance) will applaud, and the student will receive the next piece of the clavitrisk (a special key made of thirteen separate pieces that the student must collect to complete the Musiah piano course), and the student is also awarded a higher rank, the ultimate rank being that of Musiah.
However if the student fails, the audience will boo and throw fruit at the student’s avatar. Then the student must re-attempt the performance challenge before they can proceed to the next level.
In the early part of the Musiah course, the performance venues are low level venues on different planets such as school halls and hotel foyers, but by the end of the course, the student will be performing in front of vast audiences at rock concerts, music award ceremonies, and much more.*.
*These various venues are are part of The Musiah Story mode (an optional setting) or alternatively, you can experience the performance challenges in 'pure' mode which does not have the story elements / various performance venues.
In either mode, the performance challenges help make learning to play piano or keyboard fun, as well as providing a deeper level of training for piano and keyboard students.
I hope you found this information helpful.
If you would like to learn how to play the piano or keyboard, I warmly invite you to take our Online Piano Lessons 14 Day Free Trial.
Happy playing,
Brendan Hogan L.Mus.A, A.Mus.A.
Piano Teacher & Musiah Inventor
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