5 ways to improve your bands stage presence at live gigs

You are the performer, so naturally, the audience will be looking at you. Once on a stage, you are there to entertain your audience, so it’s essential to provide them with something interesting to gain attention. It does not have to be an insane outfit, like KISS or Prince. However, wear something intriguing, good-looking, or even amusing simply as long as the clothing fit your persona and have been cleaned recently.

Buy a band backdrop.

Band branding is essential for any band or performer to get their brand in front of an audience. Branding your band with an eye-catching backdrop lets viewers recognise you. They are more likely to recognise the logo on other mediums, whether social media or advertised on a fly poster. Like any form or brand identity, using the same logo and theme on all forms of advertising helps to unify your emblem, making you easily recognisable. 

Creating a brand for your band

Logos are extremely important to any branding project. Create a design that is unique and relevant to your band. Please keep it simple. The best band logos and branding are always on point and simplistic. When you think of very famous bands, you will have a clear vision of how the logo appears, meaning your brain is making a visual connection between the music and the logo. The more simple the design, the more recognisable it will be across all mediums, including fly posters, billboard and flyers. Use colours that are contrasting to create a brand that stands out from the rest. Colours are very important. Please take a look at another blog we have written which is a quiz. The quiz shows how from memory, we can remember colours from well-known brands.

What clothing would suit my band?

The cover of the book does matter from a first impressions standpoint. Suppose you think of the spice girls that usually comes into your head; you’ll probably think Geri Halliweelll with the iconic Union jack Dress from 1997. Style is everything; how you look is how the world will perceive you. Some famous performers even have their own unique clothing ranges that they sell to the public and wear on stage. Wear clothing which compliments your music. We all have our styles, so make sure that your clothing suits your personality and your band’s image.

Body language on stage

All bands have a different style and usually have different body language. Being a successful artist means you need to work on your performance. All the greats use movement to create a buzz in the room. When I mean movement, there are extremes to the spectrum, like Mick Jagger creates energy skipping around the stage, whilst Liam Gallagher goes for the cooler look, hands behind his back neck craning forward into the microphone. Whichever your chosen style, you need to work on the visual aspect of the performance as the way something looks is just as important as how it sounds. Can you imagine watching an Oasis gig and seeing Liam G skipping around the stage? Don’t think so, so work on the body language and the performance.

Command your audience and get them to interact

A good gig is down to the performance. When you go to watch a famous band or solo artist, you feel part of the show. Feeling part of something is what makes live music so engaging. Interacting with your audience is very important in creating a relationship with your audience. Make eye contact with people in the audience. Do you have a memory of a gig that wasn’t as good as you expected? Can you remember how the performers interact with the crowd? Was it the music, or was it the performance? The visual is equally as important as the audio; otherwise, we would be at home listening to our favourite artists through earphones. Study famous entertainers on Youtube and watch how they move and interact with the crowd. Try to emulate their charm and stage presence and create a style that makes you and your band as individual as your music.