Arts & Entertainment, Music
Captivating An Audience
Lesson time 10:20 min
Capture your audience's heart. Follow Usher as he shares his best tips on how to read a room, trust your instincts, and win over the crowd. He also breaks down one of the hardest performances of his life.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Reading the room • Trusting your instincts • Listening to the moment
Preview
It's all about your connection to the song, to the person, to the people, to the group, the audience that you're singing to. It's not ways in what you say. It's more in what you do. What you're doing here, who you are here. They may not know who you are. They may not necessarily like the song that you're singing, but there has to be something that connects them to you. It's great to have success. It's great to have sold out shows to be able to perform to audiences all over the world. But no matter rather it's a small room or a massive stadium, I feel connected to my fans. I feel their dedication and they feel my dedication. That's my goal. [MUSIC PLAYING] Being able to read the room is one of the things that I think makes you a great performer. But when I'm performing, even in front of thousands and thousands of people, I'm looking in the audience, making sure that the connection is real. I'm looking in their faces. I'm singing the song, covering the dance. If I realize that they need something more than just the dance, I'll step out from what I'm doing and I'll go down and I'll perform the lyric. It takes my performance to another level when I'm able to read to room properly, because I know what they're expecting, I have an idea of what I should use in that moment. Like a politician, right? So a politician walks around a room. He gets to know people. He talks to people. He asks questions. He greets them. He talks to them. He gets to see what's on their mind. And then later on, when he does his speech, he then brings some of what he picked up along the way into his speech to personalize it, because you're performing to a specific person in the audience. You know what they like based off of who you know they are. If they're conservative, if they are aggressive, if they're looking for love, if they're there because they just want to get away, having a hard time in a relationship, so you know that this song is about a relationship, a breakup. You now, you look over at them and you make that connection, because you've now read the room properly. You're performing for an audience that you know has been drinking. And you know that they want to have a great time. So then you obviously know that you have to make a deeper connection with them. Maybe you have them clap. Maybe you bring them into the performance because you know that they're just there to have a good time. Maybe they're not listening to each and every part of what you're performing. They're not critiquing your performance in that way. They just want to have a great time. So you then put your energy outward into the audience. There's an acoustic audience, where it's a very private setting. There's not a lot of equipment. It's just a very intimate room and an opportunity to make your performance a lot more heartfelt and direct to that ...
About the Instructor
Usher, winner of 8 Grammy Awards, reveals the technical skills, career lessons and breakthrough advice that he has used to captivate audiences for over 25 years. For the first time ever, learn how Usher approaches performance and wins over audiences from the studio to the stage. There has never been a class like this before.
Featured MasterClass Instructor
Usher
In his first ever online class, Usher teaches you his personal techniques to captivate audiences across 16 video lessons.
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