 Wow, what's up everybody once again is Brandon Shawn and today I got another video for the live performance series and today we're coming with things you can do to improve a live performance experience. Number one I'm talking about hype men. Now there's two ways that hype men are best used in my mind and that is not just to have a whole bunch of people on stage who aren't really doing nothing hanging out for no reason. That doesn't really improve your performance experience in a lot of cases. So for the first one consider this instead of having 10 people on stage with you that aren't really truly contributing to your experience. Put those 10 people in the crowd and have them people turn up to your music. They should know the words. They should be making you seem like a superstar because what that's going to do is make the people around them say yo this person got fans. This person is really doing something. It's no different than how you might know a song and might think it's okay but then you might go to a club or a party and you see people just really excited and ecstatic about the song and then it helps you appreciate the song more because you have an experience attached to the song. Put them folks in the crowd and have them exude an infectious energy so the rest of the audience can feel your vibe too and they don't even need to all be in the front. Let them be scattered throughout the audience. Now the second way to use hype men is if they're going to be on stage with you let them contribute to the show in some form of fashion. Whether these people are dancers of some kind or you guys stop and do a little skit or y'all are just playful in y'all's interactions. Somebody who does this very well is Bruno Mars. Check out the video I did on Bruno Mars. He does that pretty much better than anybody today where people would oftentimes leave his concerts and actually recognize certain people from his bands and things that they've said and done. So that's one A and one B. Now let's skip to number two. Crowd interaction. There's a lot of different ways this could play out but I'm going to do two quick cheap versions just for the sake of this video. One of them is having some form of toys or props when we're talking about throwing out stuff to the crowd for them to play with like the beach balls. Smoke machines that's all the simple stuff but it's still actually effective and makes your show feel more professional and a better experience overall. You can even have some swimming tool type props or some blow-up toys that aren't beach balls. It can be a shark or a blow-up doll depending on you know what kind of crowds you got going on. And this is when we get into a second type of crowd interaction which is crowd participation. Now this could be multiple things. I mentioned in one of my other videos on how I had an artist who was coming out with a video and there were going to be two types of girls a crazy ex-girlfriend and a current girlfriend and he had the audience go to his Instagram page and guess which picture was the crazy ex and the new girl. You could do things like have contests between the audience members like hey who's the best dancer in here bring them up have two dance and if they don't suck a lot of times the audience gets hyped and they love to vote on who's better and then if they do suck the audience loves to laugh. It's a win-win for you. You ever been a church and a pastor said hey shake your neighbor's hand or give somebody a hug or say something to your neighbor take that line of thought and think is there any kind of scenario that could work for your type of audience and your type of energy at your show. Because the more camaraderie there is amongst the audience the better it is for you and then you create additional energy and additional memories when people can leave and say they met somebody at the show that they might actually be connected with long after that. You can have some form of scavenger hunt you can invite somebody up to sing your hook or sing back and forth with you. There's so many different ways that you could work that in and it creates an interesting unexpected experience for the audience. And lastly we talk about creating familiarity by doing covers. Now a lot of times when people think about doing covers they think about a singer because they're like yo I can just sing this person's music and then connect with people that way which is great. But for rappers that doesn't really work out a lot of times but what you can simply do is play a song that you love growing up make that connection. I've seen plenty of times whether it's just in a club and has nothing to do with somebody's performance or it's been a few artist performances where they say hey man you remember this song coming up. It used to make me blink back in the day those were the good old days. Try to make people guess what the song is they play it and then the crowd goes crazy because it's one of those songs that everybody can relate to in that situation. And if you have a rap-idy rap type show in the audience who loves lyrical performances then you can play somebody's instrumental and do your own freestyle just make sure the music is low enough where people can actually understand your verses and your rapping clear enough because it's annoying going to a show when people are rapping and you can't understand their lyrics because the music is too loud and then you don't know the song so you really can't get into experience. It just makes up two of these in one if you have a break between your songs where you bring in some older song that other people love or it doesn't even have to be old it could be new. And when you bring up that popular song you ask somebody else from the audience to come up and sing that song. A lot of times there's going to be at least one person who's brave enough and actually has the talent. Now when you add things like this in you need to be somebody who's good at controlling the stage that's why it's important to realize great performances and great shows don't come from just performing one time and thinking you're going to be better than everybody else. And as always I would love to know what you guys think so put it in the comments below if you have any other additional ideas or things that you've tried out or think other people should try out to make their performance better. 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