Do You Cringey-Face? - Making Weird Faces While Playing Music

In a recent video uploaded to YouTube (unfortunately now removed) featuring the unboxing of a brand new Handpan, the YouTuber explained that, “...I'm only gonna show my hands, don’t like cringey face...”. Highlighting a common problem likely suffered by many Handpan’ers (including us) - the urge to distort one's face into all manner of unusual and not normally exhibited facial-gymnastics, and expressions, while playing Handpan. Or as the aforementioned YouTuber put it more simply, “...that cringey face…”.

And it certainly isn’t a phenomenon associated only with the Handpan. Whether you play the piano, the violin, or perhaps most frequently commented upon, the guitar, cringe-face appears to be the curse of musicians across all musical-borders. Affecting some more than others. And while we wouldn't be cruel enough to compile our own compilation of cringey-faced Handpan’ers, you can get the general idea from the compilation below of guitarists showing off their best “guitar faces”.



Perhaps this is the real reason that so many Handpan musicians only show videos of their hands flying across the surface of their instruments.  Could the likes of Adrian J Portia be pulling mad-grimaces just out of camera view?

And while we stated above that we would never be cruel enough to highlight any specific examples of cringey-face within the Handpan community (psyke), hopefully Ravid Goldschmidt won't mind too much, if in exchange for a little extra free advertising (GO BUY AN OVAL!) we share the following video - which is not only one of our favourite Hang performances ever, but also goes some way to proving the correlation between the beauty of any particular piece, and the near-ecstatic facial expressions sometimes exhibited by the player(s) performing it...



How to Stop Cringey-Face

Should you be self-conscious as to your cringey-face when performing - borrowing from a suggestion on a similar post found over at Violinist.com. practising and performing in front of a mirror is said to help.  Allowing you not only to study and perhaps learn to control the offending facial expressions.  But it is also said to relieve some of the inner-tensions caused by over-concentration; that are thought to lead to the exhibiting of funny-faces in the first place.

Alternatively, you may well be better off embracing and learning to love your oft-wild facial-manifestations, agonised snarls, wide-eyed orgasmic joy, and all.  Taking comfort in the fact that as long as those listening to your performance aren't making cringey-faces of their own - then things could definitely be worse.

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