Five tips for music auditions

By Rebecca Fry

I have had much experience being involved in music auditions, music performances, solos, and much more. My love for music has made me go and search for how I can learn of how I can grow to the extent that I could become sufficient in my own eyes. The ways I have found to be most helpful in growing for my love of music are these five steps:

Keep an agenda, or a daily planner.
When keeping an agenda, you become more organized and can keep your work in order so you can schedule what time you are able to practice for your auditions. It also helps when knowing that you have to keep your school work up as well because you need to keep you need to stay eligible in order to be able to do extracurricular activities such as this.

Watch and listen to the pros.
When practicing for an audition or a show, you have to be physically and mentally prepared. The first way to go about that, is to watch the professionals do the same thing that you are attempting to do and watch how they go about doing it. Many times, you will see that they perform it in a totally different way that you were thinking, but they still bring about effect results.

Seek help.
There are many other sources than watching the professionals do the work, because sometimes, you don’t know how they went about doing what they did to make it sound or look amazing. Go to a teacher within your high school that can show you a how-to on what you’re looking to accomplish. Practicing one on one with them could physically prepare your performance.

Practice and review by yourself until comfortable.
After going through the first three steps, you can then practice by yourself over and over and over again until you feel sufficient enough to perform it in front of that teacher that helped you. You can then let him/ her critique you and take that into consideration the next time you practice.

Go back, and practice with the backgrounds and notes. Then sing a capella.
When finishing the critique from your teacher, go back and include those edits that they told you about. Practice that until sufficient, then you are ready to perform!