Auditions

[Scott Swartz]

I had an audition for a short series of CD Release Show dates in my region for a singer out of Nashville, the "hire a band by region" type deal.

The 3 audition tunes were new country-ish with not a ton of steel, but they are catchy.

My plan going in was figure out the steel parts (duh), some of the fiddle parts on steel, some of the guitar stuff on steel, some steel parts that weren't on the record, and also some B3 sounding parts (ala the recent B3 thread here in Steel Players).

I would be interested to hear how others approach these situations.


Some other observations from the evening....

- I knew the tunes and licks solidly without charts, and showed up with ample time to setup. I could tell from the comments this was a rarity, isn't that Rules 1 and 2 for auditions? WTF?

- The rhythym section they had matched me with didn't bother to show up. Once again WTF? This actually worked to my advantage since I got to play along with the recording rather than unknown hacks for my audition.

-They flipped out over the B3 simulation. It appears (based on conversation, but waiting for final confirmation via email, you never know what could be going on in the background) I will be hired over a keyboard player because of the ground I can cover between steel, sorta B3, and being able to double on guitar.

-The singer is early 20s and had never played with a steel, but was fascinated by it.

[mtulbert]

Scott,

Sounds like you did it all correctly. When I auditioned for the band that I am currently playing in, I did basically the same thing that you did. I learned the material!! And showed up on time.

One thing that helped me also was after the formal "audition" we kinda had a jam session and I jumped in and played on all the jam songs even though some of them actually had no steel at all.

Hope you get the gig; you deserve it.

Regards,