Training for a Marathon: Winning Your Voice Audition
You're standing in a room, getting ready to launch into a performance. Seems like a dream come true. But when it's an audition, the stakes are high and your anxiety is even higher.
Practice is always the key to calming those nerves. But what's the best way to practice? Soprano Anna Atkinson shares her preparation tips, whether online or in person. As a student in the Masters of Music in Opera and Voice program at McGill University's Schulich School of Music, Anna is a veteran of winning auditions.
What do I sing?
Check the audition requirements for each school (often four pieces and four languages). Choose a repertoire that you love to sing, but that shows off your vocal ability.
Follow their requirements, but make sure it’s your version of their requirements. I would choose pieces that you love singing, but also pieces that show off what you can do.’
What is the best way to practice?
Begin with your established warm-up routine.
Start slowly. Start early. Take plenty of time to learn the pieces well before audition season begins.
When you get closer to the audition, always start with your first piece. To avoid exhaustion, randomly pick a different piece from your list each day rather than running through the pieces in the same order.
Can you over practice?
An emphatic, “Yes!” Build up your stamina well before audition season and learn to trust your body. If you are tired and not supporting your breath well, you can develop fatigue and even nodes.
It’s like training for an Olympic race or a marathon, you build it up and work really hard, and then a week before your actual race you start to back off so your body has recovery and rest time so you can be in peak performance ability for your audition.
Is practicing for an online audition different from an in-person audition?
Not necessarily. Recording yourself early and often helps prepare you for both! Make it count: Put on a nice outfit and record yourself every time you practice so it becomes second nature. Then watch yourself.
See what you’re doing with your hands, or maybe you’re doing something funky with your eyebrows, or you look angry and you were trying to look like you’re in love. All of those things can happen and it gets really frustrating if you put it off to the week before [your audition] and you’re just making recording after recording, and you start to lose your mind a little bit!
How does an online audition work?
Invest in a high-quality microphone specifically for singing (Shure makes a microphone that plugs into your iPhone).
Record yourself with the accompaniment track in headphones and then combine the two tracks on your computer.
Hear more from Anna Atkinson (@anna_atkinson96) on her podcast “Are We All Met”.
There’s a lot more to learn! Get in touch with Best Fit Education.