Three Ways Audition Preparation Goes Wrong (And How to Prepare Instead)
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Jul 15, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: 45 minutes ago
* Where I describe clients in my blog posts, I've changed names, instruments, and other identifying details to protect their privacy. Sometimes I'm describing one person, sometimes a pattern I've seen across several. The essence of the experience and what we worked on together remain true.
Most musicians preparing for an orchestra audition are not under-working.
If anything, the opposite: They are practising hard, putting in the hours, doing what they have always been told to do... and still arriving in the audition room feeling like the playing that comes out is a thinner version of what they are capable of.
When that happens, the usual conclusion is I need to practise more. Or I need to be more disciplined about the technical detail. And so the next audition gets the same preparation as the last one, just more of it.
But the problem is rarely the amount of work. It is usually the shape of it.
Over years of coaching musicians through auditions, I have watched the same three preparation mistakes come up again and again — and none of them are about laziness or lack of skill. They are about preparing thoroughly for one part of the audition while leaving the rest of it untouched.
I will walk through all three, using one musician's preparation to show how they connect. He was a woodwind player getting ready for an orchestral audition, and over the course of our work the shift he made was not about practising more. It was about preparing differently.
Mistake One: Preparing the Technique and Forgetting the Music
This is the easiest one to fall into, because it does not feel like a mistake. It feels like being diligent.
When an audition is coming, the instinct is to prove your competence — look how technically excellent I am — so you drill. Notes, rhythms, intonation, the awkward shifts, the exposed entries... you play the difficult bars again and again until they are clean.
All of which is necessary, of course. This is not the problem.
The problem is what gets crowded out. Spend enough weeks treating a piece as a series of technical problems to be solved, and the playing slowly becomes a technical solution. Accurate, controlled, and somehow inert. You walk into the room able to execute the music and no longer quite able to make it. And an audition panel, sitting through candidate after candidate, is not only listening for who made the fewest errors. They are listening for someone who sounds like a musician they would want next to them for the next twenty years.
The woodwind player I mentioned had this exact pattern. His technical preparation was genuinely excellent. But under pressure his playing tended to narrow into something careful and monitored — he was, in his own way, checking his playing rather than making music with it.
So a good deal of our work was about giving him a clearer sense of the performer he actually wanted to be in the room: Someone emotive and fluid, listening and shaping, rather than someone inspecting each note as it went past.
That distinction became something he could return to. When he noticed himself slipping into over-monitoring during preparation (and the final stressed weeks before an audition are exactly when that creeps back in), it was a signal to come back to that other version of himself.
If you want to test where you are on this one, record yourself and listen back with a single question: Are you getting the notes out perfectly, or are you saying something?
Technical practice has to happen, yes... but somewhere in your preparation, the music itself has to be the point again too.
Mistake Two: Preparing Without a Real Plan
The second mistake is subtler, because it often hides underneath a lot of visible effort.
You can practise hard for weeks and still not have a plan. Practice and a plan are not the same thing. A plan is knowing what this week is for, what you are deliberately leaving until later, and how the shape of the work changes as the audition gets closer.
Without that, preparation tends to drift into one of two failure modes: Either practising the same things on repeat because they are familiar, or a rising panic as the date approaches and everything still feels unfinished.
A workable plan has a shape. The early weeks can carry the heavier technical work. As the audition gets closer, the centre of gravity shifts: Run-throughs become the main event, with only short, targeted polishing afterwards if something genuinely needs it. In the final stretch the principle becomes less is more — staying connected to your playing rather than adding to it. And crucially, every run-through is treated as information, not as a verdict. You do the run, you take a break, you decide from what you heard what actually needs attention, and then you work on that. This way, practice stops being a test you pass or fail. Every run-through is simply data you use to optimise for the next time.
There is also a part of the planning phase that has nothing to do with the instrument, and it is not optional: Sleep, meals, time away from playing, light movement. Recovery is part of the preparation, it's not just a reward for surviving it. Particularly around travel and busy schedules, which orchestral auditions almost always involve.
When the woodwind player and I first spoke, the thing he raised was precisely this. He had a heavy programme in the final week, some travel, and limited practice time outside rehearsals — and he had not worked out how to handle it. We built that final stretch into an actual plan. What he said afterwards is the reason this mistake matters more than it looks: Following a plan, he told me, gave him relief — rather than worrying that he was making it up as he went, and that whatever he had improvised was not good enough.
That is the part most musicians miss. A real plan does not only organise the work, but it also removes a particular kind of background anxiety (am I even doing this right??) that otherwise follows you all the way into the room.
(When you cannot have the instrument in your hands, by the way, mental rehearsal genuinely fills the gap. I have written about that separately in Mental Rehearsal for Musicians.)
Mistake Three: Preparing in Calm and Performing in Pressure
The third mistake is the one with the widest gap between how musicians prepare and what they are actually preparing for.
Almost all practice happens in calm, controlled, private conditions. The practice room is safe. Nobody is watching, nothing is at stake, and you can stop and fix things whenever you like. Then the audition arrives... and it is none of those things. If the first time you encounter audition-level nerves is in the audition itself, you are meeting a major variable for the very first time at the worst possible moment.
This is why playing a piece perfectly at home is no guarantee. You have built the skill under one set of conditions and you are being asked to deliver it under another. The skill is real, no doubt about it, but the conditions are not the ones you trained in.
(I have written more about that gap in Why Can't I Perform Like I Practice?)
The fix is to make some of your preparation resemble the thing you are preparing for (it's not going to be the exact same experience, and that's okay). Mock auditions — playing your programme start to finish for friends, family, a teacher, or even just a camera. The aim is to practise playing while activated, so that the racing heart and the slightly unreliable hands are familiar rather than alarming when they show up for real.
You can even approximate the physical side deliberately: A quick burst of something physical to get your heart rate up before you start, so you are used to playing from that state.
This was the third strand of the woodwind player's preparation. Alongside the musical work and the plan, we built in practice that put him under something closer to real conditions — so that nerves became part of what he had prepared for, rather than the one thing he had not.
Auditions still feel like auditions... but there is a considerable difference between feeling nervous and being surprised by feeling nervous.
Preparing for the Whole Audition, Not Just Part of It
Look at the three together and the through-line is clear enough.
Most audition preparation is thorough about the notes and silent about everything else — the music itself, the structure of the work, and the conditions you will actually play in. Luckily, none of those gaps require more hours. They just require the hours you are already putting in to be pointed at the whole audition rather than a quarter of it.
In the end, the woodwind player did not out-practise his nerves or drill his way to a result... but he prepared the music and not just the mechanics, built a plan he could trust, and rehearsed under conditions that resembled the real thing.
If that is the kind of preparation you want, that is the work I do with musicians in private coaching. We look at how these patterns show up in your specific preparation, and build an approach that has you ready for the whole audition rather than a quarter of it — so the way you show up on the day actually matches your true level.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
