Auditions

Hi all,

Question about those of you who audition for band members: how many people do you typically search through before you make your choice?

When I'm looking for someone, I try to listen to something the person has done beforehand to get a grasp on skills and style and talk on the phone quite a bit to see if personalities and goals mesh. Assuming all is kosher, then we meet up to jam. If mutual good vibes continue, we move forward. Otherwise, we part ways. Very simple. In general, I've been able to find people without having to "audition" more than 3 or 4 people.

I'm looking to join another band in addition to my current one (which just rehearses one night per week, and I'm looking to do more stuff). I have found that a lot of people are afficionados of cattle calls ... you know, get 100 people or so over the course of a few weeks or months before whittling it down to 1 or 2 finalists a la American Idol. I decline to attend these b/c I personally think they're pretty arbitrary ... plus the fact that I believe that people should be treated like people, not like inanimate resources, which is pretty much an inevitable consequence of weeding through 100+ hopefuls.

Probably my opinions on this are shaped from my past experiences in stage theatre, where smaller invitation-only auditions often had a better ROI (and were for more upscale productions) than come-one-come-all cattle calls. In my community, I'd say about half of the people I meet construct auditions the way I do, and the other half do it the other way. Wondering what a larger sample size will reveal about a trend ...

This is exactly the way we do it. Cattle calls are for cattle.

It also helps to weed out the idiots, slackers, and junkies before they even come over to your house and start eyeballing your valuables.

However, in our search for a drummer, we're on our sixth person. Just haven't managed to find the right one yet.

I like to audition them before they know they're being auditioned. If they're playing with someone, I go see them live. I ask around and make phone calls to people who have worked with them before. After I determine I like what they do and that they're not completely nuts, I approach them about working with me. If they express interest, I give them a couple of my CDs to learn a few songs, and then we rehearse. I couldn't care less how they jam; I want to hear how they're going to be doing my songs. I let them know what they are getting themselves into if they work with my band concerning travel, pay, conflict resolution with other band members, etc etc then thank them for coming in and I tell them I'll let them know, even if I've decided they have the gig. I don't like to do this process with more than two people at a time. Seems to work well enough for me.