General Information
Each year, at the beginning of the Fall semester at GVSU, we hold auditions to determine the new members of our group. This year (2016) our auditions will be held in Room 0072 in the lower-level of the Kirkhof Center on September 9th and 10th. Callbacks will be held on the 11th.
For your audition, we will ask you to sing a minute or so of a song of your choice. Pick whatever you think you sound best on, and usually a verse and a chorus of the song is the right amount of time. The style of music you sing doesn’t matter too much. We just want to hear you at your best! Pop, jazz, show tunes, folk music – we’ve heard it all!
We recommend showing up at least 10 minutes early, so you have time to fill out our “get to know you” form and dance around, meditate, or whatever you do to fight the nerves. We will have a table set up outside the room with a friendly person to walk you through the process, and give you a hug if you need one.
It’s always good to bring some water to your audition. You can bring sheet music or your lyrics, but we strongly recommend you have your music memorized. No need to bring a pitch pipe! We can play you a starting pitch if needed. Just bring all of your fun self, and leave the nerves at home! We all want you to do really well, and are rooting for you from the second you walk in the door! The audition will only last 10 minutes, and we hope you have fun!
After you sing for us, we’ll have you do a simple range test to see how high and low you can sing. Sometimes you sing, and we feel like we’ve got what we need. Other times, we want to hear a little bit more. This is no indication of whether or not you are awesome! So whether or not we do the following things shouldn’t discourage you. We just want to get the information we need to make the best decision possible.
Next we do a short segment of tonal memory but it’s not too bad, we promise. You’ll hear a melody on the piano or as a recording, and you try your best to sing it back to us. We also might give you a small, four bar sight singing exercise to determine your ability to read music. But don’t worry–reading music is not a requirement to be in the group.
We will give you a phone call the same day that you audition to let you know the results. It could potentially be pretty late at night because we have lots of auditions, but we will leave a voicemail if you don’t pick up. If we’d like to hear more from you, we will set up a call back audition for Sunday, September 11th.