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Having had experience as the auditioner and the judge, I have two thoughts:

1)When you are playing, especially under that pressure, you often get a distorted view of how well you play. When playing in an audition, we often magnify our mistakes to ourselves.

2)You have no way of knowing how your competition played.

TubaRay wrote:When you are playing, especially under that pressure, you often get a distorted view of how well you play. When playing in an audition, we often magnify our mistakes to ourselves.

I agree completely. It's easy to miss the forest for the trees. The performer hears and remembers that cracked note. The audion committtee hears that big, full tone.

And depending on what it was for, the auditioners MAY not know much about tuba... I know that's pretty unlikely, but there are people like my band directors who can't tell an Arnold Jacobs from their own.... ah, nevermind.

TUBACHRIS85 wrote:But the thing is, I feel like I dont deserve it after how my audition went. Has anyone ever felt this way before?

I would hazard that anyone with a decent ear has felt this way at one time or another. The real issue now is why do you question it? One assumes you gave it your best shot. You don't know what the committee had for lunch, how the other people sounded, any number of variables. The only outstanding question is: will you change your approach based on your experience?

Mark wrote:I agree completely. It's easy to miss the forest for the trees. The performer hears and remembers that cracked note. The audion committtee hears that big, full tone.

Or, more likely, we remember the thin tone and the audition committee remembers the musical phrasing, clarity of concept, and powerful emotional content.

At the highest levels, it requires both technical perfection and extreme musicianship, but at lower levels the musicianship is more apt to rule the day as long as the technical aspects were adequate. And musicianship is usually what is lacking.

Rick "who can hear it but not do it" Denney

Paul M wrote:I had always had great auditions but never made it, but then my senior year I screwed up everything imaginable and got in, even made first chair. Go figure.

I figure your ear was getting better, too!

Paul M wrote:I had always had great auditions but never made it, but then my senior year I screwed up everything imaginable and got in, even made first chair. Go figure.

This may be because a lot of schools use auditions just as a formality, in part to give you experience auditioning. A lot of schools know before the auditions begin who is going where. The more senior you are, the better position you receive, regardless of the success of the audition (and often regardless of skill, talent, musicianship, etc). It's called politics.

However, I have heard that schools in the USA are much more competitive than those in Canada. I'm not making a statement "across the board."

Note: I'm not trying to make any conclusions in regards to your specific situation...

Sounds like you did "fairly well", just like you thought you would do.