My Cirque Du Soleil Audition:
Part 2

now that you’ve got the audition, here’s how you screw it all up…

Well, I got my official Cirque Du Soleil invitation and now all I have to do is schedule the appointment time.  I figured I’d better schedule a late audition because I have trouble sleeping.  I knew that I would have trouble sleeping that night so I figured I’d better plan to get as much sleep as I can so I can wake up, get some practice in, and then bang out the audition.  With that in mind, I scheduled a 6pm audition.  And that was the first mistake I made in all this.

The audition was a couple of months down the line so I had plenty of time to practice.  I got all kinds of new gear, strings, and assortments to help me along the way; I even bought an extra E-flat bass so I wouldn’t have to retune on one song.  I practiced all day, every day, to the point where my fingers were in pain.  I practiced so much that the skin beneath my fingernails had begun to bleed a bit.  But you gotta push through.  This was my second mistake.

The more I practiced and the more time I had, I decided that I was going to do something special.  And thus began the path to my third and biggest mistake.

I wasn’t quite sure what to bring with me to the audition.  I knew it was going to be at a local studio but I didn’t know if they wanted me to bring my rig so they could hear my sound I usually use, or if I was just going to record direct and leave it up to the sound engineer.  I couldn’t find any info online to help me with this question. 

So I decided to over prepare for this.  I was going to bring my Line 6 XT in case they wanted me to go direct; if they wanted me to use a cab I would have that, too.  But then I got to thinking:   They probably want me to be able to set up as quickly as I can.  I better come up with a way to quickly be able to set up; I wanted to be able to just roll in and go.

So I constructed my cab and rack mount together, strapped them to a dolly, and pre-wired everything.  Then, all I would have to do is roll in, plug in, and go.  Easy.  If they wanted me to go direct it would be the same thing: put down the Line 6, plug in, and go.

But then I thought, how cool would it be if I played drums AND bass at the same time. 

In a few of the videos I made I played a variety of instruments.  In one video “Saltimbanco” I’d start off playing bass but when the song kicked in I was playing all the instruments.  In one video when the bass wasn’t playing I would do some percussion parts on my electronic drum pads.  I thought it looked cool and would separate me from other people applying.

Well, I wanted to bring this into the live audition.  I bought some material and constructed an electronic drum pad rack on top of my bass cab.  All of it would be prewired and routed through my Line 6.  The idea was then when the bass wasn’t playing I would band away additional drum parts with my hands.  So now my rig consisted of a 4×10 Hartke cab, with a rackmount of junk on top of that, then an electronic drum pad setup screwed in to that, and all strapped together to a dolly.

In all honesty, it’s not a bad setup.  I mean, theoretically speaking I could use this cab for any gig for a super easy setup time.  The whole thing was made to be able to lean in to the back of my SUV in one piece.  Once it’s out you can roll it to wherever, plug it in, and go.  Easy as can be.

Alright, I got my rig set up so that I can quickly wire up directly or use an amp.  I got my audition scheduled.  What else can I do to separate myself?

I know!  How about make a DVD of all the video footage PLUS a commentary track.

Okay, I know this sounds ridiculous but I actually did it. 

They requested that I bring several things with me to the audition.  They wanted photos, a resume, and a CD of the songs I’d be playing.  I decided that I was going to make a great looking portfolio that I could hand over to them. I took my own photos with my camcorder, photoshopped them to look pro, and had them printed up at a local CVS – nice glossy prints in different sizes.   I printed out the CV on some nice paper.  I then decided to include a DVD of all my video performances.

I used Sony DVD Architect to not only assemble all the videos together in one DVD but I also made cover art for it.  And, of course, I went further by adding a commentary track.  Because who doesn’t love a commentary track?  I actually recorded myself giving commentary to all the performances and I feel like a complete douche for doing that.  But hey, it was all in an effort to separate myself from everyone else and show that I was really putting forth the maximum amount of effort to get their attention.

I took all this material and bundled it together nicely in a portfolio.  That way, when I got to the audition I would just hand them over that portfolio and my rig would be ready to go in no time flat.

Let’s go ahead and skip to Austin.

It’s time for the audition.  I had to drive to Austin, TX from Denham Springs, LA – about a 400 mile drive.  It took me half a day to get there.  The first thing I did when I finally got into Austin was find the studio.  The last thing I wanted to do was head out for my audition and spend a lot of time getting lost and making U-turns.  After finding the studio and scoping out what was around it I knew it was time to find a hotel room for the night.  Little did I know that SXSW was actually something of a big deal.  I was not able to find a hotel room in the city.  I went from hotel to hotel and they were all booked up. I was starting to get a little worried.  Finally, I drove a few miles out of the city and found a decent hotel that had a room.  I didn’t care what the cost was I just needed to be as close as possible to the studio.

I got my room and loaded all my gear in.  I then immediately started practicing.   I practiced all the songs over and over until I had to go to bed.  I took a little sleeping pill, enjoyed some rest, and woke up the next morning and practiced some more.

The time had come.  So I left an hour early just to make sure that I didn’t run into any weird traffic problems. 

I ended up getting to the studio very early so I decided to go pay Starbucks a visit.  Strangely enough, I wasn’t nervous at all.  I knew the songs backwards and forward seeing as how I had played through them enough.  However, this was my first major audition so I could feel the anticipation starting to well up inside me.  I just knew I had it in the bag.  I was 100 percent confident.

This confidence would take a major dip, though, at Starbucks.  After I got my coffee and sat down to kill some time I started thinking about all the things that could happen. I started thinking about all the times I made little errors in playing and wondered if my nerves would kick into gear during the audition to mess me up.  It’s called performance anxiety and I had never felt it before.  It’s kind of how some guys can get when they have sex with a girl for the first time.  They get all scared that they won’t perform well or that something bad will happen. They end up losing their rod and coming too soon.  It’s all mental.  I had never run into anything like this anxiety before. I’m sitting there at Starbucks thinking about selling my house and moving to Vegas because I was 100 percent sure I would get the gig. But then little doubts started to creep into my head and I just started getting really nervous.

It sucked.  I’d never experienced anything like it before.  But I just told myself that I knew the songs and that it would go great.  However, other issues started popping up in my head.  Maybe the electronic drum pads were too much; maybe the rig was too much; maybe I’d overplay things. 

I was really psyching myself out.

The time had come for me to get out of Starbucks and head to the studio.  I got there a little early; early enough to get all my gear inside, scope the place out, and do a little warming up.

The studio was nice.  There was lots of pianos around and couches to sit on.   At that time there was a violin player in there with me. We were both waiting to be called on.  He was up first.  Someone came out, called him in, and he was off. 

In about 4 minutes he was done and out.  Wow.  Apparently if they didn’t like you they weren’t going to waste their time.

A guy came out and asked for the materials I brought with me. I handed them over and he went off to get things ready.  He came back and handed me my nice little portfolio.  He had taken out the items he intended to keep and gave me back the rest.  Hmm, I was a little disappointed cause I thought the portfolio was nice and wanted them to have it so it would look different on the stack of papers from everyone else.

They called me in to the studio and I brought in all my gear.  I had set up my guitars on a guitar stand already so all I had to do was wheel in my rig and bring in my stack of guitars.  It was a very fast setup.  However, they wanted me to go direct.  No problem, that’s why I brought my Line 6. 

I routed my electronic drum pads through my Line 6, plugged in, and I was ready to go.

There was a video camera there to tape the whole thing.  One guy was behind the camera and beside him were two other guys that had the sheet music in front of them.  They knew what they were doing for sure.  They started writing some stuff down and getting things in order.

I was a little surprised that they didn’t ask anything about me.  They didn’t really ask me my name or background.  It was just, ‘let’s get this thing going.’  They seemed like they were in a bit of a rush.  I started to think that scheduling my audition as the last audition of the day was a bad idea.  These guys were obviously ready to get the fuck out of there and move on.

Fuck, it was a bad vibe I was getting.  This, coupled with my mounting nerves, was not a good concoction.

I got my headphones on, got an initial ear mix, and told them what song I’d be starting on. 

And thus began my first couple of blunders.

The first song I wanted to do had me play one measure of bass and then take a rest, I would then add some drum patterns in to the rest, play another thing of bass, and then follow that up with some drums.  It did not go well. 

Before this went down I was playing along with the pre-recording to get my in-ear mix.  That was all going beautifully.  I was playing perfect.  But when the shit was going down for real I started to choke a bit.  The drum parts I was playing weren’t in the original mix of the song so as I was doing this I felt like I was adding too much and it wasn’t meshing well.  It also felt like it was too much for me to handle with the pressure of the moment.  Not only was I supposed to be playing the music as it was written but I added an extra element of pressure of playing drums as well.

It was god damn retarded and to this day I kick myself for ever coming up with it.

However, when I was done laying the drum parts and got down to just playing the bass, things were going fine. I actually played the first song very well, but only after that drum nonsense was over with.  When the second song came in I made a mistake.  I missed a popped note.  One of the reasons I missed that popped note was because my fingers and fingernails had become a bit bloody and sore.  I had practiced the pop/slap stuff so much that my fingers were raw.   After I missed that note I got really down on myself.  I wanted to play everything perfectly.  I always want to play everything perfectly.  I feel that if I don’t play it perfectly then someone else out there will probably have an angle of playing it better than me.  I don’t want any room for anyone to improve on my performance.  So when I missed that first note I knew I was done for.  And after that moment that was all I could think about.  I stopped imagining forward in the song; I stopped concentrating on the moment; I could only think of what a waste of time it all was because I missed that one god damn note. 

Because I had fixated on this one mistake another mistake followed.

After that song was done I made another critical error:  I acknowledged my mistakes in the song and said that I could play them perfectly.  What a douchebag moment for me.  I shouldn’t have said anything at all.  My music and my performance should speak for itself.  But I couldn’t let it go.

When all my songs were through I knew I didn’t get the part.  Why would they hire me if I couldn’t play it perfectly?  But it wasn’t the mistakes that got me a failing grade.  It was the fact that I dramatically overplayed everything.

When I was done the two main guys came out to talk to me.  They said that they thought I was a great bass player and very talented.   They then asked me if I could read music. I said that, yes, I could read music.  They then said that the songs were written a certain way for a reason and they needed to know that I could play what the composer wrote, the way it was written. For example, there were times where the bass was supposed to stop playing and leaving silences.  Instead, I took that opportunity to harmonize with the violin or do a bunch of unnecessary volume swells.  I filled in every gap with something extra and it turns out that that isn’t good.

See, I had assumed that they would want to see me overplay the songs to see what I was capable of.  Because, I thought, if I could play beyond what the song was doing then, of course, I would be able to play the song as it was written.  But I just wanted to show off, do extra stuff, and change things around.  It did not go as I thought.

I would later find out that when auditioning for Cirque Du Soleil they want you to play the songs exactly as they are written.  The composer wants to know that you can handle the material as written.  After that you are allowed leeway to change things around and make the song yours.  However, I came across as being musically illiterate and disrespectful of the songs.  Couple that with an audition performance that was less than stellar and it goes without saying that I did not get the gig.

It was a lesson well learned.

I drove back to my hotel room thinking about what I learned and just rolling the experience over and over in my head.  I realized my mistakes and I knew that if I got the chance to do it again I would do things differently. 

That was in May of 2011.

I remember that because a couple of months later I would be perusing through a local magazine to find that some Louisiana girl recently got a touring spot with an organization called “Cirque Dreams.”

Well, that’s interesting.  I didn’t know there were other cirque-style companies out there.  But of course there are.   Why wouldn’t there be?  Well, I’m just not in the field.  If you ask me about Metal labels I’ll tell you all you need to know.  But this whole cirque thing was new to me. 

So I did some research and sought out Cirque Dreams.  I did my whole gung-ho seeking out method of getting in touch with the right people and before you know it I was getting hooked up with yet another audition for a cirque-style company.

For several months I would share a back-and-forth email exchange with  Cirque Dreams’ music director until finally being afforded a chance to audition in person in December of ’11.

That audition went a lot better.  No, it wasn’t perfect.  But it was good.  It went so good that I was offered a job with them that very night.  I like to think that what I learned from my botched Cirque Du Soleil audition gave me the lessons I needed to become a better musician and become better at auditions.  Then, in just a couple of months, I was at Cirque Dreams Headquaters preparing for my first U.S. tour.

But that’s a story for another day. 

I would eventually tour with Cirque Dreams for two years with their production of 2012’s “Pop Goes The Rock” and 2013’s “Cirque Dreams Rocks.”  When I got back home I decided to entirely update my Cirque Du Soleil submission application. 

Yes, I deleted all the videos I submitted to them and reshot all new footage.  I performed everything better, shot it better, edited it better, made better titles, and I even submitted myself in the upright bass category. 

One of the things I did differently in my NEW batch of audition videos was completely change my slap/pop attack.  In my original video you can see that I’m slapping the strings using the side of my thumb.  I’m not striking through the string; I’m bouncing off the strings.  To me, this is the way it sounded on the original recording.  However, the musical score specified something a different.  So I decided to try a new method of slap/pop that would make everything sound much cleaner.

The video below illustrates my original video with my original thumb attack when it kicks in at :46.

In my new video I utilize the double thump technique.  The first two notes of the main phrase is a down thump, followed by an up thumb, then followed by a pop.  So it’s not down, down, pop – it’s down, up, pop. This occurs at :46
I feel it’s a much cleaner sound.

Long story short, I recently got word from Cirque Du Soleil that I’ve been officially added to their database of artists.  Who knows what will happen from this point.  I will, however, keep trying to get gigs with other companies on my downtime.  I have my eyes set on things like Blue Man Group and other touring stage performances. 

There you have it.  That’s how I first landed my audition with Cirque Du Soleil, how I screwed it up, how I learned from it, and how my life is better because of it.