The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 199 Rob Knopper: Audition Hacker

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

Conversation with Rob Knopper, percussionist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and audition expert, creator of Audition Hacker. You'll hear about how he painstakingly developed his process (through trials and errors, and lots of reflection), his method to prepare for an audition, and the specifics of how to record yourself for maximum results.   Book your FREE Music Mastery Experience Discovery call with Renée HERE Book your free consultation with Renée HERE Download the transcript from this episode HERE     MORE ABOUT ROB KNOPPER Website: www.robknopper.com   YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@robknopperstudio   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/robknopperpercussion/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/robknopper/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-knopper-98998aa7/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7ipoC3frMoO4AtG2KvP8Zv   Mind Over Finger Click www.mindoverfinger.com/coaching to book your free consultation with me. Visit MindOverFinger.com for my online courses as well as free resources on peak performance. Grab my free workshops and PDF downloads by going to www.mindoverfinger.com/resources. Connect: https://www.youtube.com/@MindOverFinger https://www.facebook.com/mindoverfinger/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/mindoverfinger https://www.instagram.com/mindoverfinger/     THANK YOU: Most sincere thank you to composer Jim Stephenson who graciously provided the show's musical theme:  Concerto #1 for Trumpet and Chamber Orchestra – Movement 2: Allegro con Brio, performed by Jeffrey Work, trumpet, and the Lake Forest Symphony, conducted by Jim Stephenson.

You're listening to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 199. Welcome to The Mind Over Finger Podcast, where we dive into the world of mindful music making, peak performance, and crafting a purpose-driven life and career. I'm your host, violinist, certified performance and life coach for musicians, and your guide to unlocking your full potential, Dr. René-Paul Gaultier. Hi there, how are you? I hope I catch you doing amazingly well. I have a very valuable conversation for you today. I speak with Rob Knopper, percussionist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and audition expert, creator of Audition Hacker. Since joining the Met Opera Orchestra in

2011, Rob has been featured on several Grammy-winning recordings with the orchestra, HD movie theater presentations worldwide, and he released his own solo album, De L'Écluse d'Aux Etudes for Scenaires Drums. Before joining The Met, Rob previously held a position with the New World Symphony, and he performed with several orchestras across the country. He's very active as a creative with many interests. With Audition Acre, Rob's mission is to help musicians master auditions. In his own words, he's created methods and simple, adaptable instructions to crush basically any part of the audition process.

And we're very lucky because he basically shares his entire process with us today. In our conversation, you're going to hear about how he painstakingly developed his process through trials and errors and lots of reflection, his method to prepare for an audition, and we go deep into the specifics of how to record yourself for maximum results. There is so much value for you ahead, and I know you're going to walk away filled with new ideas to implement in your practice today. As always, no need to take notes. Click the link in the show notes to grab the summary and transcript of this episode. And before we dive into our discussion, I want to personally

invite you to join me inside the Music Mastery Experience, my life-changing group coaching program. If you find yourself at a turning point in your career, but you feel stuck, I can help you. Do you feel like you're spinning your wheels and you never quite reach your goals? Are you aiming for that elusive first job or striving to level up your musical career? Well, I've got you. The road to success is paved with obstacles and it's easy to get discouraged along the way. The Music Mastery Experience was designed to help you overcome those obstacles and experience confidence and joy along the way. We're going to uncover the root causes of your performance issues

and implement tailored strategies to have you achieve your goals. With my deep practice model and life coaching techniques, you're going to succeed both on and off the stage. You're going to have clarity. You're going to feel confident and you're going to get results. So are you ready to level up? Because if you're serious about making strides, if you're serious about elevating your life, and if you're serious about getting results, well, I'm serious about helping you and supporting

you. All you need to do is go to mindoverfinger.com slash MME and join the program. That is one decision. I know you're going to be so glad you made a year from now. So take that next step to success by going to mindoverfinger.com slash MME today and let's get you started. All right, let's jump into my discussion with Rob Knopper. I'm sure you're going to find it incredibly valuable. Let's go to the show. Rob Knopper, so great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Rob, before I started recording, I was telling you that this was a long time coming.

I've been following you for a long time. You have such an interesting journey to winning the position where you are right now. And you have contributed so much with fantastic content for all musicians. to, to hone in on their craft. I would love for my audience to hear your journey in your own words. So please share with us how that unfolded for you. Yeah. Oh, you mean the journey of like me as a musician or me as like making stuff for online, online. Maybe you as a musician with a hint of anything that was peppered in along the way. Sounds good. Yeah. Cool. Well, I started as a rock drummer and i was really into um progressive rock from the 70s and heavy metal back when i was

like middle school high school i had um the biggest bass drum that you could buy for a drum set that was the cheapest version of it like 24 inches and i had a double bass drum pedal and i had these friends who held their guitars all the way down at their knees so that they could like lean over and look super cool doing it and at a certain point i went to a couple camps in michigan where i grew up at blue lake fine arts camp and then interlochen where i realized that um there was a a pathway to being able to play cool music while also having a stable life and you could do it through this kind of fair relatively fair um you know uh job, you know, job search method of the audition. Um, so that was very attractive to me because I'm,

I'm, um, I'm somebody who like, I love strategizing and working on a project alone by myself. And like, whether that's like spending hours and weeks and months, like figuring out how to master a computer game or like, um, like now like you know obsessing over photography and the you know the details of all the buttons on a camera and all this the specs and everything i just i'm an obsessive person so i knew when i found that like i love music i can obsess over percussion i could break this audition project down into all its little parts and i could like you know bite off every little mini project one at a time until I like, you know, and I could do this all like myself in a practice room. I thought

that was pretty cool. So I pursued it. I started pursuing it in, in high school. Um, and between my junior year of high school, when I took the Ann Arbor symphony audition and nine years later, when I took the Met audition, that was a nine year journey of auditions. Um, and, um, and then basically along the way, I felt like I did things very, um, systematically and thoughtfully and, and experimentally and, and obsessively. And, and so I figured if there are other people out there after I won my job, I was like, if there's other people out there who are going through the same kind of struggles, cause it also is very difficult and there's a lot of rejection as a part of auditioning, um, that I would love to be able to like put these answers that I found through so

much work into easily consumable, like pieces of, you know, resources. Um, and then I can't solve everyone's problems, but I can at least like hand over all the, the helpful answers that I found. And that will make the problems that others are having, like just slightly easier then that's what I kind of have been doing ever since then. You've been doing it brilliantly. And it's what you said, a nine-year process. What you've learned along the journey, someone else would have to go through nine years of their own experiments

to come to the same or similar conclusions and develop their own system. So for you and all the other people who've shared their audition strategies, to offer this is so helpful for so many musicians. It's really a time-saver, an energy-saver, an agony-saver. Yes, I hope so. Yeah, thank you. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about that? How you prepare for auditions?

And you have amazing programs online that the listeners could definitely go look up and sign up for. Absolutely. But if you're to give us a little, little hint. yeah so um i would say like my audition preparation process is something that i developed for myself like along the way i had a problem i got some feedback from a from a you know a professional or an audition committee would give me feedback or my teacher and i would like obsess over that problem find a specific solution and integrate that solution into my audition preparation process

And so I built this version of audition prep, which is a series of steps that I go through from the day I get the audition list to the day of the audition that I feel is incredibly effective and successful. And I have used it to win my two auditions. And so I'm happy to tell you exactly how I go through that process. I also feel like for people listening, you might be able to find certain aspects of what I do really helpful. You might take certain pieces of my audition process. Rarely would somebody just copy and paste this process and do it exactly how I do it. Cause like you have your own brain, you're, you know, you're wired, you're, you have your own set of strengths and weaknesses, etc so you're gonna have to find your own audition preparation process but the way i have found over

those years to be successful is i kind of have these um like major phases of work so i i start off by completely getting organized i call this um phase zero so it starts before i get into the practice room. Um, it means getting my schedule set up. So I, I figure out my entire daily schedule that everything I'm going to do between now and the audition and every day, like for instance, I have to self-record, you know, Bartok miraculous Mandarin on like April 30th. And on May 1st, I'm going to learn the notes of like Beethoven nine or whatever it is. Um, so I have this whole schedule and i also do all of my excerpt research um before i start practicing so i want to figure out how the excerpts go and i i want to not just figure out how they go but like

really build an authoritative level of knowledge about them so if i'm studying you know 10 excerpt 10 10 recordings of the same excerpt and really listening actively taking notes averaging out the tempos, I'm, what I'm doing is I'm installing like a deep understanding of the range of ways that it could be interpreted so that I can choose one way that is most likely to be accepted by the committee. Um, once I have that set up, then I go into what I call phase one, my, my note learning process. So I do this process to everything, all the, every note on the list goes through my, my note learning system, um, which, um, I do things in a, uh, very specific way. I don't slow practice. I do, um, one, I do repetitive, like at tempo practice starting in very small

chunks. Um, so I really like, um, I have an acronym for it. I call it Rome, R O A M repetitive one note at a time at tempo method um and you can think of it like back chaining which is how some people learn a really long word in a foreign language you learn the last syllable and then you learn the syllable before it and then you put them together and then you learn the previous you know the previous syllable and then you add it to the um to the set and so i really like my entire met opera percussion list i learned the whole thing in this way all the excerpts from end to beginning what starting with one note at a time and really just like chaining these notes together um and um and that really helps muscle memorize the excerpts like

i really feel like i can play through all the notes and the details are installed into my muscle memory. So I don't have to really think about what I'm doing. I can just, because I know that I'm, I'm easily distracted. And if I have to rely on my focus to, to remember where I am in the excerpt, then I will lose that focus and I'll like lose my place. But if I can install it in my muscle memory, then I can, what's going to happen anyway, which is I'm going to get distracted and think about like, Oh, the hot dog stand outside the hall where I'm going to go after the audition. And then I realized, Oh, what measure was I in four or six? And then, but my hands have kept going through the distraction because of this strategy of, of no learning. Um, so after I'm

done with that, then I do this major self-recording process. And to me that I call that phase two. And to me, that helps take the excerpts from where I left them muscle memorized, but not polished. And it really brings all of the polish out. So I feel like I am really sculpting very minute details, like how exactly I'm going to shape a crescendo, comparing the volume of accents, hearing all the little issues that might have slipped through the cracks. like oh these two notes are too close together or something like that um so that's my phase two self-recording and then i do um a major mock audition phase phase three um and this is i mean i struggle a lot with performance anxiety and nerves and i shake when i play if i'm nervous especially for soft snare drum that is a big obstacle for me and was for many years um, and doing these, um, mock auditions. So I did six weeks of mock auditions every day. I would do a mock audition. I would find somebody new to play for record myself,

have them choose the list, uh, listen back afterwards, record the results into this big spreadsheet. I would give myself a numerical score and I'd write down their feedback and it would really help me prioritize what things are generally at a higher level and what things are still coming through at, you know, a lower level. And it would help me prioritize my attention and time, extra time to, um, solving, you know, whatever remaining red flags the committee might, might hear. And then, um, and that's really the prep. And, uh, and then I would show up to the audition really thinking about it every audition would be like an experiment so the hard work happens in the prep yeah the anxiety should happen in the prep the deep thinking the experimentation

like everything happens in the prep and then coming up coming to the audition day is just uh observing the results it's just collecting data you're not there to like play your best or anything like that. You're just there to see whether the preparation process you went through this time was effective or, or what happened basically. You're just like, it's just like completing the last step. And, um, so I record the audition and I might play it the very best version or the very worst version. Um, but the goal is to just see what happens based on that particular set of preceding, you know, strategies, whatever I did before that day. Um, and then from there I would say, okay, and this is actually the most important part after the audition

to listen back to the result, get any feedback that you can from outside, you know, the committee might give you feedback or you could send your audition recording to your teachers or whatever it is you and then you know there's a few days of like disappointment and desperation and like you know uh my my family calls this circling the drain like where it's like you feel like there's no there's nothing left and everything has been a waste and you're just about to like let yourself slide down the drain but um but then like you know a few days later you kind of um at least i collect my energy again and say okay if today is the start of a new period of you know highly productive work that leads me to winning the audition in two years what did i do today to

make that change like what is the big things that have to change in my practice routine in my audition preparation process and the way I understand music in order for, you know, me to win an audition in two years, um, for instance. And, um, and so that's when my audition preparation process changes, you know, there's tweaks like, okay, I need to add a step here and remove a step there. And, um, that's like you being the CEO of your own audition preparation process. Yeah. Um, yeah. So big picture, that's kind of how the whole thing looks. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing and I agree with so many of the things that you've said and I feel like people always ask oh what is the secret to winning an audition and you've just said it basically you talked about

how you obsess over these details and how you problem solve and that's really what it is actually and I was thinking when you said everything happens in the prep yes you should make a t-shirt out of that this is that's a great tagline everything happens in the prep Not just in music, actually, in everything. But I agree with that so much. And that is what it is, really, is, you know, decide what it is that you're going to do, then listen well and obsess over the details and problem solve. And then another thing that you highlighted was to have that flexibility of adjusting, I mean, course correcting along the way, but also adjusting to the circumstances of each different auditions. So, yeah, audition success secrets in a nutshell. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You talked about performance anxiety, and I know that so many people will relate with what you shared.

What are those strategies that you use to deal with performance anxiety? Yeah, well, I think everybody experiences very unique symptoms of performance anxiety. Um, some people like I shake when I play, some people have shortness of breath. Some people have sweaty hands. Some people, um, have dry mouth, especially when players like you tend, you know, you tend to have a range of symptoms, but the ones that are most impactful are the ones that affect the actual playing. Um, so they're the focus, um, for me, I tense up.

Oh yes, totally. Yeah. Um, and we could talk about that one specifically, but, um, I mean, the shaking is from the tension if you tense up then the shaking kind of is like the result of that um and so i'm very like left brain person i like to think of things in kind of a project management way so i also like to think of performance anxiety and nerves in that way so um i don't i i think a lot of it, a lot of the results of this project are, are of the, of my approach of nerves are like, you know, mindset and different things, but it, in the end, the, the, um, the structure of

pursuing, you know, improved relationship with performance, anxiety, and nerves is, is very black and white to me. So I, I kind of break nerves up into two categories. There's the causes of nerves and there's the symptoms of nerves so the causes are things like what are you worried are going to happen in the audition are you worried that the committee is not going to accept your interpretation are you worried that you're going to lose your place in the music i said those two because those are my big causes are you i mean people tend to say here oh i'm the stakes are high so i'm worried i'm going to lose why what is going to happen in your playing What is your body going to do that is going to cause you to lose? So what are the worries,

the specific worries, whether they're physical or, you know, mental focus related, maybe. So what are the specific things that you are worried are going to happen in the audition? And so, and then there's the other side, the symptoms. So what, once the worries or the causes uh, like get stuck in your mind, then they can sort of balloon. And I, I say that the temperature of the nerve of the causes rises, the nerves rises, and then it trend, you know, transitions or it cascades into the symptoms. So whatever those things are, dry mouth, like shaking hands, et cetera, tension, tension in your, in your arms and your fingers. Um, nerves is not some huge umbrella project to all solve at once like some people think like

oh the answer is just going to be like centering and then i'm going to forget about all this underneath or like i should just have like a banana and a granola bar at a certain period right before i play and and i think of it much different than that each individual cause and each individual symptom is its own little project um and the goal is to reduce or remove the impact of each one of them. Um, and the answer to reducing or removing is there's going to be some tweak to your audition preparation process that will effectively reduce or remove each one. And, and your job, all you can do is brainstorm a solution for each one and test it out in your next audition. Um, so the causes are generally something that you can

improve by changing the way you prepare the excerpts so those two things i mentioned um i'm worried that the committee won't accept my interpretation and i'm worried i'll get lost in the music those are both things that i don't change i don't fix those on audition day like i fix those far earlier so with the interpretation thing it's because i am like a drum set player at heart and like i'm much more comfortable listening to like um system of a down or genesis or whatever than i am listening to mozart and knowing how it should go so when i'm playing mozart i don't feel confident that the committee will accept my interpretation so to solve that cause i needed to install it's like an imposter syndrome basically um so to to solve that cause i needed

to really go overboard with how I studied it, how I studied all the recordings. So I'd get all the recordings I could find and really try to analyze to like a microscopic level. How much does this bell player rise in volume here? Or how do they like slightly rubato to this downbeat? Or, you know, all the little tiny observations I could make about how someone was playing. And then I would compare all the interpretations and say, well, I don't, I'm not a native Mozart speaker, but I can definitely pick an interpretation and pretend. Um, and, and I know that based on my research is going to be authoritative enough. And so that was an area where I, I totally overhauled my excerpt research process. And that really helped solve this cause of nerves, this underlying

cause. Now there's another cause and there's all these symptoms, but at least that particular cause was reduced or removed in terms of its impact on audition day. Um, so a similar thing with worried about getting lost in the music. I changed the way that I, um, I already explained it, how I actually learned the notes, um, and muscle memorize the music. Um, and then the symptoms are usually things that I try to work on desensitizing myself in mock auditions. So I do a lot of inducing the symptoms that I expect. So if I'm going to shake, then I need to induce a loss of control of my fingers and my hands. So I do a lot of like pushups right before playing a mock for somebody that I respected and then going in and starting

with a soft snare drum excerpt. Um, and it's really hard. Like I was, um, doing a lot of my mock auditions for new world while I was, um, living in Michigan. And I would like go to U of M University of Michigan. I wasn't a student. I would just take over a recital hall without asking anybody. So I was already feeling a little uncomfortable. I would pick out, I might ask somebody, but I pick out like a rant. Sometimes I just like ask somebody walking down the hall like and i wouldn't even know um one time i saw carol yonch the uh tuba player in the philadelphia orchestra because she grew up in michigan but i was too scared to ask her um but uh i would just ask random people and so it was a scary situation and i had them go in the hall sit in the audience

and i would say okay i'll be in in two minutes and i'll play and then i would go out in the hallway and i would walk like sprint down the hall run down two flights of stairs where they have the music uh musical instrument museum and then i'd sprint back up sprint all the way down the hall and then i would just like walk in with my you know when dancers finish their big number and you see them completely still but then if you're up close you can see them like dripping sweat and like trying to hide the fact that they're breathing so heavy yeah that's how i felt like i was in that moment and that's how you're gonna feel at the audition anyway so you may as well start getting used to that six weeks ahead of time and really start to gain some control over

it because you will get better at anything you force yourself to experience so if you can identify the specific ways you're going to feel nervous in the audition moment and start forcing yourself to experience those things or as close as possible, even if they're not exactly like the kind of shaking you have when you're, when you do 30 pushups is different from you're nervous on stage at the Detroit symphony orchestra or something, but it's not so different that it won't help you to induce as many different versions of that ahead of time. Um, and you really do start to feel more and more comfortable. Like anything can get thrown at you and you're like a machine who can power through any kind of thought or negative self-talk or, um, worry or

whatever on audition day. Um, so, um, so yeah, that's kind of how I, that's my big picture, like, um, project management approach to, to dealing with nerves. Um, it's not, it shouldn't feel like this vague uh you know mystical thing where you have to find the right book and have the right mindset and have the right meditation before you know maybe some of those things can can really help you but it should be more like i've identified this like pile of 10 problems and i'm going to work on each one of them separately and experiment my way to and and you won't have solved all of them even the day you win your audition they won't all be solved You don't have to solve all of them. You just have to get better at some of them until you can

play well enough to win. Yeah. Thanks for outlining it so clearly. Like you said, it doesn't have to be complicated. It's not easy. I always say that it's not easy, but it's not complicated. And what I love in what you said, I mean, I love so many things in what you said. One of the things I love in what you said is you must get the data. I always talk about get the data. Yeah. Right. Right. adversity training is not, it's not something that's random, right? You don't just run down the hallway for some random reason. You must know why you're doing it. So get the data and then find a solution that targets precisely what is an issue for you. But I love that you also encourage people to go beyond this what is the reason so that like the symptoms but the reason behind the

symptom that is so important exactly and then i love how i think it might be surprising for some people to see the degree of intensity that sometimes we have to put ourselves through to be resilient when we step on stage and feel in control there's another t-shirt right you'll get better at everything you force yourself to experience. I think that's a fabulous, fabulous quote. Thank you. Yeah. Well, um, we're, uh, we're filling up my wardrobe at this point because I liked the first one you mentioned. Everything happens in the preparation. Yeah. Um, yeah. Everything happens in the prep. Yeah. I agree with that so much. You just came out also with a great video about how to record ourselves. And I'm a huge fan of this. So I'm

going to encourage everyone listening to go on your website, all of your channels. I'm going to have the link in the show notes, all the links and to, to check out that video. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about that? Yeah. Yeah. robnopper.com slash self-recording. I, I really love making these videos and I really just don't have enough time to, but I've been working so hard on this one. And, um, so I have, it's a set of three, there's the complete guide to self-recording. There's all the gear you need for self-recording. And then there's the step-by-step, um, self recording process. So, um, I mean, I mentioned that self-recording is a major step in my audition preparation process it is phase two um my students and i we all have the work our vocabulary is all

on the same page so um i call it phase two so it is um uh a uh essential part of my audition prep the music goes from like i think of it as sort of like it goes from the raw playthrough stage to like really being polished and ready for um a professional committee to hear it um so it's the time that the the interpretation becomes what it needs to be uh it doesn't mean i can do it in the moment because that's a whole other step of mock auditions and performance practice but it's like it's like the sculpting phase like sculpting the raw material into exactly how it should sound like if i were to release you know the world's like version of the sorcerer's apprentice bell excerpt which i wouldn't but if i were i would use this self-recording process to

to make that um and it's a real advantage that if you have the stomach to really do this properly because it's so hard to put in the willpower and the determination to really solve all the problems. So you set up your mic, you play the excerpt, or even better, you play a small section of the excerpt and you listen back. And I like to think of having a little rubric the same way like an elementary school teacher

will have a rubric when they're like grading papers or whatever. Oh yeah, I love a good rubric. Yeah. And you break down the rubric into musical elements. So you have the objective elements and the subjective elements. And the objective ones are the measurable ones like time, rhythm, dynamics, pitch, the things that can be right or wrong. and um and not that there's not wiggle room for some of these things but um a committee will hear a rhythmic you know mistake as you know that's incorrect they won't hear a phrasing mistake as incorrect but they will hear it as inappropriate or awkward versus compelling and natural so there's the subjective elements of of phrasing tone character style color um so i want to have

all of those in front of my face. So I actually like write them down on a piece of paper and put it on the music stand while I'm self-recording. So I'll choose a section of an excerpt, play it, record it, listen back to the recording, and just make a big laundry list of all the things that, you know, need to be solved or need to be improved. And then I'll maybe put the recorder on again, or I might have to like work something out a bit and then I'll record again and I'll listen back again. And I'll keep going through this process back and forth until I'm slowly going through the rubric, making sure, okay, the rhythms are fine. The time is fine. The dynamics are right now. The phrasing is how I want it. The color, the tone, you know, everything.

And eventually you do get to a point where it's like, hmm, I have nothing left to work on. This is like actually how I want it to sound. And then you move to the next set of measures or the next excerpt. So this I feel is, for whatever reason, it's very hard for people to actually make it to the end where I said, oh, there's nothing left to work on. most of my students and most people i talk to say actually i can't make it there because there's still problems so this is the like this is where i feel if you have like an obsessive determined personality you cannot give up and even if you don't have that personality just knowing the person who wins this audition is going to be the person who didn't give up on solving all the problems in their, in their playing. And in the self-recording context is the perfect way to constantly be observing how you sound and, um, making little improvements and not letting yourself

move on until you've really dealt with this rubric, everything on the rubric. Does that make sense? Oh, so much. Yes. I'm trying to encapsulate it in like three minutes, but tell me if there's anything that, um, you know, is still confusing or whatever. No, I think that everything that you've shared so far, the clarity is something that's going to be so helpful for people listening because sometimes, you know, we receive some vague concepts, but the level of specificity that you go into, I think is really helpful. I love the analogy to sculpting because painting sculpting writing these type of art forms uh it's very different than for us or all the other types of movement art like dance or athletes for example where we're in the doing

it's really our perception of what we're doing is warped by the action of doing it as a sculptor or painter they'll draw a stroke or they'll carve something and step back and take a look before the next move and we're so lucky in comparison to musicians from past centuries that didn't have recording abilities that now have this chance of doing the same thing and i mean of course we need to go about it with a an objective mindset because if we if we got to if we start to get too subjective it's it's easy to go down this route of oh i'm not good enough And, you know, we can easily get sort of discouraged, but when we go about it with those qualities that you've mentioned so far with problem solving, with just making things better, then it's a tool that is going to be such a differentiator between someone who uses it versus someone who doesn't. And your process is so clear.

yeah um yeah and like a lot of the musicians that i have worked with who then win their audition this is a big thing that they've added whether they've added it as the first time they've done self-recording or sometimes they already do it and we talk about it and dig into it a little bit and they realize like i can be doing this so much more in depth and getting making so much more progress through the self-recording um method that um yeah i mean if you're if your listeners are hearing this and they're like thinking about why am i not able to do well in auditions or why am i not able to make things as good as they need to be look into this this step of self-recording and maybe imagine how could it be more effective more in depth how can you use

it to solve more problems and just know that most everyone who's coming to your next audition, like a huge majority, 80, 90% will not have done as intensive of self-recording as is needed or is possible. Yeah. I could not agree more. I remember a few years ago, I was preparing for a performance and I was very short on time with this difficult repertoire. And my motto was not one note unrecorded because I was so short on time. I couldn't afford to lose any time in the practice room. And I thought the best way to do this is to record always and listen back. So I know right. I'm getting the data. So I know exactly what I'm doing. Not one mistake gets passed by or unnoticed. And it saved me so much time. But a lot of people

think that listening it means not working because you put your instrument down for a second when it's the opposite it really makes you listen differently you identify all of the issues so much more quickly and then your brain is at work while you're listening which is you know mind over finger big thing for me right okay i see what you mean yeah i i just love everything that you're sharing. Rob, how about a round of rapid fire questions before I let you go? That's one new question that I really like. Is there maybe a thought or a belief that really supports you in your work or your career? I think one thing that I realized at an important time in my own audition journey and that I talk about a lot with my, you know, the musicians I work with is

in music, it's easy to think about who you are as a musician as being like a list of the successful results you had, right? Whether you did well in an audition or who, what orchestra you've played with. And I've found that it is totally the wrong measurement of how you should think of yourself and even like what kind of musician you are, who you are as a musician, your asset, the thing that is yours is not your list of resume line items. It's how you prepare music to play, whether it's in an audition or first rehearsal with an orchestra or whatever, That is the most important part about you. What are the steps that you've found for yourself to get music from where someone's handing you the sheet music or sending it to you over email to showing up that day and being able to play it? So for me, I feel very thankful that I put so much time into and found a version of music preparation that is really effective. And it doesn't really matter. It itself resulted in my audition wins, but it's more important than my audition wins because the music preparation process itself, which is my asset, it's like my business card.

It's like what I, it's like the, the, the productivity or the result of all my work is something that I could then use on other auditions or when showing up at some other orchestra to sub or whatever. Um, so I want, I'm on this like, you know, crusade to like help people try to realize like who you are shouldn't be measured by the result or the rejection of this last audition or the, you know, your, your successful results or where you've performed, who you've performed with, it's how effective is your preparation process. And the way that you get that to be better is through experimentation and, you know, testing different like possible methods and, um,

finding, you know, prioritizing and making your scheduling process better and, and all the things that you can do through creativity and hard work, uh, rather than what you can't really have a result or a, a major impact on, which is what people decide to vote in an audition or who decides to call you. Um, so you're who you are is your audition preparation process or your music preparation process. That's your asset. That's the thing that you can build over time. And that's what I think people should spend their time doing. Beautifully put. I'm not going to ask about a favorite tool in the practice room. I think probably a recording device, right? Yeah. What are some skills that you think young musicians studying today should acquire in

addition to learning to play their instruments? Well, you know, that thing about nerves and performance anxiety that I mentioned, I think that balloons in importance because we start working on it late. Like, I mean, when I was growing up as a musician, I felt a little bit of nerve, but I never had the pressure of like, my job is on the line. So I never felt all this extremely, you know, severe shaking in my hands until like college and, and beyond. So, um, I think, and I also never experienced advice or teaching about how to deal with performance anxiety. So even if I started to feel it, you know, it still wasn't like, I think I felt like

people would say, oh, you'll grow out of it. You'll get more confident. And, and it doesn't, it's not something that I grew out of. I had to actually solve it. So I feel like it'd be great if people started working on this earlier. Like if you're in high school, if you're in early college and you start to experience performance anxiety and nerves, there should be more resources and more, it should be more of a part of learning your instrument along the way. because it's something that it's just another project it's like learning scales and figuring out how to play a tambourine thumb roll it's like yeah if you learn if everybody learned that like the year that they started taking auditions after college or whatever it would be very difficult for

people and it would be new and unusual but no we start that far earlier so we've been working on it for years and performance anxiety and nerves it's the same way if you had been working on it for years, you would have found ways, all sorts of ways to make great progress on it. So I think it should be something that is taught along with learning your instrument along the way. I love that. Yes. In closing, what about an actionable tip that the listeners could implement today in their

musical lives? An actionable tip. Oh, I think, um, one thing that people could do is, um, because I think a lot of musicians, they don't think about the bird's eye view of what does their audition preparation process look like? Like, what are all the steps that should be a part of it? They kind of go to the practice room and they start practicing, but they don't think about what are, what are the, what's the list of strategies that I should put the excerpts

through? I think of it as an assembly line, like the excerpts enter one side, they hit this station and then they hit the next station and then they hit the next station. And then the product is ready for, you know, for release or whatever. So what, what are all of the stations of your audition preparation process, or even of your music preparation process? And I think people are constantly in just like what's next mode instead of what's the big picture mode so i do i did a lot of list making and like big picture thinking about what are what what does three months look like if i had that um you may not be able to exactly achieve the the plan but doing the plan at all will put will put you in the position of doing the right work a lot more often so start

to make lists of what are all the practice strategies that you could do in your audition prep? How is that going to break down over the days, the weeks, the months between now and the audition? Um, and, um, and that to me makes, uh, yeah, bigger overall progress than, uh, maybe even any of the individual practice strategies inside of my audition prep. Yeah. Really great tip. Rob, thank you so much for everything that you've shared today. I feel like this was a gold mine of information for anyone pursuing not only audition preparation, but any type of performance preparation or any type of projects at large. So I can't thank you enough. I'm so happy you finally had a chance to connect like this. And please tell us one more time where everyone can

find you? Oh, thank you. I really appreciate, you know, being invited to, to talk to you and to be a part of this. Um, yeah. Uh, so you can, um, people can find me at, at my website, which is just robknopper.com. Um, K N O P P E R. And, uh, I have like, you know, different pages and audition part of it and a percussion part. Um, but, um, yeah. And like, it'll have a link to YouTube and everything like that. Uh, I just started doing more stuff on Instagram. I had been putting it off. And until like a week ago, my Instagram was only pictures of my daughter, which is great, but you know, now I'm doing more audition prep stuff. And, um, and then I am like, I don't know when this is coming up, but I am like doing enrollment for our new, um, program.

That is, uh, a year long program called inner circle. And, uh, and that will start happening in May, uh, that enrollment process. So, um, this may or may not come out before that, but if people are interested in like figuring out how to work on auditions together, then, um, then yeah, you'll find like links from the website and everything. That's fantastic. Rob, thank you so much again. Thank you, Renee. I really appreciate it. There you have it. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Rob Knopper from Audition Hacker. You can find more information about Rob and all things Audition Hacker by going to robknopper.com. Of course, I'm going to have that link for you in

the show notes. If you found our discussion valuable, share this episode with friends and fellow musicians. Grab a screenshot of the episode, share on social and with anyone you think might benefit from this conversation. And don't forget, the doors to the Music Mastery experience are open right now. So if you want to get unstuck, if you want to get clarity, if you want support and tools and an amazing community, if you're looking for results that will blow your mind, you're going to love this program. Head over to mindoverfinger.com slash MME to join today. That's what I have for you this week. Until next time, much love going your way, and à bientôt!