Get Involved — Band
So, you play a traditional big band instrument* and want to join our musicians pool to play in one our gigs. Here’s the TD;LR…
Throughout the year, we run casual and low-pressure auditions
You can choose the difficulty of the audition pieces you will play (see details below)
You can sign-up to an audition slot by clicking “Join the Musicians Pool” in the top bar
The auditions are not designed to judge you but just to see at what standard you play
Everyone who auditions is accepted into the musicians pool and will be selected for gigs
The audition allows us to balance each band, with enough experienced players to support beginners
If you don’t feel that you played your best at the audition you can re-audition at any point!
*Alto/tenor/baritone saxophone, trumpet, trombone, guitar, piano, bass, drums. See here for joining with other instruments.
Checkout the other “Get Involved” pages for details on how you can join in!
Are you a string player, arranger or vocalist?
The “Audition” Process
Really the Big Band Roulette “auditions” aren’t auditions in the traditional sense. We just couldn’t come up with a better word, so that’s what we’re calling them.
The main difference is that we’re not trying to get you to “prove yourself” or making you jump through arbritary hoops. All we want is to see you play, so we can make sure we don’t put you in a position where you’re playing music that you find too difficult.
For that reason, we’ve designed the audition process to match as closely as possible to want it’s actually like to play with us for a gig. That means no sight-reading, no exposed/unaccompanied playing, and complete freedom to audition as many times as you like if you’re not happy with how you played on the day.
Essentially, the audition is just a trial run of one of our gigs, compressed down into a 25-minute window. Importantly, you’ll be entered into the musicians pool regardless of how well you play.
On The Day
Auditions last 25 minutes and take place in-person
For the first 15 minutes, we’ll leave you in a practice room with two 30-second big band extracts for your instrument
The difficulty of these extracts can be chosen in advance (see example extracts in the next section)
For the last 10 minutes, one of our MDs will pop in and listen to you play (alongside a backing track if that’s what you prefer) and have a quick chat to get to know you
We don’t want you to play the extracts perfectly, just well enough that you’d get them with a bit more rehearsing
Audition Difficulty Levels
To make the audition process as welcoming as possible, musicians can select the difficulty level of their extracts when signing up for the audition. At the audition, we will randomly select two extracts from our collection that match the selected difficulty.
Ideally, you should choose a level so that you can play a 30-second extract fairly well (you don’t need to play it perfectly!) after 5–10 minutes of practice. If you think you sit between levels, you can audition with one piece from each level.
Our audition levels are based on the Hal Leonard grading scale which we summarise here. Most of our gigs will mainly contain songs of level 2 or 3 but we will run some simpler gigs and more challenging ones too!
You can find an example extract for each of the four levels we audition at below. The extract file contains all instruments so just scroll down to yours. You can also find the backing track for these extracts below the download link.
Example Extracts
Level 1
Caravan (arr. John Berry)
My Favourite Things (arr. Paul Murtha)
Level 2
Level 3
Four (arr. Mark Taylor)
Level 4
Bone Talk (auth. Mark Taylor)
Book an Audition Slot
That’s it for the year!
Big Band Roulette will be taking a break from gigs over the exam term.
Auditions will reopen again at the end of the academic year for gigs starting October 2025.
Why We Audition
It is worth re-iterating for a final time that we are not auditioning in an attempt to judge people or filter out weaker players. Instead, our auditions are incredibly casual and low-pressure, with everyone who auditions being accepted into the musicians pool. The reason we audition is to give us an idea of each members skill level so we can better randomly construct each band:
If we have a rough idea of each players ability, we can make sure that each band section has a mixture of skill levels, with more experienced players available to support and mentor beginners.
By knowing your specific skill level (and talking about your preferences at the audition), we can make sure we’re not going to put you in a position that your uncomfortable with, e.g. playing an exposed solo.
Each setlist we create will have a different difficulty level. Auditioning allows us to weight experienced players more heavily when creating the band for difficult gigs, whilst favouring less experienced players for our more relaxed or accessible gigs.