hi, i'm rob.

10 years ago i was trying to figure out what to do after high school, but now i play percussion with the greatest orchestra on earth: the met orchestra. before that, i studied at juilliard and i was a fellow in the new world symphony. i consider myself to be unbelievably lucky. 

as i traveled along my percussion journey, from naive high schooler to rookie met orchestra member (where i’m currently a 4th-year percussionist), i always found myself hungry for information. if i was playing a tambourine excerpt, i wanted to know a thousand different ways to play it, who plays it each way, and a thousand ways i can practice it.

before i got my job at the met, i failed my way through years of unsuccessful auditions and rejected applications.

my goal with this blog is to reach keen and motivated musicians like yourselves and help you get where you're going quicker and smarter than i did. 

i want to help you master auditions.

here's my mission: if you love performing music enough to make it your career, you're going to have to audition and get a job. and if that describes you, then i have so much personal empathy towards you, because that was me, too. but I also know the incredible weight bearing down on you: audition struggles. i want to help you barrel through whatever's standing in between you and your dream orchestra job.

when i was a student, i wanted to learn the beginning-to-end, step-by-step audition preparation process. but lessons are so short and busy, and you have to learn such a variety of things that you never end up learning that methodology. you learn great little tidbits here and there, but it's not the full picture.

and so, because i’m an obsessive, driven, and project-oriented person, i've created methods and simple, easily adaptable instructions over the years to do basically any part of the audition process. and i'm going to teach you ALL ABOUT IT! 

some of the highlights? well, in one of my upcoming online courses (which will be FREE), i'll talk about what a winning audition sounds like. and to illustrate it, i'll play you a recording of my winning audition round at the MET. cool, right? i think so, too.