A guitarist in his 20s recently told me something that rearranged how I think about this whole business. He's auditioned exactly once in his life. One time, at the very beginning. Every single gig since then has come a different way.
I should mention that I'm not exactly in a position to act surprised. I haven’t auditioned for anything in years myself. At some point the phone just started ringing on its own. A gig would end and another would appear, almost always because someone I’d worked with knew someone who needed a player and my name came up in a text thread I never saw. I always chalked that up to time served. You pay your dues, you build a reputation, and eventually the auditions stop because the work comes to you.
But this kid hadn’t put in 30 years. He’d barely started. And he’d already skipped the part of the process I always assumed was mandatory.
At first, I just thought he’d gotten lucky, or that he was so good that word had spread quicker than usual. But that’s not what he described at all. What he described was, essentially, a life. He went to jams. He hung around clubs. He met people who loved the same music he loved, and he made friends with them, both in person and online. He used social media not to audition for strangers but to show what he was into, what he could do, the specific corners of music that lit him up.
And those friends, over time, became the entire engine of his career. Every call he got came from someone in that web of genuine relationships. Not connections. I hate that word—it makes what I’m talking about sound like a transaction, like collecting business cards at a conference. This was the opposite of that. These were real friendships built on a shared love of music, and the work was a byproduct, not the goal.
That distinction matters more than almost anything else I could tell you. People can smell the difference between someone who wants something from them and someone who genuinely loves the same things they do. One is exhausting. The other is the beginning of a friendship. And friendships, it turns out, are how most gigs actually happen now.
The thing that struck me most was his range. He wasn’t trying to be the best at one narrow thing. He was openly, almost joyfully curious about everything—country, indie, r&b, pop, the weirder stuff at the edges. That curiosity wasn’t a strategy. It was just who he was. But it had a side effect: Because he loved so many types of music, he could talk to anybody, play with anybody, and fit into almost any situation.
A genuine love of music and an honest curiosity about styles outside your lane will open more doors than any single skill you can name. Not because it’s clever positioning but because it makes you the kind of musician other musicians want in the room. The player who lights up when someone puts on a record they’ve never heard is a lot more fun to tour with than the one waiting for their solo.
Then there's the part that really separates the players who work from the players who wait. This guitarist doesn’t sit around hoping to be hired. He solves problems.
He related a typical scenario to me: A new artist wants to play live, but the budget is small. A full band is out of the question. Most players would hear that and walk away because there’s no gig there. He hears it and says, I can fix that. He takes the artist's tracks, drops them into Ableton, arranges them for the stage, pulls out the guitar parts, and shows up as a one-man band. Problem solved. The artist gets a live show they can afford, and he gets the gig he just invented out of thin air.
“The player who lights up when someone puts on a record they’ve never heard is a lot more fun to tour with than the one waiting for their solo.”
That’s the whole game right there. He didn’t audition for that. There was nothing to audition for. He looked at a problem somebody had and made himself the answer.
I came up in a different era, when the audition was the front door and you’d better know how to walk through it. That skill still matters, and I’ll always believe in being prepared. But I’d be lying if I told you the front door is where most of the action is anymore.
The action is at the jam. In the club. In the comments under a video posted by someone who loves the same obscure record you do. It’s in being a real person who genuinely loves this stuff, who’s curious beyond their own lane, and who, when someone describes a problem, leans in instead of backing away.
So if you’re young and waiting for the audition that’s going to change your life, I have slightly inconvenient news: It may not be coming. Something better might be, though, and it starts with putting down the practice routine for a night, going to where the music is, and making an actual friend.
Turns out that’s been the real audition all along. We just didn’t call it that.
