That's Not Spit, It's Condensation!

Daniel Santos felt prepared for every audition he took. He’d learned the music, run mock auditions, done the work. Then he’d get on stage and it wouldn’t show up. He’d play the first excerpt, start analyzing everything, and the mistakes would snowball. Montreal, Phoenix: cut in the first round.

Free Winning Auditions workbook: http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions

Daniel is a trumpet player in the U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West. In this episode, he talks about what was actually going wrong in auditions. He was playing too safe, trying to be perfect, and evaluating himself the entire time he was on stage.

He also explains what changed. He had a structured plan for his preparation and recorded himself every day. He built real evidence that he could trust his playing. And he learned that the committee isn’t listening for reasons to cut you. They’re rooting for you.

His results since: through a full first round at San Francisco Ballet, a round in Dallas where he played exactly the way he wanted to, and then the finals with the Houston Symphony.

If you’ve ever walked off stage thinking “that’s not how I play,” this one’s for you.

Connect with Daniel: Instagram @danielsantos717
Ryan Beach: ryanbeachtrumpet.com
Kathleen Costello: kathleenbcostello.com
Instagram: @thatsnotspit

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You’re organized. You’re recording yourself. You’re running mock auditions and putting in the hours. But once you get on stage, with the committee listening, something changes, and you don’t play the way you know you can in the practice room.

Download your free winning auditions workbook here:
http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions

In this episode of That’s Not Spit, It’s Condensation, Ryan Beach and Kathleen Costello explain why the usual audition prep (more practice, more mock auditions, trying not to care) doesn’t always carry over to the stage. They also name the state you need to be in to play your best when it counts: flow state.

You’ve probably been there before. It’s the performance where two hours flew by, where you weren’t thinking about mistakes, nerves, or the committee, just the music. Some players call it being “in the zone” or playing “out of your mind.” It can feel like magic, but it isn’t. Flow has conditions, and you can build them into your practice.

In this episode:

-Why players who sound great in the practice room struggle at auditions

-Why more practice, more mock auditions, and “just don’t care” often don’t fix it

-What flow state is, and why it’s behind your best performances

-The most important condition for flow: keeping your attention in the present moment

-Three more conditions to explore: clear goals, immediate feedback, and skill/challenge balance

-Why players who make mistakes sometimes advance over players who played “perfectly”

-Answers to “I just need to get better at my instrument” and “this is supposed to be hard”

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More practice and more effort won’t fix inconsistent playing. If sometimes you sound great and sometimes you don’t, and you don’t know why, this episode is for you.

Maybe your preparation goes well and the audition doesn’t. Or one audition goes great and the next one, a few weeks later, doesn’t come close. Keep that up long enough and you walk into every audition not knowing which version of you will show up.

Download our free Winning Auditions Workbook
http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions

Ryan Beach and Kathleen Costello talk through the practice habit they use to find out what actually causes their best playing: neutral instruction journaling. Instead of writing “sharp,” you write “aim lower.” Instead of grading yourself, you record what you’ll try next and whether it worked. Over time, that record becomes proof you can trust, and a clear idea of what to focus on when you’re under pressure.

In this episode:

Why “keep practicing” and “get more information” don’t solve inconsistency

What it actually takes to play consistently

How performance journaling differs from a diary or gratitude journal

Three journaling mistakes: the activity log, the error list, and positive-only

How to turn judgments into instructions

Why it doesn’t take much time, and how it saves you from solving the same problem twice

Pages from the journals Ryan kept while preparing for his Atlanta Symphony trial and Philadelphia Orchestra finals

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If you're looking to understand what goes in to winning an orchestral audition, download our FREE winning auditions workbook!
http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions

What if the way you think about orchestral auditions is the reason you play worse in them?

Tessa Vermeulen, second/assistant principal flute of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, joins Ryan Beach and Kathleen Costello to talk about audition preparation from the inside. Tessa trained at Carnegie Mellon and Juilliard and won her Alabama Symphony job while still finishing her master’s. She was technically and musically prepared long before she started working with us. What she wanted was consistency: a way to stay mentally present on stage no matter what happened that day.

In this episode she talks about:

Why an orchestral audition isn’t an exam, and what changes in your playing when you stop treating it like one
Why the purpose of practice isn’t to prevent mistakes, but to trust yourself to come back when one happens
How she practiced specific points in her excerpts to bring her attention back to the present
What happened when she cut her finger days before an audition
Why her goal for her most recent audition was to “not try,” and why she counts it as a big moment even though she didn’t advance
Why it’s okay for some parts of your preparation to feel easy

If you take orchestral auditions on flute or any other instrument, and you play better in the practice room than you do behind the screen, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Tessa
https://www.thethinkingflutist.com/

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Most players who can't produce their best playing in an audition assume the problem is skill. If they could just get a little better, the pressure wouldn't matter. For some players that's true. But there are a lot of musicians who can already play well enough to win a job and still can't reliably show it on the day. If that's you, the problem isn't the skill you have. It's your access to it.

Free Winning Auditions Workbook
http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions

In this episode we talk about what's actually going on when preparation doesn't survive the audition, and what to do about it. Why committees can only respond to what they hear in the moment. Why doing all the "right" things, the hours, the organization, the smart practice techniques, the books, still leaves people walking off stage knowing that wasn't representative. And the shift that changes it.

That shift is attention. Under pressure your skill doesn't degrade, your attention does. And your attention is the thing that transfers from the practice room to the stage, because it's been getting trained the whole time, whether or not you were training it on purpose. If your practice is built around noticing what went wrong, that's what you've trained your attention to do, and that's what it will do in the round.

We get into:

-What a committee is actually deciding, and why it isn't who's the best player
-Why "I need to improve my skill" is the first conclusion almost everyone jumps to, and when it's the wrong one
-The difference between raising your ceiling and getting access to the ceiling you already have
-What attention training is, and where it came from in our work, including the breath meditation we learned from John Baker, a former major league player and mental skills coach
-Why the real skill isn't holding your attention in place, but knowing where to return it when it wanders
-What changes in the practice room when the goal of a repetition is your attention rather than the sound
-What it looks like on stage when you've spent the whole preparation building the headspace you want, instead of trying to find it in the moment

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Most players preparing for orchestral auditions are working hard on the wrong target. They practice, organize, record, run mock auditions, and work on the mental game, and still walk off stage knowing they have more than they showed. The problem usually isn't effort or talent. No one ever showed them what their audition preparation is supposed to produce.

In this episode, Ryan talks about the actual end goal of audition preparation, what has to change in your practice to reach it, and the part most players skip: becoming the type of person who trusts themselves when it matters most.

Grab your FREE Winning Auditions Workbook:
http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions

We look at it through three books that changed how we coach:

📖 The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler — flow state, and why it's the target of your preparation
📖 Peak Mind by Amishi Jha — why your attention, not your skill, is what breaks down under pressure, and how attention can be trained
📖 Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy — values, belief, and deciding who you want to be at the audition

In this episode:

-Why your best performances all sound the same when players describe them
-Why "your skill doesn't degrade under pressure, your attention does"
-How balancing challenge and skill changes the way you practice
-Turning audition day from "how will I sound?" into "who do I want to be?"
-One action step: pick the book that matches where you're struggling most, and read it
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Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts!
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http://www.linktree.com/thatsnotspit

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FREE Winning Auditions Workbook:
http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions
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Orchestral audition preparation usually breaks down in the practice room, not on stage. Most classical musicians walk into an audition still wondering whether they practiced enough — and that question is what stops you playing with confidence under pressure.

If you struggle with audition nerves, inconsistent playing, or the feeling that your practice isn't transferring to the stage, the cause is probably how you were taught to practice orchestral excerpts in the first place.

Find what's wrong and fix it is the most common practice instruction in music, and nobody tells you what to do when the fix doesn't work. So effort becomes the only tool you have, and every practice session turns into a verdict on whether you're good enough. Practice like that long enough and you train your attention to hunt for mistakes — which is the attention you take on stage.

In this video:

-Why audition anxiety usually starts in your practice routine
-The two beliefs that turn a practice session into a test
-What a practice repetition looks like when you stop trying to prove and start gathering data
-How to build a practice routine that produces real confidence under pressure
-Why the progress you're chasing today isn't available today

For orchestral musicians, conservatory and graduate students, and working professionals preparing for professional orchestra auditions.

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Kathleen Costello joins That's Not Spit, It's Condensation as co-host. Kathleen has been principal clarinet of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra for 20 years, played with Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre Orchestra, and performs in a chamber trio. She's also the co-founder — with Ryan — of the coaching program behind this show.

In this episode we talk about where this podcast is headed: a resource for classical musicians preparing for professional orchestra auditions, and for anyone trying to perform well under pressure.

We share the four beliefs that will guide every episode from here:

1. The problem isn't you. The problem is your system.
2. Under pressure, your skill doesn't degrade. Your attention does.
3. Winning an audition is a question of committee trust — and they can't trust you if you don't trust yourself.
4. The goal isn't to win the audition. The goal is to become the person who can win the audition.

If you're taking auditions and want to understand what a committee is actually listening for, grab the free workbook: http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions

Ryan Beach spent 11 years as principal trumpet of the Alabama Symphony before leaving in February 2026 to coach musicians full time.

Support the show

Download your FREE audition preparation workbook here:
http://www.goldmethod.us/auditions
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In this episode, I'm sharing everything I know about how to win a professional audition, with actionable steps so you can apply this to your own audition preparation.
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Orion Miller's episode on Jason Heath's podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCn6D6OglI8

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https://live.ryanbeachtrumpet.com/auditions

Support the show