If you’re auditioning for MT, accompaniment tracks are going to be your best friend. You’ll need them for filming prescreens, you’ll need them to play on a speaker in your in-person auditions, they’re your most important asset. The big thing, however, is how you acquire them, particularly if you’re doing more obscure songs. 

Option one: Check Youtube! 

This may seem like a cop-out, but I actually got all my backing tracks by just looking up, “[name of song] [name of show] karaoke.” You’d be surprised how many piano players online just do that for fun. Now the tricky thing about this method is trimming the track, because you won’t always start at the beginning of the track for your 16/32 bar cut. When I faced this, I used iMovie of all things to trim the track. What I did was that I used a website that converts Youtube videos into mp3s, and downloaded the tracks I needed. Then I started a new project on iMovie and dragged the mp3s into the audio section of the editing software. Then, I trimmed the tracks to have 2-3 bars before I came in and after I ended, and used the edit tool to fade the track in and out for a more clean sound, then I just exported it out of iMovie as an mp3. It honestly worked really well, and I didn’t need to spend copious amounts of time fiddling with tracks in order to have a clean one to use. 

Option two: Ask someone

If step one didn’t work or you’re doing a song in a different key or something like that, now is the time when you have to reach out and talk to someone. If you work with a vocal coach or a voice teacher or even just know someone who plays piano, send them an email with the MARKED sheet music and ask them very politely if they could record a track and send it to you. Sometimes they’ll ask for pay, but not typically, and it’s usually pretty cheap if they do. This is a good way to get a pre-customized track that has more of an authentic sound. However, you need to do this much earlier, as you need to account for the time needed for the piano player to find the time in their schedule to record the track.