My Military Enlistment Process | Auditioning to be an Army Musician 42R

yes I will be shipping to basic training next month Wow it's like less than 30 days at this point how many days is it Wow I'm terrible at this hi and welcome to my channel my name is Abby and I make fitness and lifestyle type videos as well as videos documenting this next part of my life as an army musician so if that sounds cool to you it'd be cool if you like hit that subscribe button you see so I want a job with the u.s. army bands in April of this year 2019 so in this video I'm going to be taking you through my entire enlistment process with the army as well as my audition steps as a musician okay first let me say I'm 24 years old and I went into my bachelor's degree straight out of high school and there I pursued and received a degree Bachelor of Science in music education and then from my undergrad I went straight into graduate school doing a masters of music performance and I won my job with the US Army Band in my final semester of my master's degree first things first explaining a little bit about music in the military a lot of people don't even realize that you can enter the military as a musician but it to me is a very very important job and it's an honor for me to be able to serve my country in this way there are basically three tiers of military bands on the top we have what we call premier bands and these are probably names that you've heard before like the president's own the Pershing's own the United States Air Force ceremonial band I'm leaving some out those are the big names that you see on TV for like the inauguration or different ceremonies in DC and DC is generally where most of the bands reside some there are some outliers but these Premier bands serve the country musically on a national level the next here down what I will be entering into which in the army we call them regional bands so they do the same things as the Premier bands play for ceremonies and troops and anything else that we need to do to serve the community we do that in the regional bands as well we just do it at a regional level and then lastly is Reserve or National Guard bands I've heard those terms kind of used interchangeably and again they do the same types of things musically serve their area just at a local state level so I am a tuba player if you didn't know and I have always had a special love in my heart for wind band and they're kind of the wind band people and orchestra people and there might be some crossover but generally you love one or the other and I'm definitely a wind band person and I kind of just realized about myself and the fact that it's okay to choose one or the other not that long ago like maybe a year and a half ago in my musical career and so the military bands were the perfect scenario for me my dream would be to one day audition into a premier band but those slots only become available as someone retires or decides to leave the band and so whatever a seat opens up that's when you can go on and audition for that spot in the band it just so happens that the president's own seat opened the day after I took my army audition but I'm not bitter about it okay with all of that said let's get into the actual timeline of my enlistment process so from start to finish it only took me about two and a half months to actually raise my right hand and be enlisted and have a duty station which I know for some people going into the Army and other branches that is super fast but I have to say my liaison that I worked with it was incredibly fast at communicating and the middle chunk of this timeline that I'm going to talk about was super easy for me just because my medical history is basically non-existent so I have all of my timelines written down so I can kind of give you ideas of how many weeks could be in-between things but let me say that this is just my experience auditioning for the army bands and even recently like around conference time I was seeing more posts online about auditioning for certain seats and things like that at certain locations rather than someone travelling to you so as far as I know this process that I'm going to explain to you in this video is still in place but I'm gonna say there will always be exceptions the first thing you're going to have to do to audition for the army bands is to request an audition oh that's super easy I can leave the link to that down below all you do is type in your information and you should receive an email from a liaison fairly quickly so I submitted my application for an audition on January 26 and I heard from my liaison on February 1st once you get in contact with the person that's going to be helping you they should give you all of this information but I'm just gonna go through what I did so that you maybe have an idea before you even get in touch with someone so before you meet with a recruiter or anyone really you have to make a pre-screen tape so if you've ever auditioned for a music festival same type of deal you want to make a tape that really highlights your skills and also shows them your techniques and variety of styles that you can play at this point when you're talking to your liaison if you play multiple instruments you definitely want to get in detail what type of things you should perform on each instrument for example if you play euphonium and trombone make sure like if it would be good to play some jazz styles on trombone that you include that in your pre-screen tapes so for my pre-screen they asked for a solo and a handful of excerpts now this was completely up to me so I tried to make mine as diverse as possible I play big tuba and little tuba so I wanted to highlight both of those things so for my solo I submitted an F tuba solo which was Michael Daugherty's reflections on the Mississippi and then for my excerpts I submitted for band excerpts and one orchestral excerpts just because I had been working on them at the time and I really wanted to show a variety of different styles so I played taqaddum artsy lj8 al Ball Meistersinger was my orchestra one whole second suite and then in storm and sunshine as my March once you make your pre-screen video go ahead and edit that together in a very concise manner iMovie is very easy to use and I'm pretty sure you could do the same type of thing if you have a Samsung or Android phone I would put your excerpts in one video and then your solo in another and then what you're gonna do with that is upload it to YouTube as an unlisted video copy that link and send it to your liaison something I did that I would suggest doing is especially in your excerpts video in the description just go ahead and put some timestamps and then the titles of each work so that it's easier to pan through because you're pre-screen tape is going to be viewed by the liaison that you're in contact with as well as a few other people from the music board so once I submitted my pre-screen on February 11 I heard back from the liaison two days later and he confirmed that they did want to do a live audition with me so this is the point where you should receive a yes or no yes we want to continue or no we don't see you as a candidate and so this is also where you should receive your packet of music for your live audition so obviously get started on that music your next step is going to be to actually meet whatever critter now my liaison gave me the contact information of a recruiter in my area that he worked with before I'm assuming that would be the same across the board but just go ahead and set up an appointment with that person and then head to your recruiter Center and get started so the point of going to your recruiter next is because you need to fill out your paperwork and also go - MEPs now I just made an entire video about MEPs and like I said at the beginning of this video this part moved pretty quickly for me just because I have a very clean medical background I've never broken a bone or had any conditions or sicknesses that caused me to stay in the hospital so if you do have things like that on your record that might take a little bit more time to get waivers or be explained to the doctors that Maps things like that but if you have a pretty clean history that should move quickly for you so I went and saw my recruiter on February 26th and then was scheduled to go to MEPs March 6 so on March 8th is the day that I was qualified to join the army so then once you get that qualification you can go ahead and contact your liaison again or your recruiter should and let them know yes I can join the army therefore you should come and do a live audition with me your liaison should be really good about setting up an audition time with you that is most beneficial to you throughout this whole process the thing that I've seen that's really encouraging is they really just want you to do your best so because I had this packet now for almost a month and it's things that I've worked on before I was ready to go to get this live audition done so we scheduled our live audition for March 20 now in the live audition there are two parts to this so there is the packet that you've received already and then they there is what they call quick prepare music so this music you should receive 24 to 48 hours before your audition and it is exactly what it sounds like they just want to see how fast you can get music up to performance readiness a tip I have for this quick repair music is to definitely pull people into your practice room something that is a little bit weird about the quick prepare music is that the liaison that is proctoring your audition has to count you off and it might be in a kind of odd way so pull in a couple friends have them quickly look at the music find the tempo and then count you off and just go because it might be a little bit strange when you do it in the audition so if you can have a couple practice runs at it I think you'll be better in the end also note that your live audition will be recorded because there will most likely only be the one liaison at your audition because they travel to you so I should have mentioned this earlier but if you're a college student or a high school student auditioning for these bands then work kindly with your administration or teachers to try and reserve you a really nice space for this audition somewhere that you're comfortable with and that you feel good playing in at your live audition is also where you should go over when you're available to ship so the Army School of Music from my knowledge kind of works on a college schedule so they can only ship musicians in June and October now I was the maid of honor in a wedding in June the end of June so I couldn't ship in June so that is why I am waiting until October but make sure that you talk about that with your liaison in your recruiter just so everyone knows your schedule all right so after your live audition is done now you get to play probably a waiting game depending on what time of the month your audition was so the board that selects bands men only meets the second Monday of every month so for me I had about three weeks between my live audition and the next second Monday of the month so I'm gonna say this is something that I've heard different ideas about but the way you get selected obviously depends on the score from your audition as well as when you can leave and the band's needs obviously March 20th was my live audition the next second Monday was April 8th and I was very lucky to have been selected at that first meeting once you get the word from your liaison that you've been selected you're gonna get back in touch with your recruiter so you can go up to MEPs and actually in lists so unlike other people that are going to MEPs for whatever job that doesn't require an audition they will have enlisted the day that they did their physical but you as a musician has to wait to be selected which means you can't enlist the first time you go up to MEPs so I was selected on a Monday and a Wednesday I went up to MEPs and actually enlisted now there is one more super fun parts to being a musician in the army and that is the fact that again I've heard depending on your score you get to select your duty station out of a smaller list so one thing that my liaison told me was to take the 22 army regional bands and rank them from 1 to 22 that way whenever I received my options that I have an idea of where I'd like to go and where I would say no thank you now you do have to choose one of the options that's presented to you but by doing the list thing you are ensured to have done research on these different bases so 5 days after I enlisted I received my three options of duty stations and they were Fort Hood in Killeen Texas Fort Stewart in Hinesville Georgia and then Fort Bliss in El Paso which is what I decided on so next month I go to basic training it's like less than a month at this point and then I will be home for Christmas and then after the new year I will go to the Army School of Music in Virginia Beach and then shortly after that I will go to my first duty station which will be Fort Bliss in El Paso Texas I have to say I'm so excited to serve my country in this way my dad and grandfathers and so much of my family have served in the military in positions much much much scarier than the one I am entering into and so I am I feel like a sense of pride already just to kind of follow in their footsteps but in my own way so that is my entire enlistment slash audition process I hope that if you are considering the Army Band program that this helps you if I left anything out or you have any questions please just comment them below if you liked this video go ahead and give it a thumbs up if you didn't like it that's okay maybe next time and if you want to see more of these videos go ahead and subscribe so I pop up in your little feed and I think that's all for now so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye guys [Music]

Channel: Abby Weaver

Views: 8,640

Rating: 4.9741936 out of 5

Keywords: army, army musician, enlistment process, military enlistment, army enlistment, meps, going to meps, how i joined the army, auditioning to be an army musician, dep, going to basic training, basic training, ait, army career, my enlistment story, MOS, picking an mos, joing the army, meps experience

Id: h0oHRpgqgfs

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019