Anyone familiar with the format of the USC Popular Music audition? My D has a question

My D (drummer) passed the prescreen and is scheduled for a late January audition.

And now that she’s actually studying the description of how the audition is structured, she’s a tad confused by the way some of it is worded.

Specifically, the prepared selections vs the grooves/sight reading part in terms of whether she is accompanied or not. In the section for drummers it says they give you a guitar/bass player but they don’t specify whether that’s also for the prepared pieces or just the sight reading and grooves section.

Given it says she can pick any 3-5 songs of her choosing (either from her pre-screen or not) and they will choose which ones they want her to play, I don’t see how the guitar/bass player could back her on that unless she pre-submitted them. And even then that’s a lot to ask them to do given the infinite choices she could make.

Anyway, just looking for somebody who has been through this or knows a kid who is there now who she can ask.

Thanks!

Mine prepared a backing track for chosen selections and was accompanied by program musicians for the rest.

Thanks! @astute12 also confirmed the “prepared selections” are solo or with your own backing track and then the musicians join for the rest (sight reading, styles, etc.) Leaving this up for anyone else who might have the same question in the future.

I forgot to mention that they also have the kids take a written theory test while they are there, for placement purposes only. I believe they said it would last an hour, but my son was done after about 30 minutes.

I saw that reference to the theory test in attachment they emailed with audition date/details.
Since my D’s audition is late in the day on Sunday (like 6:30 pm), I assume she’ll have to do that in one of the afternoon testing sessions vs. waiting until after she’s done with live audition.

She’s got a decent foundation in theory from MSM and AP High School theory class (at least relative to being a drummer), so not overly concerned about it, but it seems odd to me that they’d use it only for placement, not related to admission in any way?

For two reasons:
A) don’t they care if they have any theory under their belt as a criteria for admission?
B) why bother giving a placement test to the 75% of people who won’t move forward from audition to acceptance (based on the rough numbers I’ve seen thrown around). Seems inefficient.

I guess doesn’t cost them anything to have them sit in a room for an hour to take a test, just seems like something they would do upon intake in the fall vs. 9 months before that.

Anyway, thanks for the tips and info on what to expect!

They have a remedial level theory class and the test, from what I could tell, was used to place people who need more theory in that class. My son had AP Music Theory and was placed in the normal theory class. You can’t place out of it. I wondered why they did it before school starts, but at USC there is so much going on for freshman the first week before school, it was nice not to have one more thing to worry about.

@DrummerDad18 - The accompaniast bass or drum can look up the song on iReal Pro and read it.

I meant bass or guitar in the previous post.