AUBURN — It isn’t easy becoming “The Voice.”

Local musician Brooke Morin Lachance can tell you all about it. The 39-year-old Auburn woman just returned from New York City where she went through the audition process.

Lachance got 30 seconds to convince a judge that she is right for the nationally televised singing competition. But that half-minute spot comes only after a rather long and arduous process.

She told the story like one who cherished every bit of the experience.

“I left for New York on July 17. The audition was July 19 at 2 p.m. at the Javits Center in New York City on 35th Street,” Lachance said. “The audition was at 2 p.m. but I got in early, which I didn’t anticipate that they were going to let people in early. I actually got processed right away and went in. I didn’t have to wait in line.”

While others roasted in near-100-degree heat outside, Lachance was inside. But the rest of the journey was no easy ride.

“You get processed at the door before you’re allowed into the convention center,” Lachance said. “They ask for your audition pass, which is granted by ‘The Voice’ networking group, and your ID. Nobody is allowed in with you unless you’re a minor.”

The first step was complete. On to the second:

“They process you again,” Lachance said. “They look at your pass, they check your ID, they check your bags, they scan your body and they scan your bags. They check your ID one more time and then they send you into the convention center downstairs.”

In the center, Lachance found between 3,000 and 4,000 chairs set up as “The Voice” staff prepared to conduct auditions through the night. All around her were aspiring singers, each hoping to be that Next Big Thing.

“I will tell you that they were very young,” Lachance said. “Extremely young. I’d say a quarter to more than half of them had escorts with them because they were minors. I was by far one of the oldest in the group. The group I was in, the mean age was probably around 22. It was a very young group.”

With her younger cohorts in tow, Lachance was led into a room, very close now to the moment she’d anticipated for months.

“There’s a desk,” she recalled. “You show your ID again and they give you a bracelet. Then they line you up in groups of 20. Once you’re in your group of 20, they escort you to your seats.”

In her group were people prepared to do battle for a spot on “The Voice,” but Lachance described a mostly friendly setting.

“Usually, they ask you to be quiet during the auditions because there are multiple audition rooms off the convention room,” she said. “But this particular season, I guess, there was so much noise and there were so many people, they moved it into the actual center so we could be noisy in that space. There was singing; lots and lots of singing. Not so much people singing to showcase themselves, but a lot of group singing, like ‘Kumbaya’.” (Video of this, and more, can be found on Lachance’s Facebook page.)

The group would be broken up again as the process went on.

“They take your group of 20 and break it into two groups of 10,” Lachance said. “They bring you into a private room. There are 10 chairs and one judge sitting at a desk with a computer and red call-back cards sitting next to the computer, with all kinds of other paperwork.

“You come in, you sit and she explains the process to you,” Lachance said. “She calls you up in the order the chairs are in, right down the line, one through 10. There’s a yellow X in the center of the room. You stand on that yellow X and you get to sing one verse and one chorus from a song. No more than maybe 30 seconds, that’s it.”

When, at long last, it was Lachance’s turn, she sang Ed Sheeran’s “Make it Rain,” a song popularized by the TV show “Sons of Anarchy.”

“I caught the attention of the judge when I sang,” Lachance says. “She looked up from her computer. She brought her glasses down and she put her hand on the call-back card. The whole group started gasping. The girl next to me started getting excited.”

That moment, Lachance said, was the climax of the grand journey. And in less than a minute, she was done.

“My time was over,” she said. “I sat down. (The judge) went through and thanked us all for coming and said that, even though there was a potential hopeful in the group, they had to be extremely selective.”

“It was disappointing to me,” Lachance said, “but it disappointed my group more. People kind of corralled around me after and said they couldn’t believe she didn’t give me the card. We walked out to the waiting area where there were just thousands of people waiting for their friends or relatives to come out of their auditions. It was really intense. It was really awesome and it was really hot, because it was like 95 degrees there that day.”

After a glimmering moment of hope, Lachance was not selected to be the Next Big Thing on “The Voice.” Was she surprised? Not at all.

“I’m old, basically,” she said, laughing a little. “They’re definitely searching for young talent.”

Lachance, the daughter of popular local musician Debbie Morin, said she will continue to work with Denny Breau, another local musician, and to keep recording music.

She has nothing but good memories of “The Voice” auditions. In fact, she said, “I’m going to audition one more time, now that I know what to expect, and now that I know what they’re looking for. I know now that there are things that work and things that don’t work.”

Brooke Morin Lachance may yet become the Next Big Thing.