We had no idea that you could do trial lessons when my son applied to schools. I do think that a trial lesson has an equal chance of working for you as it has working against you.
My son wound up at Belmont University and graduated in May. I recommend checking out Belmont as the cost was lower than the other schools he applied to (Miami, NYU) even before any scholarships. He did wind up with an academic scholarship that wasn’t large, but we weren’t expecting. As a full pay family we did not apply for FA and we were happy about the surprise scholarship even thought it wasn’t huge. I mention this because someone above mentioned that sometimes scholarships do come out of nowhere.