Song of the Week #8

Song of the Week #7

I'm Whiter Than I Thought

So there's this brand new thing I just discovered. Maybe you've heard of it. It's called dancing, and I suck at it. I just discovered this recently. Somehow the result of staying completely stationary my entire life has caused a serious lack in ability to move anything but foot to the beat of music. For the painful but affective help of comparison, I have provided this psychedelic banana to show an example of about how well I dance.

Photo Credit- HERE

Ok, the banana might dance a little better than me. Or a lot better. Fine, the banana looks classically trained compared to me. That's a problem. A big problem. You see, not only do I now have to suddenly be able to dance for our current school musical (don't even get me started on the singing part), but trying to make watching the 8th and 9th grade jazz band fun gets especially difficult. You see, just the other day we had our holiday concert for band and jazz band. Because I am in JV and varsity jazz instead of the jr high jazz band, I got to watch the jr high jazz band preform. Some of my friends in JV and I decided we needed to try and make it clear that it's jazz! The rest of the audience didn't quite understand. You're supposed to enjoy yourself while watching jazz, and most of the people in the audience were treating it more like the rest of the more formal performances like band and orchestra.

It immediately became our mission to make the performance more enjoyable. It wasn't that hard for us to enjoy it as they played very cool arrangements of different types jazz songs and had some very exquisite soloists for their age. However, getting everyone else to join us in our enjoyment was difficult. We cheered whenever possible and even attempted dancing. I was very good at the cheering part. It's my specialty. When it came to dancing however, my insane amount of whiteness took over. I resorted to doing my best possible psychedelic banana impression. It was awful. Hopefully I'll be able to find a solution for my serious dancing issues in the future, but for now I thing I may be doomed.

Song of the Week #6

Music Swag

I have been DYING to share some of the awesome music stuff you can find out there! As Christmas is coming along I thought it would be a great time to share some music products with you all. So let's get started!

Music room stuff-

Photo from here

-I found some awesome music wooden stands (by far a huge music room essencial) here. Or for something a bit less fancy, feel free to check here.

-Spice up the walls of your music room with these music note wall stickers.

-And of course every music room needs a metronome.







Gifts for any musician-

Picture from gifts for musicians

-This sweet treble clef watch can be found here

-Any musician would love this manuscript umbrella

-For gifts under five dollars, check out these manuscript socks, this guitar chord swatch pack, and this pink electric guitar mouse pad.

Song of the Week #5

Song of the Week #4

Sorry I forgot to get this out yesterday. My bad.

Song of the Week #3

Our Little Hole In the Ground

I must admit, right now I am utterly terrified. The musical (Bye Bye Birdie) I'm in the pit orchestra has its first performance in a week and I'm still not ready. You may even not know what a pit orchestra is, so before I really start telling you all the fantastic stories of pit I have to tell, let me explain that. First off, a pit orchestra is the group of musicians that plays the instrumental music in a musical. So we're not the people on stage singing, but the people under them playing music, and I literally mean under them. The name pit orchestra isn't some special name for it. It's just a mini orchestra, in a pit (or as I like to call it, our hole in the ground).

Now for the stories.

Story One- Mt. Krispie

This story is extremely simple. One day my friend Joe, the other 3rd trumpet in pit, brought a huge box of Rice Krispie Treats to share with everyone. He got the inspiration for this because of Mr Taylor's (our band director) comment about how Rice Krispie Treats are the most perfect food in the world. To say the least, Joe and I ate a lot of them. By the end of the rehearsal we had enough wrappers from them to make a small mound which I named Mt. Krispie.

Story Two- The Pool Table

This story is also very simple. The easy way to put it is that there's a pool table in the pit. But it's not quite that easy. This specific pool table requires you to contort yourself into odd positions and put the cue at strange angles just to hit the ball. But it doesn't even just end there. There's always weird dips and dents in the table which messes up the path of the ball and the entire thing is at a slight slant. The moral of this story is, if you like playing pool with multiple obstacles then do pit.

Song of the Week #2

Song of the Week #1

From this point on out, every friday I will post a song that I think everyone in the world needs to hear. You can also view every song of the week in the Song of the Week Archive page. Enjoy!

On a Totally Unrelated Note..

The Tragic but True Meaning of Halloween

In case you haven't noticed, Halloween is in two days. What does that mean to you? Perhaps it means you get to dress up and go get strangers to put sugary treats in a bag, or perhaps you're on the other side of the door and it means you need to head to Walmart and stock up on candy just to get rid of it when obnoxious kids with cheesy costumes arrive at you're door. Unfortunately, Halloween brings on a whole new terror for me. Christmas music.

You're probably questioning how I could possibly have this trouble so soon, or how it's even a problem to begin with. I can easily explain the second question. It's October! I don't want to be in a christmas spirit quite yet. I still have a couple months to go. The first question is a bit more complicated.

You see, every year is our first concert is typically in October. Unfortunately, the next one is always our christmas concert. I hope you can see where I'm going by now. The moment our first concert is over, rehearsal for the next one begins. So being a band geek, plus our first concert passing, plus the next one being for christmas, equals Christmas music in October.

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE Christmas and the music that comes with it, but just not so early. Unfortunately, there's not too much thanksgiving music to help me get through until its really time to get ready for Christmas.

Picture from-  Here

Sorry Trombonists...

Soooooo true....

My Face Hates Me So Much Right Now...

I have recently challenged myself to something most of my fellow students and bandmates would think of as one of the most idiotic things possible. Today I played at least six hours of trumpet, and yes it hurts after a while. How exactly does this extensive amount of playing time come to be? For one thing, I have rehearsals before and after school, for varsity jazz band and pit orchestra. And that's only to add on to the two classes I have during the school day.

If you don't think I'm insane by now then you're probably one of three things. Either you're doing the exact same thing as me, you have no clue what I'm even talking about, or you are insane. If you aren't one of the first two then I suggest you take this test, and possibly seek psychiatric help.

Despite how nearly impossible this feat is, I have done nothing but benefit from it. Believe it or not playing up to six hours a day actually makes you better after a while! (mind blown). There of course is harmful parts about playing so much. In fact, it's currently 9:30 pm and I can still feel where the metal mouthpiece caused the inside of my lip to press against my braces, which is the hardest part about playing that long. Especially for me. Luckily, I should be getting my braces off soon. Hopefully, that will help me play for hours on end without completely tiring out too much.

Picture From Amazon
(because all the time is trumpet time)
p.s. If anybody wants to buy me this clock please feel free.

Just a Typical Day on Pandora

Screen shot taken by me

Oh. My. Gosh.

Picture From- http://www.talesfrombandcamp.com/

One Huge Breath and the Noise That Follows

Standing in crowded bleachers with over a hundred other people with metal touching my face half the time. Oh yeah, for around three hours. Now how exactly does that sound to you? Horrendous, terrifying, appalling, maybe gruesome? You're Wrong! Believe it or not, that exact thing has been the best time of my school year so far. How exactly? Well, those hundred people are some of the best friends I've ever had, that hunk of metal is basically most of my life, but it's still freezing cold. Cons: 1, Pros: 2 Pros win!

Now you're probably still wondering what on earth I could possibly be talking about, and that can be answered with two words. Two mostly typical words that when brought together has brought more joy into my life then almost anything. Pep band. Though I play in four other bands other than pep band, in this one I get to make more noise on more songs where I can get more creative with what exactly I'm playing. And by that i mean taking songs up octaves and playing about five times louder then what I thought was humanly possible. It's extremely fun.

With the description I've given this absolutely fantastic event so far, I would hope you would believe me that it is one of the most incredible things someone could ever possibly do. However, not everyone thinks this. In fact, some people find it dreadful. Standing out in the cold, doing something they don't even enjoy. Well I am in no way imaginable like one of those people. In fact I would say I'm the greatest conceivable inverse of those people. I am fairly certain that we are so different that an overextension of my contact with those people would cause the world to implode. It's that big of a deal. So in conclusion, pep band is so fantastically amazing that it could somehow cause the world to implode. It's kind of a big deal.

Image brought to you by http://www.montourband.org/

Well Here We Go

I can't honestly say I'm new to blogging. I'm not. It's true I'm not experienced, but I've had multiple blogs in my life. However, I'm fairly certain that my record for number of posts on a blog is two. Not exactly impressive is it? No it's not. Not at all. Blogging has never appealed to me over an extended period of time. Few things have. I always start, tell myself I'll finish, and then I don't. But there is one thing in life that has always appealed to me and always will. Music.

To me, music is the one true for of universal communication that anyone in the world could find a perfectly therapeutic under any circumstances imaginable (except for maybe being sentenced to death by monkeys. That one's pretty bad). Music is my life. There's not one day I don't think about it, listen to it, or play it. In fact I'm listening to music as I type this blog post. Anyway, as I said before I'm not exactly what you call an "experienced" blogger. So, to inform myself of music blogging, I did some research.

The first music blog I came across is a blog called "Consequence of Sound". They did an excellent job of the layout of the website, though they didn't really focus on the same thing that I would like this blog to be all about. While they talked a lot about music news, I would like to focus more on how music affects my life. The next blog I visited is appropriately titled "The Trumpet Player". I particularly liked this blog, because it focused mainly on things related to the instrument I play, the trumpet. It reviews many musical products and talks about things to help any musician. All of the posts were easy to read and it made the blog very "user friendly". One blog I did not like quite as much was a blog called MuuMuse. Though it was well laid out, it only focused on the types of music I don't enjoy and so it wasn't very appealing to me personally. Hopefully doing all this research on music blogs will help me to make my own.

Consequence of Sound- http://consequenceofsound.net/
The Trumpet Player- http://www.thetrumpetplayer.blogspot.com/
MuuMuse- http://www.muumuse.com/