Blog 8 Pre-Concert

Our first concert is on Tuesday, December 17.  We will be going to Kennedy high school and use their auditorium.  We have practiced our music for the past 3 weeks.  The concert will start at 7pm and end at 9pm.  We're combining 2 periods into one band and the other period stays the same.  We will be playing 3 songs.  They are called; Have your self a marry little Christmas,  Christmas declaration, and Christmas concerto.  The music we are playing is fairly easy but there some hard parts.  We have a practice on Monday the day before the concert.  We will setup how we are going to be on stage.  It will sound different then what it sounds in class,  so we will adjust how we play just a little bit to sound better.  It will be harder to get their because we will have to transport our own instrument then a truck bringing it there.  The concert will be good.

The auditorium will look similar to this just darker and a little bigger.

October 29 2013 #5

  On Tuesday our 4th tournament,  their was about 10 to 15 bands there.  We went on at 8:43.  We were the only ones in our division.  In the 1a group their was about 6 band.  In the 2a group their was 4 bands and the 3a their was 5.  In the 5a their was 2 and then their was us.  The performance to me seemed okay compared to our last show.  Their was a lot of good things in the show but their was also some bad things.  The show is now 10 minutes.  After our show we went to the stands and waited for the award announcements.  They gave out the 1a bands and after that they did sweepstakes (overall winner).  The color guard got 1st place.  Then our band got sweepstakes on band performance,  band music effect,  drum line,  and other stuff I cant remember.  We won seven out of eight awards and that is the best we have done so far.  It was a goo night hearing Savanna get called a lot.  Hopefully we can do even better when we go to the Bands of America tournament in long beach.

Our tournament on October 19

Our tournament on the 19th was okay.  There was 3 bands in our division and we got 2nd place.  Our score out of 100 was 77 which means we aren't doing so good right now,  but we will get better.  In the morning practice started at 9 and ended at 12.  We had to be back here in half uniform at 4pm.  The bus ride to Ontario was about an hour and a half.  The ride could have been shorter but it was really traffic on the freeway.  When we got to the stadium other bands that aren't in our division were already playing.  We had to go straight to warm ups and not doing a visual block.  A visual block is,  stretching,  then we go in files and rows and each  file goes and you are supposed to keep a straight line.  After warming up with our instruments we had to go preform.  We had to wait a couple of minutes before we went on.  When the show started, the tempo of the show seemed kind of slow but theirs nothing I could do about that.  The voice over in our show was really loud and with the concrete walls the timing or the sound was off.   The crowd didn't seemed that excited because they couldn't here the band.  But that was our first time we have done the voice over in a concrete wall stadium. 

On Thursday October 8,  The whole band and color guard leaned eight more pages of drill.  Drill is basically your next spot you need to go to.  We still have another five pages to learn but we will learn them next week.  We will have to clean up the show by making peoples path a straight line and not rounding anything out.  Another way we have to clean up the show is music and keeping a feet in time. We might be adding visuals to make the show look better.  Visuals are things to make the show look better,  like stepping out of a line or leaning to the side.  Some other things that are visuals are going on your knees or turning around,  and putting your instrument down.  The show as of right now is about 7-8 minutes long. Our next tournament is on October 19 in Ontario.  We have a football game on Friday the 11th.  Hopefully the football team will win this game.

  Week one of marching we have got most of our show done.  But we still have to learn the rest of the drill.  marching band isn't that easy.  You have to keep your feet in time, memorize all of your music which is about two in a half pages long, and you have to remember where to go and keeping straight lines.  We practice every Monday, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.  Monday practices are from 3-4:30pm.  Tuesday practices are from 3-7pm.  Thursday and Friday are from 3-6pm.  Later on in the year the practices on Thursday and Friday will be on 3-5.  The show is called Gettysburg 150,  and it is about a man who is telling his story on the confederate side and how the confederate side became part of the United States of America.  The show has a lot of potential but some people aren't putting in the full effort that their supposed to put in.