(Mostly) August Music Thread

Sorry, on the bridge.

Waffle, maybe there should be a thread facial tick in RL, so you know who you are talking to!

Raspberry, sorry to hear that.

I have a question about violin strings. How often do you change them? It's been 18 months with daily use and the little furry string holders are the bridge have fallen off.

That is so funny Waffle.

I am awaiting the return of DH, DS2 and DD from a bike ride. I've had a phonecall to say DS2 has fallen off and has hurt his wrist, and A&E beckons ........

I wish everyone at NCO and any other residentials a great time. We're dropping DS at his next Sunday for a jazz week. We're taking the train to save on 8 hours of driving then we'll collect by car spending one night in a b&b so we can attend the last night gig.

PS And the xylophone is on loan, not ours!

I think if i was planning a musical heist I would definitely choose alexandra 's place

Oh no fleur no bank robbery needed! Apart from the big ones, most of it is quite worthless. My parents are keen travellers, my dad is a kind of explorer who has crossed a river full of leaches in Myanmar and has slept for two weeks in the Lybian desert. So everytime he went somewhere he would bring a rare wind or percussion instrument for DS. Hence the long list! To which i forgot to add the maracas he brought from Puerto Rico...

I think we're very short on the instrument front:

• New-to-us decent clarinet, DS's toy of the moment
• Alto saxophone
• Descant and treble recorders (the latter courtesy of DS's best giggling friend at county music - who decided that a recorder group was JUST what the older teen woodwind players should be starting up, with predictably hilarious results)
• Digital piano
• Harp (mine, neglected)

Niggle we're the one south of the Cardboard one, where there haven't been many Anglicans for about 140 years...

Eventually found some secondhand ABRSM books online with free postage. I so miss living in the UK where books were easily acquired!

Proud (bonkers) mummy moment today. Turned on the Kings/ Willcocks recording of Bob Chilcott singing Pie Jesu and DS grinned his little heart out. There are some things he just loves and others he really ignores. Rhythmic stuff is great, particularly baroque orchestral stuff and jazz; but he also really loves some classical era and c20th stuff that seems relatively inaccessible for a 9mo! He completely ignores all early music though, to my chagrin....

Thank you, green, haven't seen you a while on other board, but seems like your dd is doing amazingly! I just wish my ds had determination like your dd!

Thank you, Fleurdelise.
That's very reassuring. I am totally non musical, so I thought trying for grade 2 = can play grade 1 easily any time. Realising he can forget to play so easily was a massive shock. I think it was a shock for him too.

We definitely don't have enough instruments in our house ( yet!!)
We caurrently have
A piano
2 trumpets
2 cornets
A clarinet
2 guitars
Oh and this probably doesn't count but a mixing desk as my husband likes to dj in his spare time!!
Ds is getting a new trumpet soon ( in c I think ) and is hoping for a " real" rather than a digital piano in the new house dd says she likes the digital one ( and I like that they can use headphones ) so we'll keep both when we can afford to buy one- this is way down my list of spending for the new house ds thinks it's going to happen straight away!!
Dd has asked for a ukulele for her birthday I think I might get one too so we can learn together ( the guitar and clarinet are mine as I could play them both many moons ago when I actually had some spare time )

Wow page 6 and I'm only just getting round to joining this months thread!! I'm mum to ds 12 who plays trumpet and has recently taken his grade 7 and piano ( no exams yet he's been learning about a year and is about grade 4 ish but likes to tackle much harder pieces !!) I also have a dd 9 who plays a bit of piano and lives for singing. She has her first individual singing lesson next week she's very excited about that.
Waffle I did look out for you yesterday but sadly didn't see you( love the shoes) maybe see you at the concert I'll be the one in the very large group of 10 as my extended family have all decided going to see ds is a good excuse for a family get together which will be lovely. I am utterly exhausted after the drive yesterday and now have to drive back ( stayed with family yesterday) to finish packing so we can move house on Thursday ( easy!!) was very strange that ds and dd had to say goodbye to the house that they have always lived in at 7.30 in the morning yesterday hopefully we will have got some of the new house organised before the nco concert ( especially the piano for ds!!)

Well that completely wrong footed me!- I gave up trying to keep up with the July thread and thought " oh I'll start again in August".
No fair to start August early !!!

We have a fairly modest instrument list...
3 clarinets
1 piano
1 acoustic guitar
3 ukuleles
4 recorders
1 glockenspiel
1 Kazoo

Someone asked about clarinet servicing up thread ( see!- I can't even keep up with the fake August thread!)
Dd's main clarinet gets serviced once a year... but she is heavy on her instruments plus it's free servicing. We book it in for the day online and then visit the workshop with it.. drop it off and then pick it up later.

List here:

3 X violins
1 X electric violin
1 X white baby grand piano
Several recorders (none any good!)
1 X ukulele

Re: shoes I could give imelda Marcos a run for her money - but you all knew that secretly, right? 😂

4 violins
1 piano dating from 1920.

No interesting shoes.

Our list

2 pbones
3 trombones (1 is music service and 1 is DS1's girlfriends, which has been here for 3 weeks)
1 tuba
2 clarinets (borrowed)
1 alto sax
1 bari sax (school owned)
1 flute
1 trumpet
1 cello
1 ukelele
1 classical guitar
Assorted cheap recorders
1 tin whistle
1 mouth organ
2 pianos (1 digital)

I have to google half of Drummers list!
You are all so bloody RICH!!!(not in terms of materialised rich, more in term of I am jealous, we dont know these instruments and what sound do they make!!)

Irvine: the piece I love most in her playing so far was Am Abend, Hofman: she achieved the distinct voices required and her legato from pedalling was nice and effortless(nearly perfect mark for her G5 exam). It was end of Nov, then we didnt play it at all for couple of months, in March we went to Ealing festival and she played it again there with only a week or so practice, I didnt know how she practised(meaning there could be none). We went as the whole family. I dressed nicely, had my usual bright lipstick, and hope for a relaxing, effortlessly performance where we could just enjoy ourself(I remember I missed seeing Alex playing in Barnes on the day). She said she didnt need the book as she knew it by heart. Our piano teacher also came. Then it was the worst ever performance, she tumbled twice, didnt stop however it was awful. My face wasnt red, it was pale. Our teacher tried to comfort me later when I apologised that I am sorry we didnt practise neither prepared, he said "she learnt from this experience too". Anyway, trying to say, even for the most comfortable and "easy" piece, we surely still need to go through it properly to play it nicely( could be very very quick and technically much better when we learnt it the first time though). Another example was she played over the rainbow piece in G3 and the other day she just played it from memory for fun and it still sounds beautiful.

And then drummers shows up with her list. That's it, I'm robbing a bank tonight so I can go instrument shopping tomorrow.

Normal here to irvine. If dd doesn't practice a piece a month is having trouble remembering it, you can dig it back out pretty quick though (depending on the level of difficulty a week or two from our experience up to grade 3/4).

We're now keeping one piece from grade 5 in her repertoire in case she doesn't have anything ready for a September audition and she has to play it once a week. She started making mistakes (randomly stopping in the middle of it) but all I care now is she remembers the notes, we'll start polishing it again end of August.

At the early grades is annoying though because (if you haven't got music experience like myself) you think that once they learn grade 1 they can read (fluently first sight) any piece they see which isn't true. You expect it to be the same like learning to read books, once fluent on level 9 (randomly talking about ORT levels ) you can read all of them at the same speed fluently.

Anyway where I wanted to get to is that I found it frustrating at grade 1 level that once she forgot her grade 1 pieces and whatever she was playing wasn't yet finished she couldn't play anything. So I could say dd plays the piano but if I would have asked her to play me something there were just little bits here and there.

This changed massively in the last year. While she still forgets her exam pieces almost instantly and now for example there isn't a piece she has ready to play (except the exam piece we're keeping alive) she can pick a book up to about grade 4 and sight reading. Which I find great. She picks up Disney songs (like tonight) or film music and just plays it. So it does get better.

Alex I am actually shocked with your collection. You actually have a bass clarinet?! I so want one!

I broke my toe on the flugel
That's the kind of thing you only read in this thread

Waffle at first I thought you had painted the shoes yourself

This is our list which I have compiled for the first time in my life:
1 piano
1 drumkit with 5x cymbals and cowbell
1 marimba
1 xylophone
1 full size cello
1 MIDI electric keyboard
1 guitar
1 cajon
1 orchestral tambourine
1 triangle
2 recorders
1 siku panpipe
1 rainstick
1 frog guiro
1 tbilat (Moroccan bongos)
1 middle eastern metal drum
1 fife
1 castanets
1 ratchet
1 pellet drum
1 ocarina
1 harmonica
1 slide whistle
I think there's more stuff hidden somewhere...

Oh, thank you. Glad to hear it's normal.
Yes, I'll make sure he practise scales and arpeggios daily.
Thank you again!