Answers to band questions

1. What has been your biggest improvement this year as a player?
2. What is the area you most struggle with?
3. What was your greatest musical highlight this year and why?
4. What areas do you feel the band excels at and what area do we struggle? Give specific examples

1. My biggest improvement this year as an individual player has been in playing scales and fast passages. I have become much more confident in playing fast passages, and I finally figured out how to play the passages slowly and them speed them up. I was very impatient before and tried to speed them up too quickly. Figuring this out was my best Eukeka moment this year.

2. The area I struggle with the most has been sight reading, or, more specifically, trying to learn new pieces when surrounded by other people playing other pieces. I find that I cannot learn music in a noisy environment, I need to be able to hear myself play. This also affects my sight reading ability in band, because I cannot hear myself individually, so I am not sure that I am playing the right notes. to solve this problem I need to take my instrument home and play the song through once of twice, and them I know it very well.

3. The greatest musical highlight of this year is very hard for me to pick. It was either playing Rumble on the High Plains, or in being in Honour Band. Playing Rumble that one time was awesome because we finally all came together and it turned into a real piece of music. It was amazing to be part of, and my parents told me that it was amazing to listen to. Thank you Mr. Stevenson for that moment, I will cherish it forever, and I hope you do too as you go off to Lucas. I also loved being part of Honour Band, Dr. Richardson was amazing, and it showed me what it must feel like to be in a good band or orchestra. Hopefully I will have another opportunity to play with such amazing musicians again.

4. The band is very good at playing loudly and at rhythms. An example of this is how we liked to play louder throughout Rumble, and in how well we can sight read pieces. I think that we are weak in balancing and tuning. We have problems with balance because some people like to play loudly all the time, and when the melody is moving around a lot (end of rumble) it can sometimes get lost. Tuning is also a huge problem because many people do not practice it and do not aim to be in tune. I think we could have sounded a lot better with more practice tuning, especially for some of the younger students. We are also not very good at playing more than what is written on the page, and even after we have been taught things over and over we revert to just playing it as written on the page. An example of this is 85 in Light Eternal, where we went through that part time and time again, but many people still forgot from week to week. It also happened in Rhosymedre, where we could have added much more phrasing and musicality, but we didn't. We had most of the basics down, but there was a lot more that we could have done if more people had practiced.