Re: band rehearsal every day


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] [ TubeNet BBS ] [ FAQ ]

Posted by mjg on February 25, 2004 at 09:21:37:

In Reply to: band rehearsal every day posted by ken k on February 24, 2004 at 19:25:14:

Coming from the band everyday system, I don't know how the every other day folks do it. My HS director always kept it interesting. The beginning of the school year consisted of us playing scales and doing scales in rounds and voicing chords of various types (Maj., Min, Half Dim, Full Dim, Augm.) and tuning with one of those Petersen tone generators that generates that nearly pure sine wave tone that easily penetrates the skull. After that we went through the marching band stuff (remember this is the beginning of the year) and then sight read for about the last 10-15 minutes.

After a while, we got less of the beginning routine and started into sightreading. The only thing that was a constant was that tone generator. Instead of runnning around with people playing for the Strob-O-Conn, we just tried to match the tone generator. I came to find out later how much faster and more effecient that method becomes.

To keep things interesting, we sightread or revisited not to often rehearsed music every day. Not only did us kids stay interested, we also read the contest stuff better than most bands played there prepared pieces. Plus we had about a dozen pieces that we could have played for contest and done reasonably well.

That was for regular concert band, jazz band was much more intensive. My band folder had 30-40 pieces in it at all times. The Jazz band folder had 100-140 pieces in it at all times. He did have a student librarian for every class.

I was with this director when he was still "young" as a band director (6-7 years of experience). Now he always has his bands at state contest getting highest marks. The individual students are always making all-state and all-county and all of that other stuff.

Don't think that all of this was for the students. The director did this to keep himself on his toes. Conducting stuff like "El Salon Mexico" isn't exactly easy for any conductor on the fly. He was keeping his conducting chops in shape as well as our reading and interpretation abilities.


Follow Ups: