Wednesday 11th February - Day 3

Hellooo, yet another busy day complete! Can't believe we're now past half way in the project and we've done so much but still have a lot of practicing to do before our performance on Friday! (Butler's Bar in King Charles Court at 12)

Today saw our composer head off to the library to continue working on one of the arrangements whilst the rest of us carried on getting familiar with the large variety of trumpets - it was productive, I promise. By playing through the pieces we intend to put into the big arrangement, we were able to work out which instruments to use for each section and relay the information to Sandy to incorporate into his arranging. We also had a new addition to the fun - I don't know what it is called but it's basically a trumpet version of a french or tenor horn! It uses a french horn mouthpiece which made it pretty difficult to play for us trumpeters, and by changing the slide it could be pitched in Eb or F. We decided it won't be used in our performance but it was great fun to have a go on.

French horn/Tenor horn trumpet thing

A chat before lunch with Andrew Dunn about our upcoming performance and college life as a trumpeter gave our lips a rest and made us start thinking about the quality we're going to present but also how we're going to communicate to the audience what we've learnt from the project. All of a sudden, 2 days left doesn't seem like enough time!

By the afternoon, Sandy had arranged most of the first piece so we set to work on figuring out who would play which part and where they would need to swap instruments - quite a task we soon found out and even more part writing to do! We also played through the rest of the pieces for the second composition, but we need to get cracking to get that finished and practiced in time for Friday lunchtime...

One of the sections of the second arrangement - can you work out where it's from?

On a more personal level, we're getting to the point in the week where everyone's quite tired, so hopefully tomorrow's masterclass will rejuvenate our enthusiasm so we can return with fresh eyes to practice everything and adjust any necessary bits. More about the masterclass after it's happened tomorrow, I'm sure you'll enjoy hearing about what we've learnt from an amazing musician!