Life of Wiley

After a disappointing week last week (for reasons that I won’t divulge here) it was great to have a good rehearsal last night. The music that we’re playing at the moment is really stretching my ability as a trumpet player. Most of what we played last night was quite loud and raucous in the trumpet [...]

One of my favourite pieces of jazz music has to be Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol‘s Caravan. It’s one of those pieces of music that’s very hard to get out of your head once it’s there. On Monday night I got to play an arrangement of Caravan at the JSU Volunteer Band. It was amazing, [...]

As I indicated in this post I had two new mouthpieces for Christmas, a shallow one for playing the trumpet lead in the wind band and a deeper one for the more classical playing that I do in the brass ensemble. The reason for the new mouthpieces was so that they match the rim size [...]

was all I could last when I practised the trumpet last night for the first time since before Christmas! I hope I do better tonight as I have a rehearsal with my friends at the brass ensemble. At least I’ll be able to give my new mouthpiece a proper work out. Also on a band [...]

Recently I decided to end my playing commitment with Watford Band as I felt that I couldn’t play to the best of my ability and to what the band required given my limited ability to practice. Since leaving I’ve taken up playing with a volunteer military wind band at the NATO Joint Services Unit in [...]

I took the plunge yesterday and made the new band website live. There were a couple of minor problems that have mostly been sorted now. The one remaining problem concerns the map on the directions page. This is powered by Google Maps but doesn’t seem to display in Internet Explorer. It works fine in Firefox [...]

The rehearsal with the band last night was excellent. It was lead by Glyn Williams, the Principle Euphonium of Foden’s and he took the band through some interesting exercises based on a hymn tune just to get us playing together, not only starting the notes together but also finishing together too. Unfortunately I arrived a [...]

It appears that my gripes about how rehearsals were being taken have been reinforced by others in the band and the recently rehearsals have been a lot better, though there’s always a danger of it slipping back through habit. I’m particularly looking forward to next Tuesday’s rehearsal as we have members of Fodens band coming [...]

I’m not usually one to blow my own trumpet, but last night I played my own trumpet pretty sweetly! It’s been a while since I’ve managed to get a decent tone out of the trumpet; I don’t usually have a problem with that on the cornet, but the trumpet does seem more hit and miss. [...]

Had quite a good weekend at Butlins in Skegness this last weekend. I was there with Watford Band to compete in the Mineworkers Open Contest. Unfortunately the band didn’t do too well coming 12th out of 14. However, we played quite well (even though I did miss an exposed bar!) and fell down mainly on [...]