It’s been a while since I posted here, mainly because things have been manic at home and at work. Things seem to be settling down again though.
One of the things that’s been happening at the Wiley household is that we’ve had decorators in to prepare the spare bedroom for our new arrival. The date we’ve been given is May 11th and we’ve finally come up with a boy’s name. So if it’s a boy he will be Isaac James, and a girl, she will be Eva Mai.
With the decorators in we’ve had to move the PC and desk to our garden room downstairs but we’ve left the DSL router and server laptop in the room and asked the decorator to work around it. This he has done but there has been some downtime. Unfortunately it occurred whilst we were aware and I wasn’t able to rectify it until we got back, so it looks like 4 days were lost. However, I don’t think it was down to anything the decorator did.
I’ve also been working out how to bring the DSL from the phone point in the bedroom down to the garden room. There are plenty of phone sockets in the garden room, but these are connected to a now disconnected second phone line. What I’ve done is snipped the second phone line at the back of the house where it goes under the soffits and fed this into the air grill of the bedroom and joined it to some internal cable that runs into the phone socket. At the moment it doesn’t work but I think that this is because I need to put a splitter on the phone sockets downstairs. I’ll try this tonight and see how I get on.
It seems quite an odd arrangement as the DSL is on a different wire pair than the phones. Don’t know why BT installed it this way as I thought the point of DSL was that it could all run over the same pair.
Yesterday’s recording session was excellent. It took a while to get going whilst the gear was set up and adjustments made to mic positioning. They had to get the trombones to sit quite apart from the rest of the band as they were being picked up on all the mics and they had to shield the drum kit as the cymbals were also being picked up on all the mics.
We managed to lay down all the tracks we intended to do on the day, these were:
Goldcrest – a march
Misty – Flugel Horn solo
Born Free – theme to the film
Barnard Castle – a march
La Mourisque – a fanfare
Floreat Watfordia – a march
Everyone really enjoyed the recording session, it was nice to do something where the pressure was off and everyone was relaxed. I took my video camera with me to record some of what went on and hope to create a short video (a “rockumentary”!) to put up on the band’s website soon. There’s also a few pictures that I’ll upload sooner.
Argh! BST = Bl**dy Summer Time!
I appear to have got up an hour early (even after compensating for the BST switch). The reason? I went to bed last night after Louise but unbeknown to me she’d already adjusted the bedside clock, so I went ahead and moved it on another hour!
Oh well, it gives me time to write something here, and have a cup of tea, and prepare for the band’s CD recording.
Last week Lou and I went to Berkhamsted’s Pink Orchid, a Thai restaurant, with our friends who are expecting their first child soon after we have our second. Naturally this was the main topic of conversation, in particular choosing names. I don’t know if everyone has the same experience but here are some things we have to take into account when choosing a new name for a baby:
So far, for our new baby we’ve come up with Eva Mai if she’s a girl and Matthew if he’s a boy. Mai comes from Lou’s Nan, but that’s the only deference we’ve made to family names. Eva can’t be shortened, but Matthew could. Haven’t come to any conclusions on a boy’s middle name yet, though I’m not sure why we need to have one as they’re useless anyway.
Euan really impressed me the other day. For his birthday he’d received some tablets that you put into the bath and it changes the colour of the water. I put one in for him and made the water pink, so while he was having his bath I asked him what things he could think of that were pink. Whilst he was thinking about it I found myself struggling to come up with anything other than flowers when out of the blue Euan announced that flamingoes were pink! It completely bowled me over, it amazes me just what he retains. It wasn’t anything we’ve taught him so he must have picked it up at school.
On a completely unrelated note, we’re off out to a Thai restaurant tonight with a friend and old colleague of mine from my SCO days. I’m really looking forward to it because we haven’t seen each other for a while and his wife is going to be giving birth to their first baby around the time we’re having our second, and also because I haven’t had Thai for ages.
Were there any post contest blues at our first rehearsal since the contest on Sunday? Well if there were I didn’t notice them. We had a good rehearsal with all but one turning up (and he didn’t turn up because he’d injured his foot and couldn’t drive!). Usually after a contest the first rehearsal is a bit light on players as they often feel the need for a break. However, we couldn’t afford any breaks this week as we’ve got the first of two recording sessions on Sunday for our upcoming CD (no title yet).
It’s a light playing order for the CD with tracks like Barnard Castle, but we’ve got some great solos going on like Basin Street Blues arranged featuring our fantastic, pro tombonist Mike Innes, and Misty featuring our flugel horn player, Dave Thomas. We’ll not be doing any of Partita but we will be playing La Mourisque which we performed at the Milton Keynes Entertainment contest in February.
All in all I’m really looking forward to it and it should be a good tonic for the band after the disappointment of the Areas on Sunday.
The big day (band wise) came and went on Sunday. We were in the first half of the 4th section draw, drawn 7th and played at around midday.
Organisationally, it went off smoothly enough everyone turned up with their instruments and music. Everyone got tickets and registration cards; no problems there.
Big problem was nerves. Not me personally, I’d expended all my nerves on getting everyone registered and there. But people have told me that they felt the band was a bit on edge when we took to the stage. And so it would seem as we certainly didn’t do ourselves justice on Sunday. I don’t know how many times we’ve played Partita in rehearsals, sometimes badly but sometimes very well; so it was very disappointing to put in a bad performance on the day. It wasn’t bad because people didn’t know their parts or were playing wrong notes, it was bad because people were nervous, so they weren’t confident, so entries were a bit ragged, bits weren’t together. The adjudicator summed it up in his comments as being untidy.
Overall we came 19th out of 21. Disappointing as I said, because if we’d played it as well as we could I think we may have been capable of a top 10 finish. But that’s the nature of contesting, and why I don’t like them. They are not a measure of how good a band is, only a measure of how good a band is on a particular piece on a particular day.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, there are a number of positive aspects to be taken from the experience. First of all, the fact that we got a band there and made up almost entirely of the band’s own members (the only “ringer” being the 2nd horn player transferred from a band not contesting), is a testament to the recovery of the band over the last 15 months. Secondly, we know we can play the piece 100x better than we did on the day, so the fact that we came 19th is not a reflection of how good the band can be. Thirdly, by the nature of the contest environment, the adjudicator can only really write up negative criticism, so when he makes no mention of dynamics that must mean that they were spot on and this is something that Martyn, our MD, has been drilling into us leading up to the contest, so all that hard work paid off and the band has improved through the experience of the contest.
People will always tend to make mistakes when they are nervous and there’s little that can be done about it except putting it behind us, moving on to the next event (a CD recording for us) and hopefully through more experience and exposure nervousness can be overcome. And next year we’ll try and organise a rehearsal room for the morning of the contest to blow any pre-contest nerves away.
There are four of us in the Wiley family in Watford. There's me Greg, my wife Louise, our son Euan and our daughter Eva. There's also our cat Fundi. You'll find a bit more information on our about us page.