Posts tagged "Personal"

Those who know me well know that I really, really hate to throw away data. I have all kinds of stuff sitting around on my home server, some of it dating all the way back to middle school, and most of it of very little interest to anyone today (even me). Well, the other day I stumbled across something that was sort of interesting: trombone practice recordings I'd made early on in college.

For as long as I've been a musician, my teachers have told me that one of the best ways to discover where you need to improve is to record yourself playing; for some reason, however, I've rarely bothered.

It's partly a discipline problem—I've never been as consistent a practicer as I should be—but I think it may also have something to do with my data obsession. When I make a recording, I don't just listen to it a few times, note the things I need to fix, and then throw it away. No, I think to myself, "what if I want to listen back to this five years from now and hear if I've improved?" And so I keep it, and not just as an MP3…no, I keep the original, huge, lossless WAV file. For-ev-er.

Now, this used to take up one heck of a lot of space, and a lot of manual backup effort too. As a result, I would rarely do it …too much effort to archive a daily audio practice session when I've got other things I need to store in that precious space.

These days I don't worry about that, for two reasons:

1. Storage is cheap. I have a 500GB RAID-1 network attached storage device in my living room. If it fills up (which won't be happening soon), I'll just get bigger drives; they don't cost that much in the long run.
2. Not all compression is lossy. If I re-encode my original WAVs to lossless FLACs via some automated process, I can store them in half the space and still play them back without uncompressing …no data loss, and very little loss of convenience.

As a result, I've started recording my practice sessions again. This has had a few important benefits:

1. I can listen to my playing after the fact, discovering issues I didn't notice the first time around.
2. I actually practice regularly, since I don't want my archives to be missing a day when (if?) I look back into them five years from now.
3. Also, I've found it a lot easier to notice the negative effects of skipping a day of practicing.

But at the end of the day, the best benefit is that I'm starting to recover some of my old improv chops. I've still got a long ways to go, but it's really encouraging to feel somewhat skilled at the trombone again.

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Well, my first semester of jazz arranging at UNT is drawing to a close; it's been a great experience, and I'm looking forward to doing some big band writing next semester. I feel like I've learned a heck of a lot, and gotten over some of the hurdles that usually get in my way when I want to write something. So that's good, right?

Anyway, I thought I'd go ahead and post a couple of the better recordings; one of the nice things about studying at UNT is that there are plenty of musicians available that can read your charts down for you without any trouble. These recordings are mostly performed by my fellow class members; I haven't listed them here, but if you're one of them and you'd like me to list your name, just say so in the comments (and feel free to link to your own website as well).

I'm not terribly proud of my own playing on these, but that's not what they're for anyway …this is about the writing, and I think I did OK on that front. Here goes:

• Sax Soli for Joy Spring
• Circular (original composition)
• The More I See You

Tonight Jamie and I went to see the One O'Clock Lab Band's fall concert, with guest artist John Mosca, trombonist and co-leader of the Village Vanguard jazz orchestra. I don't think I'd been to a One O'Clock concert since I graduated a few years back, which is odd given how much I like jazz, and how close we've lived to UNT this whole time. But no matter; it was an excellent concert, and I hope to keep going back.

It did put some things in perspective as far as my playing goes—if tonight's trombone section is any indicator, I probably shouldn't have ever been in the band myself. Don't get me wrong, I can play the trombone…but I think I was never quite disciplined enough to play as cleanly and effectively as these guys did.

Since I am taking jazz classes again, I'm hoping to improve; once I get started with lessons and ensemble playing again I'm sure some of it will come back to me…but not without a good bit more shedding than I did last time around. Here's hoping for a better sense of discipline in the semesters to come.

This has been a year of busy weekends for Jamie and I, but these last couple of days have been a nice exception, especially after how busy last weekend was.

Late Friday afternoon I took off a little early from work so I could put together a simple patch for one Zend Framework issue; I can happily say I've participated in my first ZF bug hunt. I don't get to work much with Zend Framework in my day job, but it's always fun when I have enough free time available to contribute something, even if it's only two or three lines of code.

Saturday, I got up early to take the dogs in for a haircut; PetSmart did a very good job, especially on Wembley:

After that, we met up with Jamie's parents in Mesquite for a Gilmer ISD playoff football game. I'm not really much of a football fan myself, but it's fun to spend an afternoon out in the fresh air with the wife and in-laws …and the game caught my attention a few times, so it must have been good :)

Yesterday, meanwhile, was another great day at church; we played in the orchestra in the morning and then helped lead a combined kindergarten/preschool choir rehearsal. I think we're getting pretty good at wearing the kids out towards the beginning of practice; they tend to rehearse better if you give them a little bit of crazy right when they get there. I'm really impressed with how well they're handling the rests; we're doing a medley, and most of the kids stood absolutely still and silent between songs. We still need to work on the words a bit, but once that's taken care of I think we're going to have a great concert!

So, I mentioned the other day that I'm going to DrupalCamp Austin this weekend, and that's certainly still true…however, it's been more of an adventure than I planned.

Jamie and I took off this afternoon around 5:00, excited for the weekend down south. The drive went well at first, but I think we might ought to have turned back when we saw the road on fire. Or when later on, our car just decided that accelerating wasn't hip anymore, and that it'd be better if we just sat by the side of the highway in the dark for awhile. (Despite several calls to the local highway patrol, nobody came to help us until we called the towing company instead.) Or when we ended up at the towing company office, and later at the neighborhood Sonic, with a pile of luggage, two small dogs, and no more car to speak of.

Fortunately, Jamie's brother and sister-in-law were kind enough to come pick us up and take us the rest of the way…so unless today takes another strange turn, I'll still be at DrupalCamp come morning.

Here's hoping :)

This afternoon Jamie and I co-directed another session of the Denton Bible kindergarten choir. We took the kids "Christmas caroling" around various empty classrooms as a way of teaching them some new Christmas songs without losing track of their attention spans…turned out to be a great way to keep them on task. We've also been teaching them about various kinds of musical opposites: fast/slow, loud/soft, notes/rests, and so forth. I don't really remember what kinds of concepts I was learning at that age, but they seem to be getting it pretty well.

I really enjoy working with these kids, for quite a few reasons. For starters, I absolutely know that the work we're doing in there is making a difference. We're not just teaching them about music; we're giving them a reason to use it. A few weeks back some of the kids sang on the way out: "Love one another as Jesus loves you." We taught them the song, but we didn't tell them to sing it right then; they just wanted to. That's a very encouraging thing to see; they may not understand it completely, but it'll stick with them until they do, and that's an incredible blessing for them and for those of us teaching the songs.

I'm also learning a lot about how I relate to children. I've always been a bit awkward around little kids; I never know exactly what to say or do, or how to say or do it. For some reason, I'm always scared that they're going to judge me or tease me or something like that…which is sort of stupid of me, considering (a) it doesn't make much sense to fear the opinions of someone who's only been alive 5 years, and (b) these kids haven't really learned that behavior yet anyway (it's not like they're printer-puncher). No, none of those fears have turned out to be justified; these kids actually seem to want to know what we're teaching them, and they consider it important to respect their teachers (even if they don't quite know how just yet).

I suppose all this is part of the reason why Jesus encouraged us to come to him like little children. Children definitely aren't perfect, but they understand that they are in need, and that gives them a distinct advantage over guys like me when it comes to learning important lessons.

Beyond that, it's been very encouraging to me to see this kind of thing valued by the church. I've already blogged a bit on my other site about adults' participation in church music, but I think the issues apply to children's music ministry as well. Kids need to understand and appreciate the joy of serving God in this way, and having a program like this is one of the best ways to teach them that. Hopefully we will continue to do so effectively throughout the rest of the year.

Most of my blogs are distinctly lacking in personal narrative, probably because I feel like I always need to say "something important" (it is the internet, after all). This, however, is not one of those "something important" sorts of posts…

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