 The Oboe BBoard
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Author: vboboe
Date: 2006-09-02 03:31
Now that September's here and a new school & music season is under way, i wonder what does an average week, month, year look like in the life of our board's oboe players of different playing levels and different kinds of playing commitments?
As adult p/t oboe student & community player entering year 3, my weeks & year revolve around full time day-job (musically unrelated) with two evenings a week committed to oboe lesson and band. Weekends have time for 'heavy-duty' (long) practice towards lesson & band, evening before either is fairly intensive too, and remaining evenings are 'light' (short) practice doing multiple reps of difficult passages or other tough technical exercises.
Either Friday or Saturday evenings are usually good for transcribing difficult new music to software for playback practice at slower tempo, running through the whole thing several times until really know the part and train fingers on it.
In the past two years our intermediate band has done a Christmas concert in early December, a Spring concert in April, our 'exam' adjudicated band festival in May, and a wind-up social band festival in June. From time to time we do smaller gigs in between. All of these are in our local area. Summer's off-season, but some of our regular band members like to practice together once a week to stay in playing shape. We start rehearsals again mid-September.
Last year i was buying most of my reeds and supplementing with occasional playable DIY reeds. This summer i've tied several dozen blanks ready to make reeds during the year, and hope i'll be turning out more & better quality playables as the year progresses, so have to fit more time for amateur carpentry into weekly schedule somehow.
Hobby oboe fills a niche in my life, and i hope when my time to retire from day-job rolls around, i'll have an established something to keep me busy. Other voluntary jobs supporting the band become more feasible then, too.
So, what does an 'oboe year' look like for the rest of you?
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What does a year look like? new |
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vboboe |
2006-09-02 03:31 |
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Shelley |
2006-09-06 16:27 |
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The Clarinet Pages
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