Singapore Youth Festival Central Judging, yes for pri schs.

Tml is going to be SYF Central Judging of Chinese Orchestras (Primary Schools) and Coral is having their shot at about 3/4 pm. So tml’s day is booked, and i won’t be attending music appreciation class (for the 3rd lesson as of now…) and helping yan heng instead.

So preparations were done today afternoon after choir, when i rushed down to swee lee to purchase the contact microphone extension for my (stolen) korg tuner, and then rushed down to Synwin, where to my horror, they were having a stock check and nothing could be purchased from them. The boss, i think his name is Reuben, realize my desperation of needing to purchase some peg drops to tune cellos, and kindly explanined to me, that the problem was not about not using peg drops, but about position of the strings at the pegs and how to properly tune a cello without destroying one.

 Fortunately, a taxi trip $9.60 saved my lateness when i arrived at coral at about 3.15 pm and began to tune the cellos, my god i suceeded, and managed to tune 3 cellos to close to perfection.

Then came the problem, i didn’t know how to restring erhus.

Whenever one problem is solved, another one seems to accompany.

After a try, i decided to give up a handed the job over to the TICs (who themselves struggled). And i went through Meng Chai with them, and yanheng still seemed to struggle with most of the parts. Lucky some still sounded pretty good (hey come on he started to learn just before CNY…) Then i need to praise the gaosheng player desmond for having improved his rhythm and played much better today. And today, i bought 3 packets of sweets for them (actually costed $4.70 in total only) and they were quite delighted.

I guess for primary school kids you need some other strategies. They are more inquisitive and willing to learn, but you need some things to keep them at attention (sweets in this case). Then for secondary school kids, esp. those who just began to learn, they tend to be stubborn, difficult, and often uninterested and not willing to try. It seems that if a band kid doesn’t wanna go for band, reprimanding him/her really doesn’t work, they need to be… self-enlightened. That was my case.

I said before in my blog i think, once you’ve learnt to love something from hating it, you’ll love it for life.

Then for JC students (i’m this level), the only reason we are still in band/co/choir is because we liked it. So we’re not that difficult. Lol.

After that was CO as well, rushed over to SYCO from 6 pm when coral ended, and sat in at about 7.05 pm, technically i wasn’t late since Mr Yao did not start yet. Today was JJL (a common short form i use with suona friends to talk about “将军令”) and 古槐寻根, the drone-bagpipe sounding song with a sentimental introduction.

Also after realizing Meng Jie’s suona concert was $20 ($28 before discount), i am considering not attending. It is beyond my budget for a concert frankly.

Anyway time to pick-up the method of stringing erhus.

See you soon.

~ by tysploevil2005 on March 31, 2008.