Marching band

 Marching band

I’m going to talk about the Marching band. It’s the place where I spend up to 30 hours a week working as hard as I can to make sure that our final show is perfect. It’s where I go to see the cringe band kids do the weirdest things, where I go to get yelled at a lot by my techs, where I go to lose a lot of homework time stressing with others. It’s also the place where I’ve met many friends that I will never forget. It’s a place I will always cherish even after I graduate, but it wasn’t always like that.

 

I still remember the first time I had to go to a marching band. It was band camp, the two weeks long hardcore grind about 12 hours a day right at the end of summer. Going to band camp would be the first time I would meet anyone from my school, until this year I had gone to Saint Bridgets. Saint Bridgets is a very small private school where the size of my grade was about 40 kids. In the seven years I went Saint Bridgets, I never really got passionate about anything. Yeah, and I spent seven years there. I didn’t want that to happen this time, going to high school was like a new beginning for me, and it all started with band camp. I still remember how nervous I was the first time I was in the band room, the seniors looked so much older than me,

it was hard to believe we were going to the same school. Everyone was moving with a purpose and I had no idea where I was supposed to go or who I was supposed to talk to, luckily I stood out as being confused and one of the upperclassmen guided me to the percussion section. This is when I met who I thought to be some of the coolest people I’d ever meet.

 

As a side note, in marching band there are two percussion sections, the battery, who played the snare, tenor and bass drums and the pit was where everyone played literally every other percussion instrument, and I mean literally everything. It was from drumset, tambourine, to marimba and a lot more.

 

Anyway, I wanted to be in the battery, and so during the first day of Band Camp I played bass. Now if I’m going to be completely honest I had no idea what I was doing and when we got to show music I didn’t actually know how to read different notes, so I was making it up as I went and nobody called me out but let’s just say I wasn’t in battery after that day. Now I was in the pit, I was a little bit annoyed to be honest. One of the main parts of the front ensemble is the mallets section, but I didn’t care about mallets and I didnt even know how to read music notes. To be honest, I was contemplating quitting at that time. Luckily I didn’t.

 

One of the days in band camp I was sitting down while playing my tambourine part, when my instructor called me out. I stood up and he said If i’m not going to be sitting during the show then I shouldn’t be sitting during rehearsal. I glanced to my side to see my entire section looking at me with a little bit of “dude, come on..” in their eyes. It was this exact moment where I realized, marching band isn’t the normal boring band that I’ve been in for years. I stopped daydreaming for the rest of rehearsal and I watched my peers and I saw the passion and determination they presented. They weren’t just reading music off a page and playing some notes, they were performing it, and performing it as a group! When it was time for lunch I would see them still practicing doing reps on reps and that was what got me going.

 

The upperclassmen were the people who inspired me to follow in their footsteps, Sure I wasn’t in the battery playing the cool drums, and I wasn’t marching either. But it didn’t mean that I didn’t have an important part to play in the band. From that point on I wanted to be passionate enough about what im playing that I could convince someone else like me to do the same. I strived to be what the upperclassmen were to me for others, and I love the section I’m in, in fact I wouldn’t have it any other way.