Our Winipeg Wake Up Call

So another yearly ritual is done...  The 2006 Winnipeg Scottish Festival.

Overall it was a fun experience.  We had a good time together as a band.  Saturday ended up being a VERY busy day for me, I played for 2 drummers, 2 competitions and 3 band competitions.  Rough, especially as my reed was having rough troubles all along.  But I won't make excuses.

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Day starts off with me going to register and the WSF people start off telling me that if we don't pay, nobody plays!  It was not a pretty sight, they really don't like us there - it's obvious.  But again, I'm not gonna make excuses. I don't want to retell the story, but needless to say, we're not well received there.  Too bad it's the only competition for us to really go to.  Wish we had other options.

So I go from that to playing for Cassie and Joe.  Did pretty well... for solos, I woulda been dead last, but Joe ended up with a 5th place.  Good for him, it was his first competition!

A bit of a reprieve for a while and then it was playing for my competitions.  The neat thing was that I was competing against Peter.  I saw Pete's secretary the other day and she said I should kick his ass.  Turns out I did!  He was REALLY REALLY sounding good before we left.  But I played really well, at least I thought so.  But I ended up getting a 5th for my strathspey/reel and 6th for my march.  I thought I played much better than that, but oh, well.  Weirdly Pete didn't place

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Then it was time for the band competitions... well we could have done much better, but ... it was a great learning experience.  We got spanked!  But the bar was REALLY brought up.  Some of the bands really were smoking that day.  But... again, I'm not making excuses.

Results:

Slow March - 6/8:  4th place - apparently they didn't liek the seconds for the slow march... 'too busy' grr... oh, well.  Would have liked to got 2nd place to get 'our' trophy again... heh

QMM: 4th place - had a few new people playing with us for this one, so we did pretty well considering

Medley: 3rd place - cool!

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The cool thing about the weekend I think was that we got to talk to the guy from Kinnairds, Rob.  Realy good guy, let us exchange some of his reeds we had bought previously and talked some shop with him.  Definitely throwing a lot of business his way.  I bought some fun new gadgets:  a reed protector [the piper's pal] and a new tuner!

 

So, what now... back to work.  An interview tomorrow afternoon, so I should go and prepare [some advice from Jarron].

-ry