Sunday, May 24, 2009

Benchmarks of Progress ~ Success is in the Details

A week has passed since the Moose Jaw and Regina Highland games, and after recovering fully from the effort, have had time to think about the progress since Brandon, and especially last year. In 2008, we elected to "perform" at Regina and Moose Jaw Games because we only had one MSR fully operational, and people were still memorizing the medley! This year, we had all the music going, and are making a better job of it than in some time. We even managed the band's first event win since 2006! Still, a long way to go.

Band members should take some pride in what has been done so far, and they also need to prepare themselves for what is coming. We are at the point where we have accomplished a lot of good things. We have three solid contest sets, and people are performing pretty well, on good instruments. What has to happen now, is all those "deal-breaker" details need to be sorted: wee note errors, corping and unison issues, sketchy Ds and Fs in the jigs, blowing on Low A. Missing and incorrect execution equals unison issues. It all counts. It can all be heard.

As we prepare for the big contests this summer, we need to make an extra effort to work on the small stuff, to get to as many practices as possible, and to take the devil out of the details. It's our next big challenge.