As you know I’m playing with 2 bands.  Brighouse and Rastrick as well as The Lindley Band.  The rehearsal schedule is T, Th (7:45-9:45) and M,W (8-9:45) respectively.  So I can practice 2 or 3 hours during the day and then go to rehearsal 4-nights a week.  This is proving to be a ton of playing. 

That said, I can’t begin to tell you how nice it is not to have regular rehearsal on the weekends.  As I thought about our schedule with ABB, I was struck by how painful it is for some folks to get to rehearsals on Sunday nights and how nice it is here to be totally free on Sunday (except for the odd trip to France or a show). 

For me it breaks down to this:  You can be really busy 5-days of the week, with rehearsals on 2 of those nights and then you get a true weekend.  Further, if you have a conflict for a gig on one of the nights you can probably still make the other rehearsal.  

People here are in and out depending on their playing requirements and their jobs.  This week in Lindley the 3rd man down has to work night-shift so we’ll be down to 2 in the front row.  No worries, he’ll be back for 2 rehearsals next week.

Say you have a Saturday show, fine, you still get a full day off from any playing responsibilities or work on Sunday.  Our current ABB Sunday night rehearsal schedule allows for us to have only 1-day a week off (from work, playing etc.) even in the best of circumstances (i.e. no Sat gig).  Here however when we don’t have a Saturday concert we are off for 2 full days on the weekend.  This weekend I’m off from both bands.  We’ll go to a church party on Friday night and then head up to the Yorkshire Dales and South Pennine Mountains on Saturday AM for the rest of the weekend.  I’ll practice Saturday AM and then leave the horns here as they won’t fit into the very small car we will be renting.  I’ll play agin on Sunday evening when we return.

Yes it turns out that Tuesday and Thursday are long days and Wednesday and Friday mornings are a bit painful, but instead of 6-days/week with something to do (like we do it in ABB) these guys only have 5 days/week committed to work and/or band. 

Just consider some of our players in ABB:   For example Bryan E. has 7AM rehearsal on Sunday morning for church.  Then he has to come out to Rowan Sunday night.  He doesn’t really get “the day of rest”.  Others have family dinners every Sunday afternoon (or want to watch American style football) and have to leave early to get to rehearsal.  I can just tell you it is really nice here being relaxed on Sunday.  And if you want to take a day off the chops you can do that on Sunday too.  Yes for contest B&R did at least one double rehearsal on Sunday (am and pm) but that doesn’t happen every week.

I’ll give you more perspective later but for now I’m very interested what you may think about trying this.  The guys in these bands travel up to 300 miles round trip to play with these groups.  The tough Wednesday and Friday mornings seem a good trade.  One thing we could try would be Tuesday and Thursday (7:45-9:45) with me taking the Tuesday rehearsals and Sal doing Thursday.  For contest we just add a few extra Sunday AM/PM and Monday PM rehearsals like usual and we are sorted…….

That is all for now.  Comments, questions, and ideas are ALWAYS welcome.  I had almost 80 hits to the blog yesterday which is nice to see but you should let me know if I’m getting you the information you are interested in.  If you have specific questions let me know and I’ll try to answer them…..

Pictures of France and video of the girls feeding the ducks should be up soon.

Cheers,

B-