Saturday...

Ah... Saturday.

I love Saturdays.

I love Saturdays because they are mostly the days where I actually get to relax, on leave or otherwise.

Generally speaking, I spend my Saturdays just sitting about the room, reading, playing some games, or rehearsing some music. If I'm slated to play for church service on that Sunday, then the Saturday before was often when I spent some time rehearsing the pieces, annotating [in pencil] on the score problematic areas that I need to pay closer attention to. That occurs often for Hymns of Praise for rhythm because for some reason, none of the eighth/sixteenth notes have connecting beams. This meant that the usual visual cues of how the rhythm look like are pretty wonky. Thankfully, there's 简谱 at the top, and it allowed me to ``cheat'' and grok the necessary rhythms as needed. As for The Wilds Songbook, the problematic areas proved to be some of the more unfamiliar interval progressions that seemingly defied what my inner music voice was telling me, where I ``knew'' that the next note should be this, but the score laughs at me with a ``Nope!'' and makes it that.

There's TGCO rehearsal in the evening, and I usually turn up about 30 min earlier to ``warm up'' outside of the music room, mostly because my 笛子 is literally powerful enough that warming up indoors while the other folks may want to do their warm up is not a good idea.

Well, I call it ``warm up'', but it really depends on my mood in terms of what I would play. Most times it was an actual warm up in the sense of playing etudes to set up my embouchure and limber up my fingers. Sometimes I would take the time to play through some repertoire pieces. Or maybe I would do like what I did earlier today, where I sight-read a new piece (《月夜》by 胡结续). There are also times where I just noodled on my 笛子 in a ``head empty no thoughts'' sort of way.

Today's rehearsal was fun in a couple of ways. We finally have something that resembles a proper 二胡 section, which is remarkable because our 二胡 section had been decimated when most of the regulars disappeared after COVID-19 (some got married, some developed different interests; it's the usual attrition issues that got accelerated by the pandemic nonsense). Granted, the section was made up of really new and really green players, it was definitely better than nothing. Hopefully this first performance gives them enough of an interest to stay around, level up their skills, and continue playing.

The other fun thing was that I finally had a reason to learn the E₇ fingering on the concert flute. I mean, I have consistently used D₇ on Aurelia before (it's basically the 5′ in 筒音 as 5͵ for when I'm playing the part of the 梆笛 while on concert flute), but have not really had the need to go for E₇ until today (because I needed to play a 6′ in 筒音 as 5͵).

Of course Aurelia can have that note appear---she's a well-made Muramatsu flute after all. It's really more on my getting used to the specific embouchure, air stream direction, and the amount of force to push, transiting smoothly from the prior B₆ to the E₇.

And that's about all I want to talk about for now. The other thing that happened this day was more progression in Halls of Torment, but I suppose it's getting a little too repetitive to keep talking about that.

Till the next update then.