Day of Percussion ~Morning

Awesome Snare Drum picture from this place!

5:36 Saturday morning, March 19, 2016. You would find a certain someone flying out of bed in a record time of maybe two seconds. Saturday morning was a very important morning if you were a student of the one and only percussion teacher, Mr. Hughes. He made it very clear that if you weren't on one of the two busses parked around the back of the high school by 6:45am Saturday morning, you would be left in Park City while the rest of the students who were actually on time would be brought down to Draper for the very important Day of Percussion competition. So waking up at 5:30 was imperative.

Long story short, I got to school on time. Me and two of my other friends carpooled, and so we all got on the same bus at the same time. We ended up riding the bus that contained mostly Percussion 3 and 4 students instead of the bus that had most of our friends and classmates on it. It didn't really matter to us, we had each other.

A fifty-ish minute bus ride to the high school in Draper was boring. We were all way too tired to hold up a good conversation, so we ended up just playing on our phones the whole time.

By the time we were actually approaching the high school, and the four of us (Sam, Lauren, Whitney and I) started to come more alive along with the sunshine that started to peak over the mountains.

It took the busses a little while to figure out where to drop us off, but we got to home base in good time. We got there before Mr. Hughes, who was in Draper since the night before, and when he did show up he quickly rounded everyone's attention and got everyone to help out set up the drums and stuff that we brought down from our school so we could have access to them for our songs. Once that was all good, the first performing group quickly hustled everything down to their room.

My first song, Strata, was played at 9:40am. That gave me some good time to go around and watch the other groups perform first. Our school wasn't the only one there, there were lots of other people around from different schools with different percussion backgrounds.

I was not in my right mind on Saturday. Which leads me to conclude that six days of nonstop human interaction leading up to the Day of Percussion wasn't a good idea. At the beginning of Strata is a Marimba 3 solo, and I happen to be one of the two present Marimba 3 players. The fact that I didn't play on the same marimba as normal was probably another reason I was thrown off. I hit a couple wrong keys at the beginning, but quickly got back on track after that reality check.

After that, my friends and I had some good time on our hands until lunch. About an hour to watch whoever and stroll around to hear what we can hear. We ended up helping Mr. Hughes at 'headquarters' the half an hour leading up to lunch. It was pretty chill.

Being slightly over word count for this post, I've decided to split it into two posts.

To be continued...