Day 60

Date: July 13, 2011
Time: 10:46pm (CST)
Playing on iTunes: "Forever Young" by Rod Stewart


Location: Minneapolis, MN Day 2

Welcome to day 2 of rehearsals!! All these days are very long days compared to what we've been used to on tour. Very similar days to spring training if you remember the very early posts. In the schedule above, you can see what our rehearsal days are mostly like. We had a lot to get done today so we needed the time to perfect it all.


Last night the pit stored their instruments in a shed down at the turf field that we have ensemble at. In the morning we had to travel back up the hill away from the turf field to rehearse as a section. Check out the hill we had to go up...luckily we're used to moving lots of equipment up enormous hills...

As different subsections of the pit (percussion, keyboard - marimbas, vibraphones, xylophone, electronics, etc) have to work on things, other sections may not have to do anything. So during that down time, the rack players took their "show" cymbals (since we have a set of show and a set of practice cymbals) into the shower and shined them. They use a product called "Barkeepers Friend". This gets rid of all the tarnish, odd stains, and finger prints of the cymbal to make them perfect. Check out Justine and Iris' great work on shining the cymbals!

As I said from yesterday, we have a lot of little things to change throughout the show to perfect it. Today before ensemble rehearsal, the pit got together with the color guard to work on a small change during the keyboard feature. The color guard has some more crazy moves they're going to be doing during our pit feature. It didn't take too long, but we needed to make sure that the pit and color guard did it separately from the brass and battery so to not spend any of their precious time. All of the changes so far seem to be making the show work out really well. I'm excited to see what's going to happen when the crowd sees what we've done!!

CPit 2011 Spotlight

So, I've decided to add a new aspect to my blog...at least for 15 days. I am going to introduce everyone in the pit. Each day I will interview a different person in the pit and explain a little about them, how they got with the Cadets and what their feelings about the season are. As far as order, I am just going from one side of the pit to the other starting with Justine who plays rack on my side of the pit. Enjoy!

Justine Lempicki (21-years-old) grew up in Dudley, MA and was an aspiring artist for 12-years. After going through high school, she moved on to UMass Amherst as undeclared for her freshman year. Then she proceeded to become a music major. After two years as a percussion major she decided to change her major to Psychology with a minor in music. She is an avid percussionist who has performed with the UMass Minuteman Marching Band and the UMass Marimba Ensembles. In 2008 she played marimba at the Spartans Drum and Bugle Corps out of Nashua, NH, and in 2009 she played vibraphone at the Citations Drum and Bugle Corps out of Burlington, MA. She took the summer of 2010 off to work and then decided to audition for the Cadets for the 2011 summer. She always wanted to audition for the Cadets and this was her chance! After a long audition process she finally made her spot on the rack. As you can see to the left, the rack is incorporated with lots of different percussion instruments. She uses her concert percussion experience at UMass to approach all the different instruments on the rack. Justine says, "I'm fired up to see what the rest of the summer brings. And I'm enjoying having opportunities to perform for amazing audiences."


For anyone out there reading my blog, feel free to put your name down as one of my 'Followers' if you haven't already. It's great to see more and more people reading the blog. It gives me inspiration everyday to write my blog. Also I would like to say thank you to anyone and everyone who is out there that gets a chance to read my blog, I really appreciate my online 'audience'.

Thought of the Day: "Choose your attitude. Anything you do, think, feel is a choice. You can choose to have a bad day or a good day, you can choose to be happy or sad, you can choose to give up or keep going. Just make sure that whatever choice you make that you know it is a choice." - Fish Philosophy