Fun Story: My director kept telling me and my tenor sax buddy to play softer. No matter what we did, it wasn’t soft enough for him. So getting frustrated, I told my buddy “Dont play this time. Just fake it”
Our Band Director then informed us we sounded perfect.
To my readers: “p” means quiet, “pp” means really quiet. I’ve never seen “pppp” before haha.
On the contrast, “f” means loud, and “ffff” probably means so loud you go unconscious.
I had ffff in a piece once and my conductor told me to play as loudly as physically possible without falling off my chair…
Me and my trombone buddies had “ffff” and he sat next to me and played so hard that he fell out of his chair.
The lengths we go for music.
Okay yeah so I play the bass clarinet and the amount of air you have to move and the stiffness of the reed means it only has two settings and that is loud and louder, with an optional LOUDEST that includes a 50% probability of HORRIBLE CROAKING NOISE which is the bass equivalent of the ubiquitous clarinet shriek.
One day, when I was in concert band in high school, we got a new piece handed out for the first time, and there was a strange little commotion back in the tuba section — whispering, and pointing at something in the music, and swatting at each other’s hands all shhh don’t call attention to it. And although they did attract the attention of basically everyone else in the band, they managed to avoid being noticed by the band director, who gave us a few minutes to look over our parts and then said, “All right, let’s run through it up to section A.”
And here we are, cheerfully playing along, sounding reasonably competent — but everyone, when they have the attention to spare, is keeping an eye on the tuba players. They don’t come in for the first eight measures or so, and then when they do come in, what we see is:
[stifled giggling]
[reeeeeeally deep breath]
[COLOSSAL FOGHORN NOISE]
The entire band stops dead, in the cacophonous kind of way that a band stops when it hasn’t actually been cued to stop. The band director doesn’t even say anything, just looks straight back at the tubas and makes a helpless sort of why gesture.
In unison, the tuba players defend themselves: “THERE WERE FOUR F’S.”
FFFF is not really a rational dynamic marking for any instrument, but for the love of all that is holy why would you put it in a tuba part.
This is the best band post
Everyone else go home
Oh man, so I play trombone, and we got this piece called Florentiner Marsch by Julius Fucik, and we saw this
which is 8 fortes. We were shocked until,
that is 24 fortes who the fuck does that
Who does that?
This guy. Take a good look – that is the moustache of a man with nothing to lose.
Julius IdontgivaFucik
More like Julius Fuckit
Pyrozod’s tags for this were too hilarious not to share
I haven’t been in band for years but this made me laugh so hard
I haven’t seen this post in ages and I’m dying of laughter
I didn’t think it could get better after The Foghorn Tuba Story, but it did. It got better. Bless you, MusicTumblr.
The Confusion Hill Journal Heist aka Journey With A Stone Nacho pt5
So with my offerings in hand, or tube, I entered the gift shop to make my tribute to the Cipher Hunt treasure box. I’d been thinking about what I could offer up months in advance, and I decided that I’d print a small poster of one of the GF coloring book project pages I’ve been working on for about a year and another print of the first thing I ever designed digitally, since it happened to be a Bill poster.
When my friend Eric saw me off, he also handed me a contribution for the box. Now he’s not into Gravity Falls himself, though he’s seen every episode once with me in support of my fandom. But he’s got mad digital art skills… So he combined two of my obsessions and created a Journal page about certain mutant turtles rumored to dwell in NYC. I think it’s amazing! He even used linen paper and distressed it. Lucky for me he made me a copy too.
Whoever picks these pieces, just know that, as of writing this, they’re literally all three 2-of-a-kind pieces.
And now we come to the… unexpected twist in my relatively normal tale of making the pilgrimage to Confusion Hill up to this point.
So when I first popped to treasure box open, there was a hand-made Journal 3 notebook laying on top. You can see it in the first photo of the box open and I moved it out of the way for the rest of the photos. But when it came time to choose what I’d be taking home after I made my contributions (one for me, one for Eric). I decided that a notebook that looked like Journal 3 would be neat for drawing and taking cosplay design notes in. So I chose that for myself, and a pack of cards for Eric….
Flash forward to me sitting at the San Francisco airport waiting for my flight home. My phone is full of photos, my heart and brain are full of emotion and happy memories. But my stomach is empty. I’ve got time, so I grab a dinner at some overpriced place that has phone chargers, unzip my travel backpack and grab a pencil, ready to take notes…
Only, the notebook is NOT blank inside….
…
..
OH. MY. GOD! I’ve stolen the guestbook!!!!!
I’m looking at hundreds of entries, signatures, sketches, messages, even a photo; all filling the pages of what I thought was a blank notebook offering, but is turning out to be a message book for visitors who made the pilgrimage to see Bill’s statue.
I feel terrible! These are meant to be shared with other fans and added to, not to be taken away by one fan. But there’s not time to return it before my flight. I don’t even have a car anymore…
I stared at (what I’d mentally started dubbing) the GuestJournal hard while I ate airport dinner. By the time I reached the final pages I realized that most of them were pretty filled, but there was one last, perfect, blank place for a message of my own; the black binding page in the back.
I was going to sign it, but how was I going to make up for stealing it in the first place??
It wasn’t until I got home and slept on it and had time to do some more looking into the treasure chest online that I realized what I could do. You see, I found out that there’d been other guestbooks placed inside the box too. Obviously they were not still in the chest, so I can’t be the first person to make this mistake. Other people took home other guestbooks, or the other guestbooks filled up and were eventually removed. That made me feel a bit better. (Though I still worry, because some of the dates are really, relative to cipher hunt, old… Please don’t tell me I stole the ORIGINAL GuestJournal!)
But there is this lingering feeling I have:
These messages are meant to be shared with other fans. And since I’ve got the GuestJournal now, I’m going to do my darnedest to make sure they still can be shared!!! I’m going to archive each and every entry of the GuestJournal and post the entries online.
That way I hope that not only those who signed it will be able to see the messages of those who came before and after them, but that those without the means to travel to Confusion Hill can still read about the excitement and enthusiasm seeing Bill inspired in Cipher Hunters.
I hope that this will make up for unintentionally stealing the GuestJournal before its time was quite up.
But I do need a bit of help: I’m small potatoes. I’ll fully admit to that. I have less than a hundred followers, and many of them are from different fandoms than Gravity Falls. And in order to feel like I’m really doing due diligence, I’d like to get these pages out to a broad audience.
So, I humbly ask that if you read through the entries and are touched, please reblog. Particularly those that have reach, and a GF fanbase that will see it, please reblog these messages. I want them to be shared, to remind us all that we’re part of an amazing fandom and community. I’m tagging the user names I found within the entries and those who I follow here on Tumblr. It’s the only way I really know how to get the ball rolling, since I don’t really use other social media much. The rest is up to the GF Tumblr community. Reblog, link to Facebook, tweet, whatever you think is worth doing to let our fandom see how much Gravity Falls and the Cipher Hunt, and the pilgrimage to Bill’s statue means to us fans.
Edit: Since there has been concern about getting the GuestJournal back to its rightful place, I wanted to assure folks that it will ABSOLUTELY be sent back.
Below the cut you’ll find every entry in the GuestJournal.
The Confusion Hill Journal Heist aka Journey With A Stone Nacho pt5
So with my offerings in hand, or tube, I entered the gift shop to make my tribute to the Cipher Hunt treasure box. I’d been thinking about what I could offer up months in advance, and I decided that I’d print a small poster of one of the GF coloring book project pages I’ve been working on for about a year and another print of the first thing I ever designed digitally, since it happened to be a Bill poster.
When my friend Eric saw me off, he also handed me a contribution for the box. Now he’s not into Gravity Falls himself, though he’s seen every episode once with me in support of my fandom. But he’s got mad digital art skills… So he combined two of my obsessions and created a Journal page about certain mutant turtles rumored to dwell in NYC. I think it’s amazing! He even used linen paper and distressed it. Lucky for me he made me a copy too.
Whoever picks these pieces, just know that, as of writing this, they’re literally all three 2-of-a-kind pieces.
And now we come to the… unexpected twist in my relatively normal tale of making the pilgrimage to Confusion Hill up to this point.
So when I first popped to treasure box open, there was a hand-made Journal 3 notebook laying on top. You can see it in the first photo of the box open and I moved it out of the way for the rest of the photos. But when it came time to choose what I’d be taking home after I made my contributions (one for me, one for Eric). I decided that a notebook that looked like Journal 3 would be neat for drawing and taking cosplay design notes in. So I chose that for myself, and a pack of cards for Eric….
Flash forward to me sitting at the San Francisco airport waiting for my flight home. My phone is full of photos, my heart and brain are full of emotion and happy memories. But my stomach is empty. I’ve got time, so I grab a dinner at some overpriced place that has phone chargers, unzip my travel backpack and grab a pencil, ready to take notes…
Only, the notebook is NOT blank inside….
…
..
OH. MY. GOD! I’ve stolen the guestbook!!!!!
I’m looking at hundreds of entries, signatures, sketches, messages, even a photo; all filling the pages of what I thought was a blank notebook offering, but is turning out to be a message book for visitors who made the pilgrimage to see Bill’s statue.
I feel terrible! These are meant to be shared with other fans and added to, not to be taken away by one fan. But there’s not time to return it before my flight. I don’t even have a car anymore…
I stared at (what I’d mentally started dubbing) the GuestJournal hard while I ate airport dinner. By the time I reached the final pages I realized that most of them were pretty filled, but there was one last, perfect, blank place for a message of my own; the black binding page in the back.
I was going to sign it, but how was I going to make up for stealing it in the first place??
It wasn’t until I got home and slept on it and had time to do some more looking into the treasure chest online that I realized what I could do. You see, I found out that there’d been other guestbooks placed inside the box too. Obviously they were not still in the chest, so I can’t be the first person to make this mistake. Other people took home other guestbooks, or the other guestbooks filled up and were eventually removed. That made me feel a bit better. (Though I still worry, because some of the dates are really, relative to cipher hunt, old… Please don’t tell me I stole the ORIGINAL GuestJournal!)
But there is this lingering feeling I have:
These messages are meant to be shared with other fans. And since I’ve got the GuestJournal now, I’m going to do my darnedest to make sure they still can be shared!!! I’m going to archive each and every entry of the GuestJournal and post the entries online.
That way I hope that not only those who signed it will be able to see the messages of those who came before and after them, but that those without the means to travel to Confusion Hill can still read about the excitement and enthusiasm seeing Bill inspired in Cipher Hunters.
I hope that this will make up for unintentionally stealing the GuestJournal before its time was quite up.
But I do need a bit of help: I’m small potatoes. I’ll fully admit to that. I have less than a hundred followers, and many of them are from different fandoms than Gravity Falls. And in order to feel like I’m really doing due diligence, I’d like to get these pages out to a broad audience.
So, I humbly ask that if you read through the entries and are touched, please reblog. Particularly those that have reach, and a GF fanbase that will see it, please reblog these messages. I want them to be shared, to remind us all that we’re part of an amazing fandom and community. I’m tagging the user names I found within the entries and those who I follow here on Tumblr. It’s the only way I really know how to get the ball rolling, since I don’t really use other social media much. The rest is up to the GF Tumblr community. Reblog, link to Facebook, tweet, whatever you think is worth doing to let our fandom see how much Gravity Falls and the Cipher Hunt, and the pilgrimage to Bill’s statue means to us fans.
Edit: Since there has been concern about getting the GuestJournal back to its rightful place, I wanted to assure folks that it will ABSOLUTELY be sent back.
Below the cut you’ll find every entry in the GuestJournal.
May's Blog 