The music journey continues in the Ruigrok household with not just one, but now two brass players learning to read and play music - thank goodness we live in a detached house!
Some of you may recall my earlier blog about Ben, my eldest and his first foray into music. He started taking lessons on a pTrumpet around 18 months ago and has now successfully passed his grade 1 exam, hooray!
I’ve really enjoyed watching Ben progress over the last year or so. He is now a member of the local ensemble for beginners’ grades 1-3 and last year he performed in their summer and Christmas concerts.
Ben has also joined his school orchestra and is enjoying working towards his second school performance later this year. Most impressive of all, he put himself forward to play a solo in the local scouting community performance and played God Save the Queen to 100 people on the stage!
As you would expect, from a parent’s perspective I’ve been doing everything that I can to support him, whether that be listening in to his teacher's feedback during lessons, practising with him regularly and talking to him about what he enjoys/doesn’t enjoy so that he knows he can talk to me if he needs to.
Throughout this process, it started to become clear to me that he was ready to move on to the next stage of instrument, ‘upgrade’ a bit if you like. So, we are moving on up to a pTrumpet HyTech. This is a part plastic, part metal trumpet and much like his pTrumpet it is lightweight and easy for him to hold.
With the metal valves that work just like the valves on a regular brass trumpet, Ben is making a fantastic sound on his new instrument (especially now he has to reach some of the higher notes!) He really looks the part too. It is still very easy to keep clean and, crucially, doesn’t damage if it gets a light knock here or there.
With Ben progressing nicely and Oscar now starting his pBone journey we are having lots of fun making music in our house. With our regular practice, together with the music we are able to download from Warwick Music’s website (and quite a bit of improv thrown in), we are becoming quite the musical family!
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