Musicalmidget’s Blog

It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since my last posting here. Where has the last month gone? It’s largely because I’ve just started my third and final year at university. The first few weeks are always a bit hectic, but I’m expecting things to calm down in a couple of weeks and I should be appearing online again more regularly by then.

Over the summer months I blogged about a number of new items I’d bought, including my new sax, piano and iMac. Although they’re all great fun to use, there were some serious reasons behind buying them. I believed they would make my final year at university and indeed my life beyond that, a lot easier. Now that I’m a month into the new academic year, I’m already certain that is the case.

My new sax is wonderful to play and the included mouthpiece is also of better quality than the old one I was using. I’m already noticing a significant improvement in my tone and with more work on that over this final year, I hope to develop it further. Additionally, because it’s so much fun to play, I’ve been playing it more often. Because of that, I’m also making progress with improvisation, and again, I’m still a long way from perfect but I’m really having a great time working on it. The sax was definitely a good buy in my humble opinion.

The piano is also fun to play, but as I mentioned when I first posted about it, I’m not a serious piano player. In fact, I can play very little. The main reasons I bought it were to aid in my work and also to connect to a computer to interact with Sibelius and other music applications. Already, it has fulfilled these purposes. My arranging assignments require a lot of trial and error when it comes to working out which chords to use. With a full range keyboard at my side it’s proved very handy to quickly try a number of possible options on the piano before committing them to paper.

Similarly, the iMac has proved invaluable so far when it comes to university work. Sibelius works perfectly on the iMac, with the piano connected of course. iWork applications such as Pages and Numbers have already proved useful when writing assignments, and the general reliability and ease of use of the iMac on the whole have really impressed me. When my windows PC was struck by a strange virus last week (that Norton decided it could detect sometimes but do nothing about), my important university work was unharmed on my iMac and my assignments were submitted on time and without problem. Again, well worth the money I feel.

With that in mind, I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard” this Friday. Unfortunately, I’ll be away over the weekend but hope to get my copy sometime early next week. Watch this space, I intend to show it off.