So far in my tenure with the Charnwood Symphonic Wind Orchestra, I’ve been playing electric bass. It’s been good to get my sight reading chops better and works very well with most of the pieces. However, it has always been my intention to also have double bass as an option there and I took it along for the first time tonight. We have a couple of gigs coming up where there won’t be a power supply so I’ll do one on the double bass and one with a borrowed battery powered amp but I needed to check the double bass was feasible.

For the pieces we are playing, it turns out to be mainly so. It also helps that it’s hard to hear me behind all the wind and brass instruments. A good number of my mistakes were well hidden! Anyway, I think it will be good enough for next weekend and we’ll see how it works in an outdoor context and possibly with a bit of bowing (something to practise over the next week).