Today was a busy day – leading worship at church in the morning, a gig with the concert band in the afternoon and, because there are more gigs looming, a CSWO rehearsal this evening.

I was quite pleased with how the CCB gig went. I’m getting that percentage of wrong notes lower and lower and it feels like my fingers know where to go when they see the dots on the page. That is reading music but it isn’t quite sight-reading because there is a lot of practise behind that. Again most of the CSWO stuff is feeling relatively easy or at least manageable but part of the evening was blasting through ‘the red books’ which helped avoid me getting too complacent.

The red books are called New Carol Praise and they are published by the Salvation Army in a small format that would fit on the kind of stand that can be fitted directly to many brass instruments. In order to pack a lot in, the arrangements are very condensed so you have to watch carefully for unexpected repeats and other details which help pack them in. The other notable feature of the NCP books is that they often use less familiar keys, with a good number of the tunes we looked at being in Db and Gb. All good practise but also extra reason to stay alert.