Future Trombone Player

My son starts middle school next year. It’s hard to believe that got here so fast. Seems like yesterday we were enrolling him in kindergarten.

He decided he wants his elective to be band. This made me extremely happy because I was in band for my entire junior high/high school career and loved it. I played sax and hoped he would too. Because I have a sax, so I thought I could just refurb mine and he could play it.

So on Saturday, we head down to the middle school for instrument try-outs. They get to play all the different instruments and see which one works for them. We get to the check in and he tells the lady he wants to try saxophone and percussion. She looks at his mouth shape and suggests trombone and trumpet.

Our first stop was the trombone, mostly because the line wasn’t nearly as long as it was for sax and clarinet. He tried the tbone first. He nailed it on the first try. I was surprised. The instructor gave him high marks and said he had “good buzz”.

Then we tried out the trumpet. We waited in line for about 30 minutes for that one. When it was his turn, he tried really hard to make sound come out of the mouthpiece. I’d always heard trumpet was hard to play (that was my first choice, too, but, alas, it didn’t work out). You really have to have the right mouth shape for it, I think. So after some trying with the mouthpiece, the instructor put it on the horn. He tried, but was never able to get any sound out of the horn. That was okay. The instructor told him to try out the trombone again, if we had time.

I told my son I wanted him to pick something that he was happy with, not the sax because we had one at home or the percussion because his dad played drums in high school. If he’s going to spend time doing something like this, I want to make sure he’s happy and has fun. No sense in being miserable.

He decided to give the trombone another shot while I stood in the very long sax/clarinet line. Turns out, trombone was perfect for him. I watched from the sidelines while he talked to the instructor. He tried it again and decided that was it. He didn’t even want to try the sax or the percussion. He’d made up his mind just like that. So we officially signed him up to play the trombone.

I have to admit, I’m kinda excited for him. 🙂