Briony Barabas, 16, Balga

Everything on this list has happened to either myself or other percussionists in my school’s Concert Band. We’ve recently been to New Zealand and received a Gold Achievement Award. We’ve also recently received an ‘Outstanding’ at the Western Australian School’s Concert Band Festival. Overall, I love being in the Concert Band, and am going to miss it greatly when I leave school.

You know you’re a percussion band geek when…

• You hang out for that one time a week you have permission to beat the crap out of things
• You try to sleep on the xylophone during Presentation Night when you should really be listening to the incredibly boring speeches
• You have fun threatening to hit people with mallets/tambourines/crash cymbals etc…
• You are capable of unscrewing and dropping a suspended cymbal, without realising what you were doing
• You drop the crash cymbals by pushing the stand, and the roll out because they’re round…
• You join the band not being able to read music, and two years later, you still can’t read music
• You love the xylophone but can’t play it due to being unable to read music…
• You stalk your conductor to see his new moustache
• You play the tympani out of tune, but don’t care
• You ignore the band when they’re playing a piece of music that doesn’t involve percussion
• You get jealous seeing someone else using the school’s percussion gear
• You think of the school’s percussion gear as your own
• You name the tympani Tim and Annie
• You spend a year complaining about dodgy mallets, but still use them when you get new ones
• People call you ‘cymbal girl’

• You talk non-stop about percussion to people who don’t care
• The tympani part from ‘The Pines of Rome’ gets stick in your head, which is annoying seeing as it’s the same all the way through
• You listen to music just to point out the percussion instruments
• Before you joined the band you couldn’t tell the difference between a snare drum and a bass drum, and now you kick yourself for being so stupid
• You make jokes to do with percussion
• You name your market stall Noissucrep
• You make shirts with Noissucrep written on them
• You want all your instruments printed on the back of your band jacket, not just ‘percussion’
• You fold pieces of music up into smecksy/smexy hats
• The conductor gives you a name to do with your instrument (e.g Timps, Glock, or if you’re me, Flossy, which doesn’t actually have anything to do with percussion. He just didn’t know my name.)
• You get overly excited at the prospect of sitting behind the tympani
• You believe that the band could not function without you
• You consider yourself to be a metronome
• You have a ‘percussion uniform’ – consisting of your band jacket, fishnet gloves and bright red sunglasses bought at a Rotorua $2 shop
• You have sheet music strewn across your bedroom floor
• You refer to any drum by its proper name – snare, toms, bass
• You pick band over choir any day, much to the displeasure of the choir director, who also used to be Concert Band conductor
• As a thank you present to your conductor for a great trip in New Zealand, you buy him two plastic tambourines and a plastic guitar, and put them in a gift bag that has music on it
• You don’t know how you’ll cope not having band for four weeks in a row
• You watch ‘Dancing With The Stars’ and spend all the time watching the band to see if they have tympani, rather than watching the dancers
• Your conductor is one of your favourite teachers, despite the fact you’ve never had him as a teacher before
• People just don’t understand your obsession with band
• You would never miss after school band practise, even though you have two tests and an assignment due the next day… and you’re going out for dinner, giving you maybe three hours to finish the assignment AND study for the tests
• Crash cymbals hurt your thumbs!!!
• You get told to use a mallet in Woodwork and you immediately think of the fluffy-headed mallets you use on the suspended cymbal
• The choir conductor mentions a ‘percussive effect’ and you think ‘hmm, percussion. Can’t wait ‘til band next week.’
• Your favourite picture in the Interhouse chalk drawing competition is the Durham Knight sitting behind a drum kit drawn by a drummer in the band
• You get bored at school, so start tapping a tympani part in a piece of music you very rarely, if ever, play anymore
• Your favourite instrument in the world is the tympani
• You look at someone, know they’re in the band, know what they play, but don’t know their name
• You fall asleep when the conductor spends 15 minutes working with the clarinet section
• You drop a mallet in a performance and just stand and look at it in shock, thinking, ‘Oh shit.’ Then ‘I really should pick that up.’
• You wear your band jacket everywhere
• You can’t wait ‘til music camp next year
• The best trip you’ve been on was the Concert Band trip to New Zealand
• You’re going to cry when you leave school, because you’re leaving school, gonna miss your friends, and you won’t be in the Concert Band anymore
• You write lists like this chronicling why you’re a percussion band geek!