A Lesson Re-Learned - Always, Always Remember to Tune Your Instrument Before Playing(￣人￣)

Whenever you start taking lessons from a music teacher, one of the first things that one would teach you is how to tune your instrument (well, of course, piano teachers won't teach that...). And they always remind their students to check and make sure that their's are in tune before they start to play.

Having your instrument tip-top shape in concerns to pitch is especially important when you're a beginner. If you keep on playing with an out-of-tune instrument, your perception of the right tone won't be good. (Sigh, at least oboes don't have those problems.)

Anyway, you'd think that with all the teachers and conductors that one had worked with, a musician with experience would always remember to tune his/her instrument... Nope. People sometimes get too sure of their instruments and make the mistake that I did yesterday, the mistake of not checking if my cello was tunedლ(ﾟдﾟლ)

It was actually a funny incident, everyone laughed at it, but it was also embarrassing. I forgot the what my teachers taught, and what orchestra conductors would always remind (Sorry Dr. Gonzalez!).

This was how yesterday's epic fail happened...

An orchestra practice was scheduled by our conductor because there weren't any classes. As one of the people who help out with the orchestra, one of my duties is to make sure that everyone has a copy of their parts. This meant printing and photocopying the pieces.

Unfortunately, one of the problems of our members is that they always lose their scores. Like always. I don't what's up with them anymore, I suspect that there are little green men stealing papers to sell so that they could make a ship to go to Mars (okay, I was being sarcastic).

So, in predictable pattern, several of the guys lost their pieces, and they only told me right there and then. Our conductor allowed me to go off and get new pieces for them. At this time, I hadn't had the opportunity to get to get my cello out of my case before getting work piled up on me(ㄒoㄒ)

After acquiring new parts for our misbehaving orchestra musicians, I returned to the room where we were practising and handed them their new pieces (along with threats of dire consequences if they kept on losing them).

Since rehearsal was already on-going, I took my cello out of its case, and sat in my assigned seat, ready to join in.

At that time, they had just switched pieces and were going to start from the beginning of the new one. The cello section didn't begin at the first measure, the entrance was at fourth beat of the third measure if I remember correctly.

The conductor started, the piece had a grand entrance in which the cellos played this really deep bass part. We were anticipating it, and when we joined in at our parts...

（＞ｙ＜）To my horror, my cello was seriously out of tune. Like the string was actually sagging. I was confident that it was in tune that I didn't check it. So, the conductor stopped the piece, laughing all the time.

It was one of the embarrassing moments that you'd want to hide somewhere really far away...

I managed to get my cello tuned, properly this time, and we continued on the rehearsal. Having the practice stopped just for you to have your instrument tuned in the correct pitch isn't a good feeling at all!

Lesson Re-learned: Don't be over-confident in the realm of tuned instruments. They like making you look foolish by being out-of-tune at the worst time possible. Just kidding. What I meant was, always, always check your instrument before you play (￣∇￣)

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For classical musicians and those interested in classical music, @bengy started a Discord channel. If you're interested, go take a look ＾ω＾
https://discord.gg/NTFpy3q