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CALGARY ROUND-UP BAND - Colorguard
The middle of May is generally the beginning of our performance season. This means that between rehersals and performances, we are busy every Thursday evening and most, if not all weekends, until the end of school. Weekend events, whatever they happen to be, tend to be between 5 and 9 hours long. It can be quite stressful at times. Starting June 29th, we are busy everyday from about 9 to 5. Some days are shorter, some slightly longer. We continue this until July 16. Ofcourse, there are a few days when we perform on the Stampede grounds and on those days we often get about an hour of free time on the grounds but other than that we are quite busy the whole time. Our performances include the Stampede parade, Fanfare, Saddledome step performances, Spruce Meadows, a golf tournament and Canada Day parades. Though it might sound like a lot of work, I think it's a lot of fun.

After that we have about two weeks off to rest and then we have tour, this year to Sweden and Denmark. Most band members go but this year there was limited space but many still get to go. On August 1, 2 and 3 we have full day rehearsal to get ready for tour. Then on the 4th we leave and plan to get back on the 13th. Sure, this may sound like a vaction but we don't just sit around all day, we actually perform a lot, which is the point of going on a tour. Though we perform on tour we still get to do fun stuff like swimming, bowling, going to amusment parks, shopping and other things like that.		SCHEDULE June 8 - Rehearsal (7-9pm) June 10 - Spruce Meadows (9am-4pm) June 11 - Spruce Meadows (12-6pm) June 15 - Rehearsal (7-9pm) June 22 - No Rehearsal (School Exams) June 29 - Rehearsal (7-9pm) June 30 - Rehearsal (9am-5pm) July 1 - Canada Day: Canmore and Banff Parade (full day) July 2 - Rehearsal (9am-5pm) July 3 - Rehearsal (9am-5pm) July 4 - Rehearsal (9am-5pm) July 5 - Golf Tournament Performances & Rehearsal (8am-5pm) July 6 - Rehearsal (9am-5pm) July 7 - Stampede Parade (8am-12pm) July 8 - Spruce Meadows July 9 - Spruce Meadows July 10 - Rehearsal (9am-5pm) July 11 - Pancake Breakfast & Stampede Performances July 12 - Stampede Performances & Fanfare July 13 - Pancake Breakfast & Stampede Performances July 14 & 15 - CD Recordings July 16 - Pancake Breakfast & Stampede Performances August 1-3 - Tour Prep Rehearsals August 4-13 - Tour

The song that is currently playing (unless you have a really slow computer) is moorside march which is the only parade song that isn't on the cd. It's a very military type song and is something that we're not used to doing but it's supposed to celebrate the 50 years. Maybe they used to play songs like that when the band started, I really don't know. The image below is a picture taken of the band 50 years ago, when it first started.		The only other song we know is actually an extension of song 7 on the cd. On the cd, there is half of the show music and we now have the other half. The band has also learnt the Swedish anthem and two other Swedish/Danish type songs for tour but the colorguard doesn't get to perform these songs. I'm not that upset about it really because one is a bag pipe song and I don't really like bag pipes so yeah. We might also learn another parade song but the instructors aren't sure yet because we usually on have 3-4 parade songs and this year we have 5 so far.




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