"Last Sunday’s Orillia Silver Band concert was awesome. The main floor of Gord’s Room at the Opera House was almost full with about 340 people on hand. I didn’t expect that. The band played on a level a few steps above their last outing. There was one point during Leroy Anderson’s A Christmas Festival (a medley), the cornet’s were playing the Deck The Halls section, with mutes, and they were playing so softly, in the pocket as meant to be against the mid and lower brass, I had to concentrate to pick them out of the sounds. As I’ve remarked a few times, trumpet and cornet layers as a species often play louder than they need to, sometimes a lot louder. Anderson’s piece was the last on the program, but I noticed much earlier in the show how controlled the cornets were (afterward speaking with others who are musicians, they noticed too). That was mostly because overall the whole band was controlling the dynamics (loud and soft) of each piece, hardly getting really loud. That let them shape the music much better than some professional bands and orchestras I’ve heard. Playing like that also makes the execution of the music easier to achieve. That’s starting and ending notes together. When even one person in a section doesn’t begin playing at the precise instant in time as the others it’s noticeable. Many music ensembles with say 6 people per instrument type half of them might be together and the others real close most of the time, so it’s not bad. When you hear clean playing and it carries on throughout a program, it elevates the listening experience. People who aren’t musicians notice these things, but just chock it up to it sounds better. When you hear a musician talk about a band playing clean, what the OSB did on Sunday is what they mean (some musicians have lower standards of what clean means, mine is pretty high) and they marvel when even 5 people in a rock band are razor sharp and in such control of their sound, let alone when there’s 40 people playing."