Michael Daugherty will be doing a clinic on his music on Tuesday the 19th at 10 am.  He will be hanging out at the Hal Leonard booth during much of the conference, and we will have a separate bin in our booth of his published materials, both for band and some chamber ensembles and solos. You can browse through his oeuvre and pick up something to study or have him autograph for you. We will have advance copies of the scores to his newest works as well, just coming off the printing press this week. 

Times change, and as they do any business or organization has to change as well in order to stay relevant. I remember working at Shattinger Music 15 years ago and we were not able to keep up with the demand for wind band recordings. We'd bring our entire stock to Midwest and people would pour over them as eagerly as they do the wind band scores.

With the advent of youtube, the iPod, the cloud, and other digital mediums, the need for an actual physical CD recording has dropped to the point where it's no longer really a feasible area of me to focus my time on anymore. So we are taking our entire CD library to Midwest and selling everything off, mostly from $1 - $2. There are some hidden gems amidst all these productions and I'd like to find a home for as much of it as I can.

Speaking of which, there's one more thing. When Jim Cochran closed Shattinger Music and left the business, he had a large personal library of CDs he had collected over the years. He gave the entire lot of CDs to a good friend of his in Chicago. After this director had gone through it all and picked out what he wanted for his library, he contacted me and offered to give me the rest of it. So I will bringing all of these CDs to the booth to find a new home as well. Hopefully some of you can benefit from this small fruit of his years of dedication to the business and find some works you may not have known about before, or that you may have forgotten about.

One thing I'm doing in particular is expanding the amount of reference materials we carry at the store, both wind band specific and otherwise. I'm also trying to expand more into the academic and general music education areas, so if you're a music scholar take some time to look over the books we have. At the booth they will be organized into five areas: Wind Band, Conducting, Music Education, Instruments, and Biographies.  

There is one book I'll mention quickly though:

 Rehearsing the Band, Volume 2

I met Phil Aguglia at the 2015 WASBE convention in San Jose, California. He had a display of his batons and his baton workshop, and it was impressive. We talked for a while about how he got into the baton making business and his approach to the craft. 

They feel great, I'm going to be changing out my old baton for one of his soon. I'll probably even have mine custom made, which is a service he offers. He also makes conductor's bags, director's plaques and picture frames with batons, and even wooden podiums. I'm pretty excited about this find, hopefully some of you will be too. 

I've always brought brass choir and woodwind choir works, and last year we tried bringing some percussion ensemble works. This year we decided to go all out.

We will be bringing our entire compliment of classical and educational solo and ensemble works to Midwest. 

All of it.

We've reserved a second row of booths across from us to display all of this. We will probably have to put some of the boxes on the floor, but it will all be there for you to look at, whether you're preparing your high school students for contest or your collegiate flute choir for an upcoming concert. 

I'll be sending out emails to specific schools and directors after Midwest. If your school is hosting a conducting symposium in the coming year, or if you have a conducting class that has some required scores or other materials students need to get for class, we now have this feature working on our website.  

You let us know when the event or class is, what scores or books are needed (or the list of scores they can select from), and a link to the symposium website if applicable. I'll set up the form. Participants and students can then go to the Conducting Class or Conducting Symposium bar on our Wind Band page, choose the event or class from the list, check the items they want and add them to the cart. 

I used to do this a lot back at Shattinger and I'm glad to be able to bring this feature back again. And main reason I can do this now is because of the next entry below...

We've been working on getting the entire catalog of several major publishers into our searchable database. Because each publisher handles their data completely differently, we have to take them one at a time and figure out how their data can display in a consistent format on our own website. We're still working out occasional inconsistencies in data, like a grade 2 jazz band piece that shows as a grade 5 on our site. 

Fortunately, I've been keeping my own database of wind band works ever since I started here. I managed to get a lot of bare bones info of old titles from several publishers, and have been working to keep things up to date whenever a new title comes in.  So we decided to incorporate my database into our website. 

What this means is that when it goes live in a day or two, nearly every wind band piece I've ever come across will be on our website. This includes all the foreign and obscure works I've dealt with over the years. While I don't have the back catalog of all these foreign publishers yet, I may be able to work that in over time.

The one thing to keep in mind is that I can't update prices, especially on foreign titles. We've kept that in mind, and any item drawn from my database instead of a publisher's database will have it's price marked as an estimate. If it shows like that and you absolutely need a firm price, call me and I'll find out (though I can only do estimates on foreign titles I have to order, too many variables).

As I clean up my database, you'll also be able to search for things like "Clarinet Trio" or "Halloween" and come up with a list of band works that fit that criteria. It won't be perfect because of how our search engine works, but it will give you a good start. I can always get you a more precise list, just ask.

All right then, it's back to work for me. I have a lot of new band works from foreign publishers to get into my database and link sound codes too, plus sets of band music to pull and box up. I hope to see many of you in a few days in Chicago.

Thanks for reading, drop me a line anytime.

Instrumental Music (my direct line): 314/942-1522