FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE:
Trumpet teacher forms a virtual brass ensemble with 40 quarantined students
By PAM KRAGEN
MARCH 25, 2020
7:43 AM
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San Diego’s Tim Saeger assembled student-shot videos into a single concert of a Bach chorale for trumpets
Rancho Penasquitos — What happens to a trumpeter and music teacher who loses all of his concert gigs, school contracts and private students virtually overnight due to the COVID-19 pandemic?
In the case of San Diego resident Tim Saeger, 35, he found a way to both make music and connect with his students by creating a virtual orchestra online.
Last week, 40 of Saeger’s middle- and high school-age trumpet students made cellphone videos of themselves playing parts he assigned them from a chorale for trumpets by Johann Sebastian Bach. Then he assembled all the individual videos into a multi-track master video with all of the students playing together in perfect harmony.
A video and audio editing hobbyist, Saeger had experience with multi-tracking, having created several merged videos of himself with other musicians and one video of himself playing eight different parts of “America the Beautiful.”
The newly formed online trumpet ensemble has given Saeger something to occupy his time and has given the students, all now sequestered in home isolation, something to do with their instrument. Up next, they’ll collaborate on a recording of “Amazing Grace.”
Saeger — who lives in Rancho Peñasquitos with his wife, Dessie, and their two dogs — said the experience has lifted his spirits and encouraged him to reimagine how he may be able to teach lessons in the future.
“It provided a challenge for me. I was looking for solutions and I got the idea to adapt and overcome by doing something online,” he said. “The kids are stuck and home and bored and the parents were very excited.”
Ethan Olim, 17, of Rancho Penasquitos has been taking trumpet lessons from Saeger for the past eight years. He loves the trumpet for its versatility.
“It has this incredible range. You can be this destructive overwhelming power in an orchestra or have a smoky, mysterious quality in a jazz ensemble or be this light dancing delicate instrument alone,” said Olim, a senior at Westview High School in Rancho Peñasquitos.
While Olim said he at first enjoyed having more time to read and work out after schools shut down last week, he misses the human contact of being around his friends and classmates. So when Saeger contacted him about doing a multi-track recording last week, he was thrilled.
“He’s been putting out those videos for a few years and all of his students saw his level of recording, editing and technical skill. So when he reached out to us to put together something ourselves it was really exciting,” Olim said.
Sammy Levy, a 17-year-old junior at Westview High, has been studying with Saeger for five years. Levin said the 90-second Bach chorale piece that Saeger chose for the multi-track video is something that all of the trumpet students use as a warm-up during practice, so there would be no learning curve required for their first experiment with multi-tracking.
To keep everyone playing at the same tempo, Levy said Saeger instructed all of the students to wear headsets or earbuds playing a metronome counting at 72 beats per minute.
“It was really satisfying seeing how everyone’s hard work paid off and it turned into such a masterpiece, Levy said.
Olin said he imagined that with 40 students playing in their own homes, the intonation and coordination would fall flat. He was wrong.
“I expected lots of problems with tuning and out-of-sync releases and attacks, but I was so impressed at how clean all of that stuff was,” Olin said.
Also taking part in the project was Sienna Barker, 14, a freshman at Westview High who began taking lessons from Saeger three years ago. She is first chair trumpet in Westview’s ninth grade band and played in the marching band last fall.
Barker grew up playing piano, but had to pick a new instrument when she joined her middle school orchestra. She picked the trumpet, thinking it had to be the easiest instrument to learn with only three buttons. It wasn’t, but she fell in love with the trumpet anyway.
“It’s a really pretty instrument and it can be so versatile,” she said. “It can have a bright and exciting sound and it can also be deep and rich.”
Barker praised Saeger’s teaching style because he’s interested in his students both as musicians and individuals.
“While he cares about your improvement as a musician, the first questions he’ll ask at a lesson are: ‘How are you doing? How’s your life? Anything new?’ Then he’ll ask, ‘how’s your trumpet playing going?”
Born and raised in San Diego, Saeger started playing trumpet in the fifth grade and attended San Diego State University on a performance scholarship. The longtime professional musician is a contract player for the San Diego Symphony and its Summer Pops season, as well as the Pacific Symphony, the San Diego Winds Concert Band and multiple brass ensembles, Classics 4 Kids, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe and San Diego Zoo, among others.
Since 2008, he has been teaching trumpet at middle and high schools in the San Diego and Poway school districts. He now coaches the trumpet sections for Westview, Mt. Carmel and Del Norte high schools. He also has a private teaching business with between 50 to 60 students.
Saeger said he was devastated when all of his income evaporated overnight, but fortunately his wife has a job so they’re OK financially. That has given him the time to figure out how to use technology to perhaps begin doing lessons online. Performing concert music together over an app doesn’t work well due to the unpredictable lag time associated with the signal transmission. But the positive response he received from the first online trumpet ensemble performance has given him confidence to experiment.
I’m exploring virtual lessons,” he said. “The economy isn’t the same as it was before. A lot of students’ parents are now out of work. But we’ll do more of these online concerts. Everyone has been very complimentary, so I want to do more.”
To see some of Saeger’s videos, visit timsaeger.com or his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/saegerstudios/videos.
Sent from my iPhone
