Summerglen’s Original Music:

Trombone Ensembles:

Signing books at the Heritage Bookstore in Virginia Beach, VA

Leading the Giving Yourself Permission to Create workshop at the Heritage Holistic Center in Virginia Beach

Women Embracing Creativity book signing at Simple Pleasures Books and Gifts in Ashland, VA

A perfect ending to our book tour…Andrew and I refresh our creative energies with a trip to the beach!

I joined Coffee and Contacts, a dynamic women’s networking group here in the Triangle, about 2 weeks ago. In my experience, networking has been a nourishing experience for my business–each contact is like a plate of good food, supercharging my business and making it healthy and robust. Since joining, I’ve already made some great contacts!

I also had a chance to turn my musical experience into a helpful presentation called “Making Your Presentations Memorable”. Today, I shared some of the techniques that help me take the stage with confidence, and showed the women in the audience how to use these skills to make their business communication more exciting and effective. It was a great experience, and I can’t think of any better way to celebrate Summerglen’s anniversary.

And now, on to year #3!

All these videos were recorded on a cheap digital camera in noisy public places (mostly outdoors), and have gone through many changes in file format to get them ready for the website. So naturally, the sound quality and the picture are quite gritty. The videos have the background crackle and brash tone that you might hear on a very old LP recording. So, here are two recommendations for those who listen:

1. Listening with headphones helps mellow the tone out, and
2. Keep in mind that these videos are a somewhat abstract rendering of the Summerglen Duo. The signature sound is there, but in person we have a very different tone.

If you’re in the Raleigh area and want to hear us in person, we’re going to try to get out onto Fayetteville Street downtown this Wednesday at lunchtime (11:45 to 1:30). Maybe we’ll see you there. If not, enjoy the recordings!

I started Summerglen last year after I had had absolutely enough of teaching music in the public schools. Society really mistreats and mistrusts teachers, and I was no exception. After five years of working in a fairly large elementary school, I was completely and utterly spent, beyond fatigued, and dangerously close to being burnt out on music entirely. I felt, well, chewed up and spit out. Icky.

So I took a leap of faith and became an independent trombonist and teacher. I built Summerglen Music as a vessel, a boat to carry my musical services on. It’s a small boat, but it’s very good at what it does, namely, helping young trombonists and bringing beautiful music to our corner of North Carolina.

I’m very grateful today, because all has been well this year. Newspapers have some awful headlines lately, and the economy isn’t doing so great. Some people actually told me I was crazy to quit a nice secure job with the school system to blow through a metal tube for a living. But it felt like what I was supposed to do, so I did it, and everything’s been very, very good.

So, I’ll celebrate this special occasion with some teaching, which will be super fun! This week, I’ll share some of the things I did this year to start Summerglen Music and make it successful. And I must thank you, the reader, for sharing our first year in business with us. All the best!

Last month, the fine folks at Skirt! Magazine dropped by Summerglen to interview me for their June issue, which they were dedicating to female musicians. Faith Dwight, the interviewer, and Beth Riley, the photographer, were really cool people, and the interview had the feel of “hanging out and enjoying a coffee with the girls”. (Maybe because that’s what actually happened!)

For those of you who haven’t seen Skirt! Magazine yet, it’s a very cool regional magazine for women. Our Raleigh edition has been here for only a couple of months, but it’s already a favorite here at Summerglen. Here’s the article: Christina Thompson, Trombonista!

Our latest venture finds us fixing up some obvious insulation problems, and discovering some more! When we bought this place, the drum studio was but an unfinished room on the lower level, and the ceiling still remains open. Because of this, the worst sound bleed is in one of the bathrooms upstairs, which sits directly over the studio. See why?

So, this week we’re going to pack the ceiling with insulation, and then we’ll top it off with a layer of flexible sound barrier.

In the larger room outside the drum studio, we have an acoustical ceiling, which makes the room sound pretty nice. Unfortunately, when we popped several tiles out today, we found absolutely NO barrier between the inside of the house and the siding. You could see daylight! Ack! Once we insulated the area, though, the sound of the drumset outdoors on that side of the house was cut nearly in half. Very cool .

Andrew knows a lot more about the subject of soundproofing than I ever will, but I’ve had a great time experimenting with different soundproofing measures as we’ve done this project. We don’t have thousands of dollars to blow on top-of-the-line equipment, nor do we have space to build the ultimate in soundproofing, a room within a room. So we’ve had to try different approaches and see what works best, and it’s given us many opportunities to get creative with fluffy pink fiberglass. Even Velvet the Cat wants a piece of the action!

As a trombonist, I’ve encountered many physical hurdles throughout the years that have made playing more difficult–and one that could have ended my career! From having an awful trombonist’s lip ring to playing with uneven shoulders to trying to muscle out difficult passages, I’ve experienced all kinds of bad trombone-playing habits. None of them have made me a better player; in fact, they all made playing uncomfortable and held me back from improving my skills. As a teacher, I’ve noticed that when students take the time to establish good playing habits, their playing improves extremely quickly (even though they’re taking extra time to observe their movements in practice!)

After you read this month’s Summerglen Times, see if you can incorporate some extra physical awareness into your practice sessions. And if you see a difference in your playing, definitely let your Summerglen friends know!

Here’s our beautiful new Toyota Corolla! The old Summerglen-Mobile, a white 2001 Hyundai Elantra, had been Christina’s trusty car for a number of years…but it started acting up last summer. One by one, parts of the car gave out, and last Friday we found out the head gasket was going bad. Guh.

We bought our Corolla from Mark Jacobson Toyota in Durham, NC. Mark Jacobson is a local celebrity because of his cute and entertaining TV commercials–and we SAW him when we went to buy our car! COOL!!

Today, we found out that the car can hold an entire orchestral percussion section (minus timpani) with a ton of room to spare, drive smoothly from Raleigh to Durham twice, and only use 1/8 tank of gas in the process!

So, now it’s time to undertake the task of covering the back of the car with stickers. We’ll post pictures of our progress!