Australian national brass band championships live stream

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The Australian national brass band championships are this weekend. They're live streaming at brassbanned.com. The schedule can be found on a link at the top.

It's about 3:05 am here on the US east coast, and it's 5:35 pm in Adelaide, so the time differential is pretty severe.

The band contest runs Friday-Sunday, with the solo contests on Monday. There have been a couple of failures in the live feed from halls two and three, but I've seen bands from hall one just fine.

Edit: I have no idea why the BBcode for the URL is not working.

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Streaming for the Saturday competition (Friday in the US) starts at 6:30 pm EDT.

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There are evidently concert bands in the mix, too. It's morning there. It may be that the brass bands are more of an evening thing.

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By the way, Wessex is one of the broadcast sponsors.

[AnorakHorn]

Australia works on a grading system, similar to the United Kingdom.

Brass Bands
A Grade - Top level banding, expected to play all works with very little fault, if any at all.
B Grade - High level community bands compete here, often as a second band to that of an A Grade one.
C Grade - Probably the biggest grade in the country. Most regional centers and capital city suburbs have a band in this grade. You often see bigger bands here (like mine, City of Greater Bendigo Brass, or Boroondara Harmony Brass from Melbourne), as there is no discrimination on the players, they accept all.
D Grade - Lowest level, with often lots of smaller community bands. Both D and C Grade often do more community events rather than competing.

Concert Bands & Junior Bands
Same as Brass, however they only run from A to C

Australia doesn't have rounds to compete, however each state has it's own championship, run by it's band league (Victorian Bands League or Band Association of New South Wales for example). These are open to any band affiliated with their state league, who are then affiliated with the National Band Council. It's a bit of a council heaven in Australia.

I just returned home from South Australia after competing. It's always a great way to spend Easter, however this year there were some surprises...

Cheers from Bendigo

[Patrase]

I was there. Bands have to play a test piece, own choice, a stage March (seated) and a hymn. I have been told that is different to the UK, where the band only play one piece.

There is also a solo section including junior and open age. The tuba section is further divided into high (Eb and F) and low (C and Bb) tuba. A junior won all four sections- must be a good player!

My band finished second in A grade - worthy of some fairly serious celebrations well into the night!

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Some of the A bands were monstrously good, both in concert bands and brass bands. The final group in brass band class D was startlingly good for its class. I missed all the C bands, unfortunately.

The majority of the brass bands stuck pretty firmly to the standard instrumentation, though I saw one group with 6 basses and another with 5 tenors. I don't think I saw a single group with 4 trombones, which I found a little surprising. The camera was positioned in Hall 2 (the chapel, mostly class B groups) so that most of the trombone sections weren't visible, though.

[cambrook]

I read that Aidan Purdy won the High tuba and Low tuba sections in both the Junior and Senior division in the solo championships - an amazing feat!

I'm pretty sure that this is the first time that someone has got a clean sweep of ALL tuba sections - well done Aidan!