Wow, I underestimated how loud the Wheelock AS is

We had our first fire drill today first thing during first period, which is concert band for me.

This is a new campus for me, so I didn’t know how the alarms sounded apart from YouTube videos.

The building which houses the auditorium and everything fine arts/music related has WAY too many Wheelock AS horn strobes for the good of the students.

In the rehearsal room, there is a horn strobe. In the cramped hallways with all the instrument lockers, there are two horn strobes. In each of the two very echoey stairwells, there is 1 horn strobe.

Good lord, the evacuation route was short but those things are insane. They really get into your ears when walking by one. YouTube videos alone cannot capture the sheer sound of those damn things.

Thank goodness the school administration decided to be very generous and make an announcement over the PA system that the alarms are going to sound in a few seconds.

Also, the band director was mindful of it and kept everybody in the rehearsal room until after the drill. We have this “block” schedule where each class lasts for ~90 minutes, with each period within the block being 45 minutes. During the first half of class, brass and woodwinds split up and us brass players go into a very echoey choir room downstairs with, you guessed it, yet another horn strobe. Thank goodness I didn’t have to be in there. Though, I’m pretty sure it was just so we all evacuate together.

Even after we went outside, a good distance away from the campus, the horns could still be clearly heard.

I feel bad for the first chair oboe, she was sitting right below the horn strobe, which is wall mounted pretty low. Not really head height, but just above it.

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Would not surprise me if they’re all set on high volume, especially since I tested one of my ASes on low volume against my MT horn just the other day & the MT was actually louder than the AS! (I believe the MT was set on low volume as well, but if so it was still louder than the AS!) Just the same, hope there was no hearing loss from the over-abundance of ASes.

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