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Danish Stick Seminar 2003When new goals are achieved
My name is Peter Laustsen, I'm 22 years old and come from the little Scandinavian country Denmark. I bought my Grand Stick 3 months ago and started to play after being "persuaded" to try getting one by the Danish veteran-player Lennart "Jazzman" Marott Hansen. Well, what happened since then is quite a lot, so lets jump right to the points of this story about the first Danish Stick Meeting. Well, Lennart and I had been meeting each other several times before his idea of a meeting occurred. Actually, we came upon the idea to make a forum on the Internet at first and we would also try to gather all the players in Denmark. And yes, you guys might think, "Well, how hard can it be in a little country with a population of 5 million!" Hey, I'll tell you, it took many nights of telephone calls and searching around Lennart's old friends and music-related connections. Now we have an official Scandinavian Chapman Stick Forum (thanks to Emmett's approval) with players from all of Scandinavia as members. There's a total number of 17 members, some players and some very interested potential players. In 3 months we managed to dig old players out from the dust and build an internet-forum. That was a success for us, especially for me as a newbie player. In a discussion on the forum, some of us asked for a meeting. When? Where? How? There were many questions, but we settled on the date June 5th to be the date of our first meeting. Sadly, the Norweigan players dropped out, mostly because of the relatively long distance of 800km and because our evening was to end up with a King Crimson concert in the capital of Denmark, Copenhagen. Just 10 days before our meeting it was confirmed that King Crimson would visit Norway for the first time ever and the Norweigan players stayed at home to go to the concert in Oslo. Everybody could understand that, of course they had to stay. The days went along and suddenly we were close to the goal. Claus Poulsen, a good Stick player as well, invited us to his apartment in central Copenhagen, where we could all meet. It was a great idea and at 3:00pm on the 5th of June, we knocked at Claus' door one by one. It was pretty funny to see all the people from the forum. How old were they? What style of music did they like? Did they have a 10-stringed stick or what? How did they discover the instrument? Etc... After everybody arrived and short introductions were made, we started to play, geek-talk and had a cup of coffee. We didn't have a "mentor" to instruct us, but we played and listened to the different pickups, effects and of course the exciting SP 13 preamp from RANE. It was very inspiring to see all the different Sticks, some old, some new, some with midi-pickups and made of many beautiful tree-sorts.
As many of you surely will know, the time went by way too fast. We ordered a
couple of pizzas and ate them in a hurry. Then we took off to see King Crimson
and said goodbye in the hall of "Cirkus-bygningen" where the concert was held.
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