[bcrdukes]

No, I never made it to Bach Strad level, although I do have and Olds Ambassador (nothing special) and a Holton Symphony T101, which is somewhat of a copy cat of a Strad. Holton bought the old tooling from Bach and ended up making some minor changes to it, but plays similar, and sounds smiliar to a Strad, but realistically, nothing like a Strad - Trained ears can hear the difference. I got it for very cheap from an estate sale (IIRC, $200 USD) but it needed a bit of work to get back into a good playing condition. Heidi Choo at Long & McQuade (Northwest Music OG) fixed it up for me.

I didn't play after my parents discouraged me from going in to music, despite being accepted in to UBC Music. Martin Barrinbaum was furious lol. Also, at that point, i realized it wasn't what I wanted to do, so I never pursued it, other than to play music for pleasure. I don't think i've played since maybe 2014/2015.

Edit: No, I never played with the Westies, although i did fill in for a few players once or twice. I'm not familiar with the Beef Eaters, so probably before my time. Other than that, I played with the BCRs for a solid 6 or 7 years, and played casually with Victor Guy's community band in North Van in 2013 to 2014.

Edit #2: Nice horn - i really enjoyed playing on the Doc Severinson series Getzens, but was never able to find any for sale when I was looking. I grew up playing student-level horns throughout elementary and high school (Yamaha and Jupiter, sadly) and when I did honour band with Martin Barrinbaum at UBC, he hated it, and always gave my band teacher a hard time about giving us junk horns. I think one of the things Martin didn't know was the income disparity and social situation compared to 99% of his students, but I could be wrong.