Although I've been keeping up with music I haven't been in band for a while, not since 2011. It was good for me to learn and I don't regret doing it at all, but the hyper-competitive nature of band in school was not my kind of thing. I was first chair and it felt like people were trying to (figuratively) assassinate me for my spot or something, couldn't deal with that shit man. In high school it was even worse, because for whatever reason people decided that we should be treating marching band like it's the damn marine corps and take everything super seriously and never have any fun with it. The directors and the techs were super serious and it just created this environment of guilt for all the students.
It wasn't all bad though, I did have a lot of great moments and every Friday night Football game was a blast because we could actually just have fun and chill and stuff.
Super serious hyper-competitiveness is just not what music is about to me, I'm more concerned with having fun and expressing myself through art. Obviously, you need to be at a reasonable level of skill and hold yourself to a certain standard to actually be able to play the things you want to play, but school was just too much of a negative environment for me.
I kinda gave up music for all of 2012 but I met a guitar player online in 2013 who was doing amateur recording and he got me back into music. So from that point I kinda realized I didn't hate music, just band, so I started playing again. I kinda had to figure out for myself what I was interested in playing and eventually realized I had an affinity for soundtracks from various games and anime so that's what I've been focusing on since then.
I started on Alto Saxophone in 2007, so I guess you could say it's my main instrument. I also learned Tenor Saxophone and Trumpet while in school (unfortunately my tenor is broken and it's a weird situation because it was cheap anyway, so I'd rather get a new one than pay to fix it, but I can't really sell it if it's broken so it's just kinda sitting there). My friend is sending me his old Trumpet for Christmas, so that's cool. I'm learning Piano and Harmonica at the moment. I do own a guitar and am really interested in learning to play it, but I think I should try not to focus on too many things at the moment. Maybe next year. I also play the kazoo, just to add some padding to my instrument count, haha.
Here are some videos of me playing back when I was 13 years old. They're all kinda low quality so you can't really see what I look like (not that I even look like that anymore lol) but you can hear me pretty well I guess. They're all recorded with regular video cameras so the audio and visual quality aren't so great. The balance of instruments might be a little off, but oh well:
This one is of me in the 2010 All-County Band. I'm on the right side, 4th chair Alto.
Another one of me in 8th grade. I'm the Tenor soloist at 1:34, improv of course! I am not Sam.