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Some boring serpent chat: I am currently getting myself on the build list for Kaiser Serpents. In case anyone cares, his prices are going up to probably around $800 and the build-list is currently at a six month wait. He also told me that there is no difference between a delrin and wooden mouthpiece as far as playability but the delrin is a bit more rugged. E-mail is a slow process with him, but I should be reporting in with a serpent in about six months 
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Dec 28, 2012 16:27
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 Did a banner - any thoughts other than sub par timing and an unimaginative font? A LOVELY LAD fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Dec 28, 2012 |
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Dec 28, 2012 19:48
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A LOVELY LAD posted:
That's actually getting pretty close. I like your take on it, and with a few tweaks I could run that. Can I send you out a fife, a few tinwhistles, or something in a similar pricerange? If you toss in a few future banner upgrades for later versions, I could do you something like a Brazilian tamborim, or something around the $30 line. Are we allowed to say "gently caress" in banner ads, or do we have to do "F**k" or is even that count as NSW for banners? If that's the case, I take it "Gently caress guitar" is too old-school goony? Maybe "Guitar is Dead"? For the last panel, I'd like to at least mention the thread is about picking an instrument to learn, so something like "Learn a Weird Instrument" or "The 'Learn a Weird Instrument' Thread". Some font and timing tweaking would help, and if it's not too hard to do probably one or two of the instruments can be replaced with something more visually grabby. Not to approve it and then pick you to death with notes; I do like the overall concept, so on a good track. Yoshi Jjang's was an interesting take, but awfully specific to the Gakki product line... Butch Cassidy posted:Some boring serpent chat: drat that is cool. Serpent has been high on my "goons get weird instruments" bingo card ever since I found an affordable one on the market. One goon last year was pretty interested in one, but got banned so no followup there. In any case, yeah, a medieval tuba, outstanding. Are you fixing to perform with this at all, or more just for personal enjoyment? Anyone curious about serpent, the most interesting serpentist I've ever heard is Michel Godard, so watch his many clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xuxzJkuJWI  Yiggy posted:I'll be happy to do an Indian Percussion post but I'm going to be out of town a little bit longer until next week. If you don't mind waiting I'll throw it together then. No worries, anytime over the next few months is great. Your call how to present, but I'd suggest a few different megaposts over time, maybe grouping by families, like one of double-head hand drums (mridangam, mrdanga, pakhawaj), one of double-head stick drums (dhol family), and however else. That's just how I see them grouped from my non-India-hand eyes, but you're the expert. If you do cover mrdanga, I would be curious to hear your take/squint on the modern synthetic Tilak/Balaram model. I'm always curious about modernisations of trad instruments, but given the maker/customers' association with ISKCON I'm not sure whether this a serious art-music drum, or just a Hare Krishna noisemaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJf5S15kJ1Q.  I do claim one of the drums for my own post though, since I just bought a Remo kanjira. I've been meaning to get a frame-drum all year for jams and drum circles, and the kanjira seemed flexible enough to cover groups and also smaller artsy stuff, plus packs a lot of bass into a small frame TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Dec 29, 2012 |
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Dec 29, 2012 17:35
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:That's actually getting pretty close. I like your take on it, and with a few tweaks I could run that. Can I send you out a fife, a few tinwhistles, or something in a similar pricerange? If you toss in a few future banner upgrades for later versions, I could do you something like a Brazilian tamborim, or something around the $30 line. Cool yeah if you send me a PM with some more visually interesting instruments I can replace the existing ones tomorrow hopefully, text changes and timing changes are all simple stuff, I'm working it all from photoshop. As for payment we can leave it just now till I figure out what sort of low-price weird instrument I want to go for, I live in UK so I don't really want you to pay more than its worth in shipping costs too.
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Dec 29, 2012 18:07
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A LOVELY LAD posted:Cool yeah if you send me a PM with some more visually interesting instruments I can replace the existing ones tomorrow hopefully, text changes and timing changes are all simple stuff, I'm working it all from photoshop. As for payment we can leave it just now till I figure out what sort of low-price weird instrument I want to go for, I live in UK so I don't really want you to pay more than its worth in shipping costs too. I've got a few weeks left on my current ad (you can see it by hitting the "Browse all ads" link down by the bottom banner) so no huge hurry. And since you're in the UK it'd probably be easiest for me to buy something off ebay.co.uk. Among the <£25 items would be some small kalimbas, harmonicas (Swan makes a decent chromatic harmonica), tinwhistles, and some smaller drums like the 11" Meinl darbouka, various Brazilian tambourim, or one or two models of tunable tambourine one could use as a riq. There's a scattering of stuff, plus the Chiff & Fipple poster that makes Irish fifes that a few goons have bought lives in the UK, so easy shipping there. quote:What really sucked me in was just youtubing doumbek videos. Middle Eastern rhythms are INSANE. Feel free to post a few of your favourites and a pic of your new buy when it comes in. In the meantime, I ran across a few fun fusion doumbek clips: - Bhangra (Punjabi dance) rhythms on doumbek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wer6bFky9NE - Hip-hop rhythm on doumbek (complete with dumbass YouTuber comment "what a disgusting misuse of an instrument"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSUsgVWIeN8
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Dec 30, 2012 18:09
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Are you fixing to perform with this at all, or more just for personal enjoyment? Mostly personal enjoyment, but I may get sucked into busking with a friend if I get decent with it.
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Dec 30, 2012 23:03
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More on the Doumbek: any recs on effective dvds and suchlike? I've gotten my hands on a few but am curious if there's some really foundational, awesome stuff that you know about. Update: I've managed to get my teks a lot fuller.
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Dec 31, 2012 01:40
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RasputinsGhost posted:More on the Doumbek: any recs on effective dvds and suchlike? I've gotten my hands on a few but am curious if there's some really foundational, awesome stuff that you know about. I have not messed around with dumbek learning since 1997, so actually predating the prevalence of DVDs. But I never had a VHS tape of dumbek, just a soft paper book and watching a few other players at Seattle drum circles. So I can't really speak to such, but the ME drums forum I mentioned earlier probably has some past writeups of good learning materials. If you find any ones that look appealing, that'd be a useful update. Speaking of dumbeks, I hadn't seen mine in years so dimly thought that I'd either sold it on some trip back home from the military, or given it to a friend or something. I was at my family's place for Christmas, and my folks mentioned that my dumbek was stacked on some shelves in the garage. I hauled it down, and it still has a tape label with name and contact info from where a belly-dancing friend borrowed it for a few years a ways back. However, it also had a pinhole in the head, and a gash in the head at the seat (where the head is tensioned against the drum body. Not sure what caused it, though likely just being stacked against things in too thin of a case. But that head lasting 16 years, so I can't be too picky. The spare I had is probably buried in some boxes, so I'll just end up buying a new Remo synth head for it. Small heads-up: I was glancing at the DC-area CL for synthesizers, and the first item on today's list popped out at me: http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/msg/3452168955.html - Sharpsicle Harp and case - $250 (manassas) At first I was like, "oh, a Harpsicle, those retail for $400, that's a pretty good deal." Then I realised, it's a Sharpsicle, so it comes with eight sharping levers for changing keys. With the levers and accessories that's pushing $600 retail. If you're in the Northern Virginia/DC area and been meaning to learn harp, I'd jump on this puppy. Ghastly paint-job (allegedly from the maker itself), but you can probably paint over that.  EDIT: Huh, and at the other end of the DC area (Germantown, MD), another Sharpsicle, sans weird paintjob and with a few more accessories, for $300: http://frederick.craigslist.org/msg/3432281317.html 
TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Dec 31, 2012 |
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Dec 31, 2012 04:42
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I actually got my hands on Raquy Danzinger's Dumbek Fever 1 (for beginners) and it's very good so far.
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Dec 31, 2012 07:09
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RasputinsGhost posted:I actually got my hands on Raquy Danzinger's Dumbek Fever 1 (for beginners) and it's very good so far. Good deal, getting some drumming going on in this thread. Speaking of which, dammit, I just bought a Balaram mrdanga for $135 on eBay. It's a modern synthetic version invented because the Hare Krishnas in the US in the 1970s were having a drat hard time with their drums breaking/melting because trad mrdangas are made from clay. Plus the hassle of trying to arrange and ship them from Bengal. So some ISKCON guru tasked one of his disciples to travel to Bengal, spend a while apprenticed to a drum-maker, and come back and design modern ones. I think they ended up getting a Los Angeles company that makes plastic boat-hulls to cast the bodies. In any case, cool drum, though I'm going to feel a little self-concious playing it at drum circles since it's rather heavily associated with the Hare Krishnas, especially in the US. I still have that chant stuck in my brain from going to Rainbow Gathering in the mountains of Arizona back in 1997 or so: "Hare Krisha, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krisha, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hara Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare." I guess that means it's a really well-composed chant; props on the marketing skills if nothing else. What the hell, Hare Bol!  Yiggy, sent you a PM to see if you want to try borrowing this one for a bit. TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Jan 1, 2013 |
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Jan 1, 2013 01:30
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Well, for Christmas this year I got an electric guitar, a sitar and some sort of flute from India, and a didgeridoo from Australia. Family members picked it all up for me in their travels. This is what you've done to me Tap.
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Jan 1, 2013 20:57
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:At first I was like, "oh, a Harpsicle, those retail for $400, that's a pretty good deal." Then I realised, it's a Sharpsicle, so it comes with eight sharping levers for changing keys. With the levers and accessories that's pushing $600 retail. If you're in the Northern Virginia/DC area and been meaning to learn harp, I'd jump on this puppy. Ghastly paint-job (allegedly from the maker itself), but you can probably paint over that. Oh, my God, a camo Sharpsicle.  I visited the makers over Thanksgiving. I was actually wanting to look at their higher-end harps, but they'd all been shipped to a trade show. The two things I noticed about the Sharpsicle were that it had a rather thin voice -- not surprising at this price range -- and very loose-tension strings. This makes sense, because the tighter the strings, the stronger the construction needs to be. On the other hand, I think it would make transitioning to a folk harp (or, God help you, a classical harp) difficult: you wouldn't have the harp calluses and, more importantly, your pluck and release would be trained to a much mushier string. It would be like going from toy guitar to mandolin. I think the spacing was also a bit wider than my folk harp, but spacing differences are routine and any harpist needs to get used to them.It's still a great price for an entry-level harp, but I think you would want to transition to a more expensive harp as soon as you could.
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Jan 2, 2013 00:48
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TTFA, a guy in the greater DC area is looking to get rid of a gamelan orchestra Do you know anybody who could put it to good use?
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Jan 3, 2013 02:10
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Arsenic Lupin posted:TTFA, a guy in the greater DC area is looking to get rid of a gamelan orchestra Do you know anybody who could put it to good use? Wow, that's way out of my lane on a variety of levels, but I'd imagine that'd be quite a coup for a university looking to get up a gamelan orchestra... I've been pondering a bit about instruments which are accessible to people who don't necessarily have a lot of music background, or aren't so much looking to "play" specific tunes as just make some music, improvise, etc. Percussion is always good for that, but there are some melodic instruments with limited note ranges (such as the penatonic 5-note scale) that are really hard to sound bad on because most of their notes complement each other. One of the simpler options is a pentatonic kalimba/thumb-piano, and I got one of those for a friend over the holidays, and she's been finding it really intuitive even for a non-musical person. On the string side, the instruments most like that are some of the small harps/lyres/zithers which have a limited number of notes and just play open strings (instead of fretting, pinching, etc). An Anglo-Saxon lyres works pretty well for that, but for folks wanting to attack it from a different angle: Tonkori  The tonkori is a traditional lyre/zither played by the Ainu people in Northern Japan. Briefly put, the Ainu are to the Yamato (the modern "ethnic Japanese") what the Native Americans are to Americans: the Ainu held much of the Northern Pacific Asian island, the Yamatos showed up and stole their land, wiped out or assimilated most of them, worked to erase their language and culture, and at the very last minute backed off slightly allowing some few remnants of Ainu life to soldier on.  The tonkori has five strings, in a rising and falling vice just straight order, and forming a pentatonic scale. The players uses both hands to pluck and strum notes, and the sound is really quite hypnotic. Not surprisingly, it was used to play in shamanistic rituals, to back up some songs and dances, to ward off ghosts, and to play lullabies for children. The measurements of the instrument, which is generally made of spruce, is coincidentally about the size of a 4-5' length of 2x4, so for folks looking for a project you could just build the basic body out of a piece of lumber (cedar or pine). I've been meaning to get around to doing just that, but it didn't happen in 2012; maybe this year. This would definitely be a great instrument for someone that just wants to be able to freely improvise with little risk of sounding bad. Just find a rhythm and groupings of notes that sound good, and you really can't go wrong. I know of only one source selling these, the Ainu Museum has them for like $700. Given how easy they are to build though, if anyone really wants one I'm pretty sure you can find an American folk luthier (lyre or dulcimer maker, or pretty much anyone) who can knock you out a basic one for a few hundred. If so curious, let me know and I can track you down someone to make one.  The main modern player is Oki Kano, who's a bit more world-musicky, but there are a few more trad players as well: - Woman playing in costume at the Ainu musuem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur8-K_Hr8jw - A really strummy, clawhammery style of playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuWSvCpSH2I - Artist Sanpe backing up a trad dancer; this might not suit all tastes, as the trad Ainu singing has a yodeling sort of quality to it that some might not dig. Great tonkori work though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHr3U_4uZQ - Some of Oki's more modern solo stylings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Sgj78mI5I - Some world-rock music video by Oki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X9QxFaHJwA
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Jan 3, 2013 13:17
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A LOVELY LAD posted:
I just found this thread via the banner - so nice job  One of my favorite instruments of all time is the Japanese sho (which I know, like a lot of things Japanese, is based on a Chinese instrument first, the sheng). OP, do you know anything about the sho? I've seen it played at a few Japanese classical/court concerts and it sounds both amazing and like a cracked out harmonica.
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Jan 3, 2013 22:34
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FloorCheese posted:I just found this thread via the banner - so nice job I've got a sheng and it is a little difficult to sound good on. The tonality is incredibly shrill, and the pipes have a very counterintuitive organization. I don't pick it up or work on it much because of this. The learning curve just isn't worth the sound, to me.
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Jan 3, 2013 22:48
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A Rogue Mandolin was on the counter when I got home from work, tonight and I promptly popped one of the G strings  I'll re-string it over the weekend and try not to gently caress it all up.It is pushing all of the right ergonomic and aesthetic buttons for me. I think it may give the ukulele a runs for its money as my string instrument of choice. Probably not, ukes are fun as can be. And nylon strings forever.
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Jan 4, 2013 07:07
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FloorCheese posted:I just found this thread via the banner - so nice job Funny you should mention, I just sold to a goon its more primitive cousin, a Thai/Laotian khaen:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLAMtWhE_v4 Maybe the goon who bought mine would be up for a mega-post? FloorCheese, I haven't messed with a sho, though I have briefly played around with a Chinese sheng (close to the same thing). You are correct that they're pretty close to a harmonica: each bamboo tube is a chamber where the note is produced not by the tube itself, but by a vibrating reed inside the tube, and each reed has its own note. East Asia had such instruments milleniae ago, but free reeds don't show up in Europe until the 1700s or so; European organs from the Romans until the Early Modern period were all pipe organs, more like huge tinwhistles controlled by a keyboard than anything else. It isn't until around 1800 that there was an explosion in free reeds in Europe, leading to the reed organ, accordion/concertina, and harmonica.  There's a really good demo clip of sho here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUpr1F1dZt0 So far as how to go about getting one or playing one, I'd have to do some digging on that. Are you interested in learning to play a sho, or something similar? Japanese classical music, or Western music? Chinese shengs are relatively availanble, but a sho is a little smaller and I'd imagine tuned somewhat differently. A harmonica can't imitate a sho too well, since in a harmonica you can only really play notes together if they adjoin each other. A better parallel would be instruments where you can select any combination of reeds. I was going to say that the closest Western instrument to the sho would be the concertina, where you direct air from bellows into selected reed chambers by pushing any combination of chambers. Then I realised a more direct parallel would be a melodica, which is still mouth-driven, and likewise lets you choose to which buttons the air is routed. I don't know your intent, but if it happens to be doing something sho-like without necessarily learning Japanese classical music, you could do something very similar (playing tone clusters to accompany music, or solo), by playing chords and chord variants on melodica.  Let us know if there's any info you need tracked down to get you playing music on one thing or another. TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Jan 4, 2013 |
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Jan 4, 2013 14:00
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FloorCheese posted:I just found this thread via the banner - so nice job There doesn't seem to be much in English about the sho. So I googled around Japanese sites to gather some info for you. What I gathered: - Sho are very expensive. I would expect to pay over 1000 dollars for one. - Sho are kind of high maintenence compared to western free reeds. It'll have to be tuned more often than any western free reed, and tuning is a kind of long process but maybe fun if you like to make a mess. You'll have to bring a little portable stove with you everywhere. This is because, like the recorder and some other woodwinds, your spit will mess up your sho. So before you play, after you play, when you're taking a break from playing, you need to heat it up to keep the reeds dry. - The embouchure is pretty easy, it doesn't involve special tonguing like the sheng. The fingering is difficult. The pipes are arranged in a kind of inexplicable way. Also apparently switching between the different aitake (tone clusters) is apparently very difficult - The places which sho players suggested buying sho from don't have international shipping options. This is the only english language website I found which had sho available to buy, but I didn't find any reviews. It probably is easier to get started on a different free reed and move to sho at a later point. I tried playing some aitake on my concertina, and it definitely was reminiscent of the sho. Sho aren't in concert pitch though, so for a truer sound, you would have to tune your reeds. There are guides on how to tune melodicas available around the internet. If you decide to go this route, I can send some charts your way which show what frequency each note should be. Melodicas and concertinas and such aren't really intended to be tuned by amateurs though, so there is a chance you may break a reed. While sheng and sho seem really messy to tune, breaking a reed is unlikely. So you could get a sheng and retune it to have the notes of a sho. The pipes of a sheng or a sho are decorative and do not affect the pitch produced. What changes the pitch is a drop of wax on each reed. Retuning is just a matter of scraping the wax off, and rewaxing with the right amount of wax to produce the pitch you want.
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Jan 4, 2013 17:35
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Bought a Gibson G string that is as old as me for the new mandolin and slapped it on when I got home. Then my wife started fiddling with it and told me to order her a mandolin of her own. This is getting to be an expensive month.
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Jan 4, 2013 19:51
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Fascinating posts - thank you for the really helpful replies everyone. My intent would be (if feasible) to try and learn it in the classical Japanese style. I spent some time in Japan learning traditional theater forms and a little bit of shamisen (as someone who grew up playing oboe and clarinet, switching to a string instrument was interesting). I'm not too surprised a proper sho is expensive and hard to maintain. (Shamisen was also very high-maintenance, had to constantly retune the thing.) Sounds like retuning a melodica or a sheng might be more a way to go for me as an entry point. Advice along those lines would be great... especially since I don't think I'm ready to drop a grand on an actual sho at this point.
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Jan 4, 2013 20:40
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Yes I'm still working on the hardanger, I'm probably going to be finished tomorrow (I'll post then on my thread ) Anyway, what do you know about the erhu? The range seems very similar to a violin, but in other respects it seems very different. Yet I've actually heard someone play classical violin music on a erhu and classical erhu music on a violin. The erhu has always fascinated me. Here's a fellow playing an erhu at the tea house in Portland, Oregon's Chinese Garden. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNEtOodvjvc I really like the instrument, although I'm going to have my hands full for awhile, but the idea of having an instrument with just two strings to tune (instead of eight or nine, or ten!) seems like a bit of a relief for me.
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Jan 5, 2013 09:34
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 This is a chart showing what frequency each note on a sho should be.  This shows which pipe is which on a sho. The two red pipes on a sho are silent. The above are from 笙のページ, probably the most comprehensive sho site on the internet, at least with beginners in mind. In this thread, a sheng player shows what he uses to tune his instrument. Sho players only use the brown wax, which is a mixture of beeswax and pine resin and they use malachite (and make a blue powder) rather than wuyinshi (I'm not sure what this is, but it makes a white powder). From what I understand, the red wax is heavier than the brown wax, which makes it easier to use for tuning. But, the red wax contains cinnabar. The sho site I've linked recommends putting a tiny amount of metal in the brown wax on certain reeds, so I guess you can experiment with that if you're cautious about using anything containing cinnabar. One website I looked at estimated that tuning the entire instrument takes about 9 hours, but it seems that you're more likely to tune individual reeds as they need it. As for retuning a sheng vs melodica, I don't really know which way is better. Getting a melodica looks to be less expensive, and the ups and downs of various melodica brands is more of a known quantity (at least on the English speaking net). But a sheng would probably give you more skills that transfer over if you do decide to upgrade to a sho. If you do get a sheng, be careful about the pipes. Most sheng don't have silent pipes anymore, but traditionally they can have up to 4 silent ones.
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Jan 5, 2013 18:00
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FloorCheese posted:My intent would be (if feasible) to try and learn it in the classical Japanese style. ... At this point I'm leaning towards recommending the melodica option. There are tons of melodicas out there, so you can get a used or cheap one to try out quite easily. Before you even go re-tuning things to a Japanese scale, I'd suggest messing with the melodica as-is for a few weeks to see if it's something you would enjoy experimenting with. No point in buying tuning tools and risking ruining one, or even successfully converting it to a scale most people don't use, if you don't enjoy the instrument itself. I'm not particularly spun-up on Japanese music, so I don't know how feasible it is to find recordings (or playable files for music software) of Japanese melodies but in Equal temperament (which would match the stock reeds of the melodica). But if such a thing isn't hard to find, you could start out practising accompanying that just for fun. Or if that's not readily available, you could apply some sho-style riffs to standard Western chord progressions. Put on a basic melody to which you have the chords written, and then just play tone-clusters on your melodica, in a technique similar to the sho. It's entirely possible you'll find some application of a Western-tuned melodica that you enjoy enough to stick with, but if it turns out that you do want to re-tune to play along with Japanese classical recordings or something, fortunately melodica is apparently pretty easy to re-tune. There are various articles about it you can easily Google up, though the Melodicas.com one seems reasonably detailed. You can get by with some basic small-parts tools and some improvised wedges/shims, or (as I understand it, best double-check on this) people buy harmonica-tuning kits for their melodicas, like these assorted makes. I briefly glanced around for some articles about melodica in Japanese music, and this looks like a guy you really want to read, and maybe even correspond with: Makoto Nomura's blog. Lots of good background, and Nomura himself has retuned his melodicas to play various scales, like Javanese gamelan and all that.  Melodica is pretty huge in Japan; it was (is?) is a standard part of elementary education, so I'd expect there are people that've drawn the melodica-sho comparison before. If you either speak Japanese, or correspond with some Japanese melodica players, I imagine there's a lot more info to dig up on the topic that just doesn't exist in English. EDIT: Definitely get a hold of this Nomura guy if you can; he seems really cool. TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Jan 6, 2013 |
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Jan 6, 2013 02:18
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Thanks very kindly - I'll do that! I live about a block away from Berklee school of music so there's gotta be easy places for me to get a melodica around here.
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Jan 6, 2013 05:38
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TTFA, I just noticed that you are keeping up with with your goon:instrument list and thought I would drop mine here with some initial impressions and maybe some pictures later if the lighting holds: Mandolin*, Rogue RM-100A: Fiddybux, shipped, at Musician's Friend with a guarantee seemed like a very low-risk gamble and it paid off. Also, a goon in this thread made mention of Rogue being a decent intro mandolin. Mine came in with a decent action, seems like it will hold tune well enough when the strings break in, and the tone is fine for mucking about in your living room/back deck/maybe jamming with another instrument or two. It is looking like I will like mandolin as much as ukulele and if so, I will be upgrading to a nicer one (not sure if A or F body) with a proper set-up from the shop. The kids will then be free to hammer on the Rogue. I'm not sure I would recommend a Rogue to someone else, but if you feel like a gamble, you could make a worse bet. Tin whistle**, Brass Feadog in D: Not sure what to say about it other than tin whistle kick rear end and it has a more pointed tone than a Clarke by far. Harmonica, Lee-Oskar 1910-C: Haven't really done much with it outside of some random "tikka toodle." The reeds seem well done and it sounded nice in my howdy-do? out of the box. It is hanging out in my ukulele case for a slow day when I am better with other stuff and want to try a simple tune with something different. Cigar box guitar: A friend swung by my place a few weeks ago with a so terrible it is awesome three-string. It sounds fine and I will muck with it after I get handy with ukulele and mandolin. I have never played any member of the string section before this year, so it may take a while before I get to it. And my dad came by last night with the beginnings of what will probably be a two-string acoustic...thing. Looking forward to seeing it finished. Diddley-Bow: Mandolin G string, cheap acoustic guitar pickup, mostly built by a five year-old. It is a hilarious good time. Fife, Yamaha YRF-21: I have always made fun of flautists and decided to fill the recorder shaped hole in my heart with a fife. I am half-assedly working on getting a workable embouchure and leaving it as another rainy day toy. Mostly just to be available to the kids, honestly. Another specific model picked when confirmed decent by this thread. Ukulele* count? If so, I have a Kala KA-ASLAC: It sounds great and has a proper setup from the shop and Aquila strings. It survived a two year-old dropping it on the floor. I am completely  for this thing.Electric organ: About a year ago, my wife's grandmother gave us the organ that her mother used to play and we have had trouble with the main fuse. Before I got a chance to look at the wiring, one of the kids smashed some keys with a tack hammer  It is now a long-term project to get working again. I am not a piano person, but the kids would love it and I have friends who like to noodle on pianos so it will be a nice social addition to my cable T.V.-less living room when finished.One of my friends is a band director who did her level best to get the kids into music back in my work-midnights-have-two-jobs-stop-playing-instruments phase. So they have always had a pile of toy instruments from her and loved playing her drumset and piano when she baby-sat. Now they are old enough to start some proper instruments and my wife and I cut some spending and are tossing some extra cash into piling up an instrument collection in the hopes the kids will at least find one that speaks to them and they will stick to. Another friend likes fiddling with instruments at parties and yet another friend seems pretty supportive of keeping accessible/inexpensive enough instruments about. The kids have started asking if we can all dig out the pile of instruments and just have at it before bed a few times a week and it is pretty much my favorite dad moment. The neighbors probably disagree  * Stuff I plan to take seriously. After my trumpet because brass is tops always and forever. ** While I don't take it seriously, I do play with it all the time and enjoy the hell out of it.
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Jan 6, 2013 17:52
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Butch Cassidy posted:Bought a Gibson G string that is as old as me for the new mandolin and slapped it on when I got home. Then my wife started fiddling with it and told me to order her a mandolin of her own. This is getting to be an expensive month. Everyone getting mandolins, eh? I immediately thought of this article from The Onion: Mumford And Sons Can't Believe They All Got Each Other Mandolins For Christmas.
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Jan 6, 2013 19:51
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Butch Cassidy, you and your attempts to infuse your children's lives with music is unequivocally awesome. But... Flutes are awesome too damnit  The unkeyed ones are just a deeper throated tin whistle, a much more deserving pipe for your ire.
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Jan 6, 2013 20:02
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The Onion posted:...I can’t say I’m disappointed when I think about the amazing sound we could create with this many mandolins... A bunch of mandolins can even make Gotye sound good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMeoFaYqgTI
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Jan 6, 2013 20:24
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FloorCheese posted:Thanks very kindly - I'll do that! I live about a block away from Berklee school of music so there's gotta be easy places for me to get a melodica around here. eBay is honestly probably the easiest way to find decent prices and selection, especially if this is something you might be opening up and doing surgery on anyway (eventually). That said, if you're around a major music school you might as well start reaching out to other people interested in Japanese music, or West-Japanese hybrids. Maybe there's some local classical guitarist that would want to jam playing Japanese melodies while you play tone clusters along with him? Getting to talk about your ideas with some other people will likely get you a lot further. Also, check out the Japan Society of Boston, which keeps a calendar of local events, and might have folks who can introduce you to people in your area who do Japanese music. If you're not booked up for Wednesday 9 January, there's a CD release party for a Japanese band over in Cambridge: http://www.japansocietyboston.org/Events?eventId=605029&EventViewMode=EventDetails quote:Electric organ: About a year ago, my wife's grandmother gave us the organ that her mother used to play and we have had trouble with the main fuse. That reminds me, while looking for synthesizers on Craigslist I've noticed there are a buttload of electric organs for cheap or free every single week. It's a bulky instrument, so there tend to be people around that just get sick of it taking up the spare room and want it gone. Some of them are junk, or really old acoustics that might need too much repair, but a ton of them are major brands and in generally working order. If you happen to live somewhere where you have room to spare, and some kind of vehicle you can load a bulky instrument into, it'd be pretty boss to have a nice organ with the foot-pedals just hanging out. 
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Jan 6, 2013 22:25
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I've been learning the didgeridoo lately (unrelated to this thread funnily enough) and it's a lot of fun. Definitely one of the most free-form instruments I've ever played, and I'm not very creative so I can't do much with it yet. Circular breathing isn't as hard as people make it out to be (or at least wasn't for me once I sat down and practiced it for a couple hours), but being able to do it consistently without changing note, or changing the note in the desired fashion, definitely can be. Having access to a wealth of both indigenous and non-indigenous teachers who have even helped me make my own didgeridoos to play doesn't hurt either. e: this comes across too much like bragging when all I want to say is tell me about your experiences learning the didgeridoo Makrond fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Jan 7, 2013 |
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Jan 7, 2013 11:27
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quote:e: this comes across too much like bragging when all I want to say is tell me about your experiences learning the didgeridoo We only have a few didj players that've dropped into the thread, but if you're up to tell a few stories about your experience playing and making didjs (ideally with some photos), I'd imagine folks would be interested to see that. I've been really bad about posting when I get new instruments, but here's one I just picked up after the holidays, after I spent so many hours watching clips and reading up on this that buying one just seemed inevitable given the sunken cost. Kanjira  Kanjira is a type of rather small Indian frame-drum, distinctive from similar creatures in that it has one cutout with two or three metal jingles, and a head of lizard skin at surprisingly low tension. It's primarily played in Carnatic (South Indian) music. Folks are a bit sketchy on the details, but this particular drum type might only date back a little over a century, and moved from the street into classical Carnatic music shortly before Partition; it's now a respectable high-skill instrument. The drum is held in the weak hand, which can also apply pressure to the skin to warp the pitch, and drummed only with the strong hand, generally with a "split hand" where the index is held separate from the group of the lower three.  I picked one of these up because I'd been meaning to get a large 20-24" frame drum (tar, bendir, etc), but when I saw clips of this on YouTube I was really impressed by the playing styles, and it is convenient that this little drum is only 7" across, yet puts out a lot of bass. And the jingle is pretty selective depending on how you hold/hit it, so it's not jangly like a tamborine, but just adds a bit of dry clash like the rings on a daf. It also reminds me, oddly enough, of a bodhran, so if I ever get some decent skills on this I intend to try out some Irish rhythms. The kanjira seems to be getting a good scattering of attention from serious international hand percussionists these days, who speak glowingly of the instrument's possibilities, so that helped convince me too.  So far as buying one, an actual lizard-skin one takes some real skill to keep tuned (the skin is left tight, and sprinkled with water to loosen it to get bass), plus that species of monitor is endangered, so not a good option. There are a few cheap fishskin-headed kanjiras from the usual suspects for $25ish, not familiar with those. The main Western manufacturers are Meinl, Remo, and Cooperman (who's mainly known for bodhrans); I believe all of these are tunable. The Meinl kanjira has a goat-skin, so takes a little tweaking to get the good bass going, but gets some good reviews for a $50 drum. Remo has two models, the older Bergamo (natural head) which looks really more like a pandeiro, and the new Skyndeep model ($79) with a synthetic head in an imitation monitor lizard pattern. The latter Remo has some big name sponsored players, and also some good press, and it takes the least maintenance of all these, and looks the most "traditional". The tradeoff is some criticise the synth head as just not being as good as lizard/goat, though apparently there's a detailed technique to stretch it out by giving it "CPR" and thus get more looseness and bass out of it. The Cooperman gets generally good reviews, but is pricier at $165, and has a Remo synth (but not cool printing) head on a hardwood body, while most of the other drums are cheaper wood or composite wood. The Cooperman is a bit larger and comes with its own case, while the Meinl and the Remo Skyndeep can fit in the Meinl kanjira case, so I got one of those for $20 and it's a really great piece of gear with lots of padding. Word on the internet seems to be that Ganeshkanjira.com is the place to get instructional materials, and Ganesh Kumar has a lot of good clips online; I'm getting close to just buying one of his DVDs to try out. I bought the Remo Skyndeep, mostly because I like synthetic for the stability, since I don't know if I'll be playing it daily or putting it away for a year before playing again. Plus it looks pretty wicked. I don't know that any of the above Western makes are at all bad options, so personal call.  Here are some clips, but I will emphasise you can't hear the bass properly on laptop speakers. You need to either be using decent speakers, or maybe headphones, but with laptop speakers it'll just sound dull and flat. I thought kanjira was vaguely interesting at first on my laptop, but then heard it on a desktop with a nice subwoofer and was totally sold on getting one. - A less-traditional but really interesting short demo by Remo's Brad Dutz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KETEpqpw8M - Bruce Tauzin (heads up kanjira.fr) has a lot of minute-long clips of cool techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4w34jVrb-w - Kind of dry with a lot of talking, but a 15m lecture and demo on kanjira with Pete Lockett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG-R7X_nzwg - Ganesh Kumar, the dude with the crazy hair above, arguably one of the top modern masters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=polPvaLFQe4 TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Jan 10, 2013 |
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Jan 10, 2013 05:03
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Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from when I was making my didgeridoo or when dad was making his two. It's not terribly difficult though, we used draw knives made out of scrap metal and wrapped with duct tape to make handles, then a bit of sandpaper and varnish to finish, and string and PVC glue for sealing holes. Modern materials make the process quite easy and painless, if a little time-consuming if you still want to say you made your own didge by hand. As for my experiences, I had a lot of free time after I finished my didgeridoo to just sit and play it, so I used it to great effect. I had two great instructors who sat down with me for a couple of minutes and showed me the basics of circular breathing, then told me to practice on my own until I got it right. About two hours of solid practice later I pretty much had it down, and after an hour of mucking around after that I could make some basic sounds. A year later I haven't really learned anything new, but I've gotten a lot more consistent at what I do know and I can do all the same things I could do before with half the amount of breath. I'm hoping this year I can get better at playing rhythms now that I finally don't need to constantly remind myself to breathe. I actually got to sit down and jam with a fantastic guy today who's been playing since he was 13 and is a great teacher. He taught me some more traditional techniques and I ended up teaching him about bounce breathing which he really enjoyed, since he's a dude who loves to blend the traditional techniques with the more contemporary styles of playing.
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Jan 12, 2013 08:05
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I cannot do a proper full Tap post; here's me going off half-Tapped. Introducing the épinette des Vosges. It's a member of the dulcimer family. Varying numbers of fretted strings and drones (two fretted, three drones is common) ; played only in two areas of the Vosges mountains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB2TMeUp5I8 Christophe Toussaint, a luthier and épinette player, playing Polka de Dorothée. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWY5LeM8Flg Two women singing a duet, "Belle Hirondelle" If you're a Bay Area goon, there's one on Craigslist for an absolute steal: $140. I'm doing this post in hopes that some goon with more time than I have will give this beauty a good home. It's from Lark in the Morning; currently they sell this model new for $245.
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Jan 12, 2013 23:30
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I've recently picked up an old mandolin that my Dad had lying around, and I know for a fact that the bridge is placed improperly. I've heard harmonics mentioned for how to properly set the bridge, but I don't know how to put this knowledge to use. This is my first stringed instrument, so proper fretting technique is purely theoretical at the moment. I have an electric tuner, which I suspect is a key element in this process. How do you determine the proper position of a bridge?   
virtual256 fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Jan 13, 2013 |
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Jan 13, 2013 08:43
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Oooh, pretty. I love bowlbacks. [end of useless comment] Of the stuff I Googled, this page looks the most detailed: http://zeppmusic.com/bridgeset.htm Even though it mostly uses the word "banjo", the instructions are the same as for mandolin. If you already own an electronic tuner, use it, unless you have a great ear. Awaiting instructions from somebody who's done it.
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Jan 13, 2013 17:46
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Basically the right place for the bridge is where the open note and the 12th fret harmonic is the same pitch for each string. Start out with the bridge placed so the 12th fret is exactly midway from the bridge to the nut and nudge it around from there.
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Jan 13, 2013 18:31
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I skimmed the thread and can't find it. Has anybody messed around with the Waring Music cardboard kit harp? I don't always have access to the living-room where my beloved Triplett floor harp sits, and I'd like a small instrument to keep in the bedroom and practice finger exercises and so on. The Waring looks tempting, both because of the price point and because I could paint it purple. I've already had my hands on a Harpsicle and hated it. I didn't like its voice, and I didn't like the feeling of its strings. I'm sure the Waring will have slack strings as well; it will have to. However, a $130-plus-shipping toy harp is a lot more attractive than a $400-plus-shipping toy harp.
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Jan 14, 2013 21:36
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TapTheForwardAssist is a cool dude: The  patch has a date with some velcro to be used on everything.
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Jan 17, 2013 18:16
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TTFA, do you have any other squeezeboxes for sale? lol
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Jan 17, 2013 20:22
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