Rethinking 26

Okay, so now I've spent a few minutes with this little exercise. It's not hard fingerwise -- when I was a student, I probably didn't practice, and ended up sight reading a lot of things at lessons. And the recording I made was after only a brief lookover. So what have I learned by listening to myself play this?

1. I can't count as well as I think I can. The high A in bar 14 is three beats and a bit long, but I only hold it for two. Didn't realize that until just today, when I listened to the recording while looking at every note in the music.
2. It's only 25 bars of music, and maybe two minutes long, but nevertheless, I think I'm having endurance problems. Quavery notes.
3. It's fairly rich, musically. I should spend some time working through exactly how the phrases should go. And where to breathe!
4. I actually suck at making obvious to the listener even the dynamic contrasts that I attempt to make. Eg, the big rise/fall on the last note. I tried, but the result is pretty subtle at best.
5. Garbage in between notes, bad attacks, bad releases... yeah, they sound bad on tape, too, not just to the player.
6. Maybe I should memorize it? Jeez, my son can memorize anything, and pianists usually know all the notes for everything. If I knew the notes, it'd be one less thing to be thinking about.

So yeah, lots to work on, even in just this little piece.

Checking intonation

With a bit of fussing, I scanned in the etude, so you can look at the notes.
Okay, so how bad is the intonation in it, really? Well, I suppose I could just listen... but I guess I don't have a lot of trust in my ears these days, after all, they were on when I was playing it, and it still ended up how it did. Using the tuner is another way: play it back, and watch the needle. This is helpful, some notes are worse than others. But the tuner takes a few moments to lock on, by which time the music has moved to the next note. So this isn't great either. Besides, it's hard to document and blog about, without making a video, which seems like far too much work.

Other approaches... well, if a tuner can detect intonation, so can a computer. And computers can shift pitch too. Digital pitch correction tools have become an important part of recorded music production in the past decade, particularly in pop music, and we can use this kind of software to analyze the audio in question. First, I tried the "Enhance Tuning" option in Garage Band. Rather than just provide a file 100% corrected, I made of copy of the track, corrected one of them, and played them against each other, so you hear beating on the bad notes.


This is pretty useful, it's easy to hear the notes which have been shifted.
To me, the worst (of many contenders) is the D just before the resolution in bar 8, second time through the first section (start at about 0:54 for the last few notes).

Garage Band, unfortunately, will only fix your pitches, it doesn't (as far as I know) provide a way to look at what it's hearing and doing. I downloaded a demo of Melodyne, one of the heavy hitters of pitch correction, and ran my audio through it. Here's a screen grab of the tail of that phrase. I've selected that D, which is identified as a full 30 cents flat. Making it worse is the note before is sharp, so the interval is pretty close to a full quarter tone off.


So how much does it help? Well, here's a fully tuning corrected version (GB, not Melodyne). To my ear, not much better, which shows that intonation is only one of the problems with how I sound.

More of my playing

Tried playing the Hummel, but it was too hard, I've regressed too far. So here's something easier, Weissenborn XXVI, on page 61. Last played April 14, 1983, after I'd been playing less than a year. I've added a bit of reverb to try and compensate for the tiny room I'm recording in ("Medium Concert", adjusted down to 18% wet, for my own future reference), and normalized when exporting, but otherwise clean. I think you can tell why I want to work on tone and intonation. And yeah, I had the tuner on while playing. Not that it helps much.

Beginning acoustics

My son's clarinet doesn't have an octave key. Instead, there's a key which, combined with overblowing, makes notes go up by a twelfth. What up with that? And why do intervals have the ratios they do, anyway? How are we supposed to tune? To answer these questions, we need to do a bit of math.

First, intervals. A string tied at both ends can support a standing wave of wavelength 2L (if L is the length of the string). That's the fundamental. Lightly touch the string in the middle to put a node there, and you get a harmonic, a wave of length L, double the frequency of the fundamental, or an octave. This has two half-waves in the string, but we can put any integer number: 3 (which makes twelfth from the fundamental), 4 (the second octave), 5 (two octaves and a third), and so on. All the intervals are connected by integer ratios, which are also all present as part of the tone of the note from the plucked string. Fine, so intervals are connected with the harmonics of a 1D vibration.

But why? seems like a natural question at this point. To me, there are lots of other examples of vibrating structures, not all of which have the frequencies of their harmonics related as integers. Why does our brain put particular emphasis on the 1D string? Well, I'd guess it has to do with our vocal cords being 1D strings. There's brain circuitry devoted to identifying intervals like octaves and fifths, which has been demonstrated in a variety of creatures, eg owls. Or so my wife tells me, she read a book on it once.

Now, tuning and the chromatic scale: if you go up by fifths, wrapping down by dropping the pitch an octave, you get the sequence C, G, D, A, E, B, F#. The closest note to your starting note is B, which has a pitch ratio of (3/2)^5/2^3 = 0.9492, which is lower than the C by about 5%. This is the ratio of a major 7th to an octave. Arranged in order of pitch, they form a sequence of pitches with small gaps, which we can identify as the western scale. (Well, since we started with C, it's the scale in the Lydian mode.) If you choose fewer than 7, you get a scale with wider leaps, eg the first five give the pentatonic scale, C D E G A. Pentatonic is supposedly another universal, occurring in all peoples and cultures.

If you keep going, you fill in the gaps, until you get to twelve notes. At that point, you've reached a note I'll call C', which is (3/2)^12/2^7 = 1.0136, about 1% higher than our starting pitch. Now the arguments begin. In the true tempered scale, which is how most of our pianos are tuned, we force these to be equal. So replace every interval with the appropriate number of half-steps, and define a half-step to be the twelfth root of 2 = 1.0595. That's a full 10% different from the B-C interval we calculated from integer ratios, a difference easily heard, particularly if played directly against the other pitch, so that there are beats from interference. You can't even get away with the true tempered intervals by playing only with other precisely tuned true tempered instruments, since the harmonics of the notes themselves will follow the integer ratios, if the pitches are formed by anything vibrating like a 1D string, and you'll get beating among the harmonics of the notes. But nor can you use only integer (perfect interval) pitch ratios, since then the note you're playing will depend on the path you took to get there. C vs C' is only one example, it'll occur everywhere.

Fine. So what about the clarinet? Why doesn't it have octaves? More later.

What I used to sound like

Digging in the crawlspace, I found a shoebox full of tapes, including tapes of myself playing in my high school days. With more digging, I was able to put together enough technology to pull the sound off. This tape was made in 1987, when I was a senior, as an audition tape for an honor band. So I was in shape, practiced up, and performing under pressure for a competition: not a bad snapshot of where I was then. The piece is selections from the Hummel concerto: basically the first page of all three movements. There were a number of takes of the first movement on the tape, this was the master I guess, and I pulled off only the last. Not sure which take we ended up using for the submission, they all had goofs of varying severity. Maybe I quit because I sucked. I should try recording these selections again now, for comparison.


Added: here's a YouTube video of the beginning passage, being played by Valeri Popov. In case you're wondering what it's supposed to sound like.

Professionalism

I love Betsy S's bassoon blog. I found it googling for intonation, and have been captivated by the writing and the first person photos of the orchestra experience. The original post I found, this one, was very encouraging to me. A pro with a job, she still frets about being in tune. She's got the same tuner I do. I felt a little less silly, spending my practices doing nothing but playing intervals into the tuner. She will even leave it on during rehearsals, wired into her horn. (I don't have a pickup like she does, but I spent a few minutes looking for one online.) Hey, I'm not so bad, if a pro worries about the same thing I do! Then later, I clicked on the sidebar, and listened to her play Devienne. Instant depression. Incredibly beautiful, totally out of my league. I There is a huge gulf between an amateur and a pro, even a good amateur. It's true in almost all areas of endeavor, really. A pro is working. It's got to be right. If I muff a note during my concert, and I certainly muffed a few, so what. Even if someone noticed, I'm paying, I'm there to enjoy myself and have fun. There was a pro or two at my concert, one a bass player who just showed up for the show, and sight read every note. I noticed quickly he was solid, secure in every note, and I started keying off him, for entrances and intonation. He was working, I was playing. I was paying, he was being paid. Kind of like the hunting guide, who helps the client track and find the animal, and may even take a shot at the same time as the client, ensuring the hunt is successful. If the client misses, so what. Two shots, and no one every knows which one really took the animal down. But the guide can never miss, and never gets credit. At TS's show the other day, I spent most of my time watching the drummer. He was very serious, every drum hit a solo, picked up by every singer in the choir, dozens a bar for more than an hour, hands and feet. Professionalism.

Electric bassoon

You can do some nice things with electric effects, analog or digital. Here's Paul Hanson, with the Flecktones.

Reed material

Legere has been making synthetic reeds for clarinets and saxophones with some success. There's no magic in Arundo donax, it's just a material, albeit with a particular set of properties. It seems like the folks behind Legere (a chemist and a materials scientist, and probably musicians themselves) have found an appropriate material and processing strategy to achieve a substitute for the variable natural material. The reeds still wear out, though, and they aren't cheap, ~$20 each. I'm more interested in the science behind the reed, which their patent might give some clues to. They've also tried making double reeds, but guessing from their website, it looks like that's harder than they'd expected, and they don't have a product yet.

What I sound like

To see if all my tone practice was worth anything, I recorded a four-part hymn. Kinda screwed up on the soprano line (the tune!), but oh well, the other takes were worse. Funny thing, the first time through is almost always best. I guess you should do your practicing before you turn on the recorder. I bumped up the bass a few db, panned the middle lines a bit left and right, but otherwise the recording is dry. Probably should have added some reverb.

Baby it's cold outside

Weatherman says it's -34, the dogs say it's cold. The windows are creaking, and the furnace running continually. And I'm done taking my bassoon through the weather. Had a lunch hour benefit on Friday, chamber music, easy Christmas songs with a few other players. It was supposed to be easy, anyway -- four parts, and about ten of us, so everything was doubled, me sharing part 4 with a cello. So suddenly, not only do I have to hit every note, because it's exposed, I also have to manage to make unisons in tune... on every note. Hard work. Plus one really scored for cello, an entire page of slurred triplet leaps through the low register, without as much as an eighth note of rest anywhere. But TS managed to make it, she hadn't been able to come to the previous shows, and heard me play.

Got my bassoon out last night, to play a few minutes before bed. I did random intervals, with the tuner on. And the mike too, since I was curious how I was sounding. I figured I'd listen after. Played for a bit, was almost starting to get bored, and checked the computer... 58 minutes of track, 300MB of files. Hm, no, I'm not going to listen to all that, but I listened to a few random bits, and some of them sounded better than I expected. Aside from the missed entrances, the flips between some notes, and always the intonation, the intonation...

Order form

Yesterday evening, after practicing a bit for my concert tonight, I looked into the file for my bassoon order. It's been sitting in a filing cabinet, collecting dust, much like the bassoon itself had been. Some strange stuff in there, including letters written by my high school self, wondering where I was on the waiting list, and how construction was going. Drawings made by my teacher, for all the custom bits he thought the horn should have. A Christmas card from the company, with photographs of the shop. It brought up some fairly buried memories, not all good. I was a kid when we ordered it, the decision sparked largely by a favorable exchange rate, but I think at some point I'd had visions of being serious. Later, I learned how much musicians got paid, and how competitive jobs were, and it didn't seem like an environment that I wanted to be a part of. The trajectory away had already started by the time the bassoon showed up. It's a good bassoon, so good my teacher tried to trade for it (seriously -- for his very nice professional horn plus a substantial hunk of cash). But I didn't really feel it was my right, my parents had paid for it after all. Even if I'd wanted to, which I don't think I did.

There were some mistakes made, largely by my teenage self. The maker had a long description of all the whisper lock options, and the 15-year old me had chosen the coolest and fanciest. But it never worked all that well, making loud clacks in operation, and sometimes sticking on. The other overall issue is just maybe too much stuff, every key available, resulting in more holes in the bore, more weight on the horn. I realized a week or so ago that there was a key I'd forgotten about, and hadn't touched, much less relied on, in the time since I restarted. Clearly not something vital.

But mostly there are feelings of guilt, and of being undeserving. By a year after it'd shown up, I was at college, still playing, but rarely practicing, not taking lessons, not progressing, getting wound up in other things. After college, I put it away, figuring I'd restart once I was established, and had my life figured out. Never happened. The life figured out part, anyway. And I'd feel guilty whenever I thought about bassoon, guilty to my teacher, to my parents, to the horn itself. I never quite felt like I deserved to be playing on such a fine instrument. Like the wood deserved better. Feelings of worthlessness. Still struggle with those. It's dark, and cold outside, maybe that has something to do with it.

A bassoon dream

A nightmare, really. I was wandering around backstage, carrying my bassoon, with the bocal in the bell. For some reason there was a loading dock back there, and I lost my balance and fell off. In the dream, I managed to protect the bassoon, but the bocal flew out, hit the pavement, and got a big ding right at the tip.

A minor milestone

My goals are reeds, intonation, and tone. I figure that once I'm able to stand listening to myself play, it'll be easier to figure out what I want to do next. So I've been focusing on self-sufficiency and sound. And first of all, trying to learn reedmaking through making a lot of reeds. Everything requires learning through mistakes, so the faster you start making mistakes, the more you can learn. I passed through a milestone on the weekend. When I started again, my reed case was full of historical reeds, made by my teachers twenty years or more ago. I took some out to make room for the reeds made by a local pro to start me off, and more once I started producing. Well on the weekend, I wanted to pack with me a couple of my latest blanks, not really playable, but in case I found time for scales or whatever, and had a moment to work on breaking them in. To make room, I had to remove the last of the historic reeds, one that still works from my teacher during high school, a reed I'd kept with me for reference. I set it on my bench. For now, all the reeds I have with me are new.

Multi-bassoon

Here's a video of a bassoon with a bocal input, looped through a pedal to give four voices. Kind of cool...

Show's over, sigh

And wow, hm. Lots of things went well. The articulated runs I was worried about, in the last movement of Haydn 101, were clean, or close to it by my standards. I guess the practicing worked. But a wide variety of other things happened that were entirely new. I feel worst about the opening of the Andante in Haydn, the clock movement in the clock symphony, and the bassoons are the ticking clock. I could have sworn I'd locked the conductor's tempo in before beginning, but when the downbeat came, it sure seemed like a totally unrelated tempo. Perhaps it was, without a video I can't know what really happened. Likely the conductor would blame himself if challenged -- he makes a point of always taking all blame, whether fairly or not. Things were pretty disorganized for a few bars, and I dropped out briefly to try to avoid further damage. We got back on track, but it was not an auspicious start.

The second half of the program was Christmas tunes, which are supposed to be easy, sightreading material almost. And some of it was great, but there were times when it seemed like half the orchestra was lost. That hasn't happened to me since junior high. I remember distinctly, playing some repetitive part, when the conductor called out a rehearsal number. Desperate measure, that. Of course, it was also not where I was, so I assumed that he was confused, but that he'd figure it out soon, and kept playing where I was. That sounded fine for awhile, and there were other people with me, but I ended up skipping ahead a bit later. My goodness.

At least I wasn't spending all my time worrying about being in tune.

My kids came. I think they enjoyed the show, and heard a bit of bassoon. I think it's good to be exposed to adults playing music for fun.

Picking a reed

Spent a few minutes last night trying the various reeds I have in my box, deciding which one I'll use for the show. Pretty sure I'm going with one I call R4, which is the newest one from my batch of Rigotti cane which has been working well for me. I did a fair bit of practicing on it last week, to finish breaking it in. It has some brightness, and vibrates okay, but sometimes not well enough, and low register entries aren't totally solid. And intonation is no better than my other reeds. Except for C# in the staff, which some of the time goes way flat (>40-50 cents or more). Not an uncommon reed problem, I know. It could be clipped back, but I think I'm just going to deal with it. I find it interesting that that note on this reed can't be raised by lip pressure, or air stream pressure, the usual bassoon ways of fixing intonation. I'm experimenting with mouth shape -- kind of a French "eu" vowel sound shape brings it up. The tone color doesn't really match the surrounding tones, at least from behind the horn, but that's really the least of my problems.