Little Jake pickup test

So I picked up one of Trent Jacob's Little Jake pickups. After some trouble with the installation (a DIY job, and let me tell you, I didn't try it on one of my good bocals), I'm now playing with it. You're supposed to use it with a preamp, either a custom or something like the LR Baggs Gigpro. I'm putting it straight into the input of my audio interface, an M-Audio FastTrack Pro. It needs a fair bit of gain to get an acceptable signal level, but the FastTrack preamp is kinda noisy at very high gain, so I'm thinking about getting a proper preamp. Here's a short sample, first recorded with the Little Jake, next recorded in parallel with a decent quality (but rather old) dynamic mic, an AT802.

Little Jake Test by TFox17
Little Jake Test Control by TFox17

A couple of things to point out: the Little Jake does a very good job of rejecting outside noise. It won't feedback, if you're using it to drive a loud amplifier in the same room. When I've played against a delay, or self-recordings with a mic, it was always a struggle to get the signal through amp loud enough that I could hear it while playing while also avoiding feedback. Even without feedback, there's still effects, such as some uncontrolled reverb from the signal leakage. So that's the primary purpose of using a pickup, is to avoid stuff like that. You get side benefits too. Key clacks are gone, for instance, and ambient noise in the room is gone too. The only thing you're getting is the sound actually inside the bassoon. Of course, external sounds can propagate to the inside of the bassoon too, but the bassoon sound is so much louder there, that they are swamped out. It's a signal to noise thing, kind of the ultimate version of close miking. It's not perfect: I was recording while playing a metronome through headphones, adjusted rather too loud (don't ask), and I could end up making out a bit of the metronome sound in the Little Jake recording.

The tone color, however, seems quite different from the far field mike recording. Not a big deal, I think, since mostly people use this as a starting point for effects, as opposed to looking for a true bassoon sound. Still, interesting.

Updated: For reference, as a comparison of microphone differences, here's my other microphone, an AT2020 condenser mic, against the 802. They've been normalized, to try and get their volumes equal, but are otherwise unprocessed. Mic location is bell height, about 5 ft in front of the bassoon, a few feet in front of the wall, with the mics both facing forward, and within a few inches of each other. When I did this yesterday I was surprised at how different they sounded, but today I'm surprised at how similar they are. Certainly there's a lot of things the AT2020 hears that seem to be gone in the 802, but I seem to need the nice headphones to hear them (the laptop speakers aren't enough), and they all seem to be things I'd rather not hear anyway (breathy noises, that kind of thing).

AT2020 Test by TFox17
AT802-Test by TFox17

Scales inside of scales

When I started playing again, I didn't want to be locked into my existing limited models, notes off the page, all major scales, plus the occasional foray into the three minors they teach you in school. If you expand your horizons, however, there are a very large number of possible scales to play with, even if you limit yourself to the ones common used in some musical tradition and ignore the infinities of mathematical possibilities. So I grabbed some of my wife's jazz theory books, typed in the names of some scales, and picked one at random to play from time to time when I was in the mood. I soon got to be able to distinguish a melodic from a jazz minor, minor and major pentatonic, remember the names of all the modes, and so on. I couldn't play them fast or fluently, but I could puzzle through them one at a time, and I felt like I was learning something.

Still, there's always stuff you miss. For instance, it seems reasonable that a minor pentatonic fits inside a minor scale. But there's more. The inimitable Paul Hanson explains something I wouldn't have guessed: in fact, you can fit *three* different pentatonics inside. For a Dorian, you have a minor pentatonic available starting on the 1st, 2nd, and 5th scale tones, all without leaving the scale. (Likewise, you could do major pentatonics starting on 3, 4, or 7, with similar embeddings for any other mode.) In this video, he demonstrates with bass player Craig Harris.

Another week, another lesson

Milde Scale 1 went well this time. Really well in fact, I think better than I've ever played it in practice. It got so I was nervous about ruining the streak of smooth notes, and messed up from losing focus. I'd done lots of practicing, missing only one day, and I'd played twice yesterday and also twice today, before my lesson. It doesn't seem like things improve, but I guess they do. I was going to ask about the finger movement thing, but it didn't happen, so

Still complaints about tone in upper register, despite my work in that direction. Especially A4 and up. Lips firm against teeth but as loose as possible against the reed mute the reed less apparently, if that doesn't sound too contradictory. All support from the air, very fast air. No biting or anything like that of course. G4 is a good note to start on, since it's easy to get a good tone there, and then work up. Thin and dead is what I'm trying to avoid.

Elgar: very long lines, look for the dissonant downbeats->resolve figures (appogiatura). It's all very exposed, so every aspect of every note counts. I think this is the first piece I've played which has been hard due to phrasing, rather than just notes.

Scales: just keep the ones I'm working on, C F G D, their relative melodic minors, and arpeggios, maybe slowly work up speed. I played them at 60 in the lesson, which felt comfortable, though I've also been working them slower in practice, eg 53.

Bocals: I played on a new-to-me bocal, a CD1 I got off of eBay. It feels different than my other one, thinner and more metallic somehow. Probably no audible difference to an external listener, but it feels quite different anyway. For reed, I played on G5. I formed a bunch of tubes before I went on vacation, and really need to start finishing some of those reeds.

Struggling

Had another lesson. Terrible, in part. The fingering changes is one reason, another is the time off I took, and I'm still getting back up to speed. But Milde 1, the first scale study, was both slower and more uneven than I'd played it at the last lesson. Parts of it he just said, there's nothing I can say to help you there. And the lesson on Elgar Romance covered nearly identical ground as the previous one. Which is to say, I've made precisely zero progress.

Still, I learned things. For instance, apparently my embrochure is wrong too: not enough wrapped around the teeth. I spent a year playing long tones with an incorrect embrochure, I guess, not to mention the decade of playing when I was younger. Anyway, he said that a thinner embrochure, ie less lip on the reed, would damp less, and let the high A4 ring more, and match the lower A's. So yeah, yet another thing to change.

And while practicing tonight, trying to figure out why I can play the second bar of Milde 1 okay by itself, but never after the first bar, I realized that I have two positions for my left hand. If I start in the bottom register, my hand is wrapped a little more, and my fingers extended more, but in the tenor register I put the ball of my first finger a little more in front to support the weight. This affects how I move the fingers, and whether I can only bend from the knuckle or from the ball (not sure the right anatomical descriptions of these). Anyway, I'm trying to learn to be consistent, so that if I play a scale up, I don't need to shift. So that's yet another thing that I didn't know existed, not to mention the things I knew were problems, but hadn't figured out how to fix yet. So much to learn.

Restarting

So I'm back from traveling, and starting to practice again. First couple of days were a bear, it felt totally alien to have this buzzing thing in my mouth. And not just me, but the reeds, too, felt like they weren't used to working. I'm over that now, but my teacher changed some fingerings on me, and I'm having great trouble adjusting. I'm to add the Eb vent on D3 (and I'm guessing Eb3 as well), put down the whisper key on G3 (and probably F#3 and G#3), and remove the vent on B3 and C4. D3 is the one that kills me, because it basically adds a pinky finger motion opposite to fourth finger, when getting the fourth finger to behave is bad enough. Still, it helps the intonation, on what was previously perhaps my worst note. Still, at this point, I feel like getting back into the practice of practicing is the most important step. It doesn't matter if I sound worse than I did at my last lesson, the point is to practice practicing.