Reed throughput

Had two rehearsals this week, one with a new group. I ended up playing mostly on G1, and a bit on R5. R6 I tried out, but still buzzy and out of control. I still think it could be a really nice reed, but it needs to calm down, or be calmed down. I've been trying to be careful with it, but that just means it's still mostly just a blank.

I feel like I'm having some luck understanding intonation and reeds. On one of the two soft ones I was working this weekend, G1 or R5 (can't remember which), I was happy with how it was except for being flat. So I tightened the second wire down hard. The tube shrank substantially there, and the pitch came nicely up. It also felt kinda choked, but still.

I have a new goal for reed throughput. I've made about 10 reeds now, and have learned a great deal, and am developing a certain comfort with the very basic level I'm working at. Learning is logarithmic, though: it'll probably take the next 100 to learn as much again. I can do this in a year, by making two a week. So that's my goal: put two reeds per week through the pipeline.

How to make a saxophone

I'm curious about how things are made. Today, I'm thinking about the bocal, mostly because I maybe need a shorter one, and am reading up. Seems like a lot of money for a metal tube. And hey, if I have to make my own reeds, why not the bocal, too. There's not a lot of info on how bocals are made: I guess sheets of metal, bent into a tube with a seam, silver soldered together, with the nipple soldered in. Dimensions are controlled by the size and shape of the original sheet, and no doubt also by a mandrel and working the tube after forming. The bend is done with a flexible mandrel (series of bead of defined sizes fixed to a flexible string?) or sand. Here's a video of saxophone making, done in a factory, but which probably bears some similarity.

A serious electric bassoon setup

Jazz bassoonist Paul Hanson has a gig playing 380 shows a year with Cirque du Soleil in Tokyo. Here's his rig. Briefly, he's got a bocal pickup (well, pressure transducer -- FRAP) and an overhead mic. The pickup goes into the effects chain: FRAP preamp (Trance Audio), Avalon U5 preamp (tone color), BOSS SuperShifter for adding an octave up in harmony, a Line6 delay modeler, then a volume pedal and out. The sound board can mix the wet (effects) signal with the dry signal from the overhead mic. Less fancy than some of his other rigs, but their band already has an electric guitarist with a full kit of effects, plus Abelton Live, so his job is to sound like a bassoon. I find it interesting how all this stuff gets integrated into a stage context -- piped off to the front-of-house sound board, monitoring room, in-ear monitors plus separate channel so they can talk to each other, tiny light so he can operate his equipment on the darkened stage... plus outlandish makeup and costumes. It's very theater, very much a show.

Next batch of reeds

Yesterday I started finishing three reeds that I made into blanks before Christmas, two Rigotti (R5 and R6), and the first one from the Chinese cane (G1). I'm constantly amazed how different reeds can sound that in principle ought to be identical: same batch of the same cane, same processing, same measurements; yet one sounds bright, and the other stuffy. And amazed as well at the symmetry differences between blades. They all came off the profiler with identical thicknesses, I assume anyway, so thickness is not the only determinant for the arch in the blade. Nothing to do but fix it by scraping, I guess. This evening I formed tubes on two more from the Chinese cane. Previously I'd been trying forming tubes with two wires on, figuring that the wires constitute a hard outer form to push against the hard inner form of the mandrel while forming the tube. Then I tried wires and string, so the string could cushion the tube while allowing pliers to crunch the tube, helping the forming. For these two, however, I skipped the wires entirely, using only string, which was how I learned originally. I found myself removing the wires later so I could flatten the formed tube anyway, so if I can avoid putting them on, it'll save a step.

Update (Fri): R6 is strong and bright, and could be interesting. The other two, R5 and G1, are more mellow, and I find myself tending to look for ways to brighten them. Taking wood out of the "hinge" seemed to help... which led to a rare feeling of success. I felt like McCoy in the Star Trek episode, Spock's Brain, where he has to reconnect Spock's brain to his body, with the help of some neural enhancement: It's so easy now. Just scrape the channels if it makes your lips tired, the hinge to get brighter, nuthin' to it.

Updates

I added a blog to my blog list: "I was doing all right", which is by another player who quit, and came back. Like me. Except he's been blogging his recovery for seven years, instead of seven weeks. Also he was more serious than I ever was, a jazz major in college, heading for the pros, before he stopped. I'm looking forward to reading some of what he's written.

I bought some lessons from Frank Morelli. No, not live in person, unfortunately, but a startup called MusicComm taped him and a few other Julliard faculty, doing their teaching. Basically, for a few dollars, I can sit in on a lesson in a world-class institution. It's really interesting. It's not that what he says is so different in detail from what you'd hear from your junior high band teacher ("Support the tone!"), but the realization that no, there aren't any secrets, not really. This is what the best music faculty has to say to the best music students in the country. The rest is talent and work, mostly work.

Playing wise, not much to say. I fooled around a bit with breathing. Since I'd had endurance problems, I wanted to try to discover an exercise that worked that. Long tones are good, but normally I find myself taking a brief break after playing one, just a few seconds, exhaling and inhaling, and recovering. This doesn't work if you have another phrase coming, and the piece is minutes long. You need to be able to just take a breath and keep on going. I ended up playing chromatic scales, bottom couple octaves, 8 beats on each note at 60, and two, three, or four notes per breath. I found myself getting lightheaded, and ended up reading up on things like hyperventilation, hypercapnia, and other fun respiration topics. Fascinating stuff, human physiology.

Why.

While I'm playing, people who used to play the bassoon will run into me, telling me they stopped because they had other things to do with their lives. Other people will give me this wistful look and tell me they miss making music. Someone once said to me they weren't good enough, and that they weren't going to be a professional so they thought they shouldn't waste their time.

It's always sad to hear about people letting music go because they think they aren't going to be good enough. To me, doing creative things with music doesn't have to be about being the virtuoso or the expert. It's something you have fun with that opens up your heart and your spirit, and you can share it with people one way or another.

I want people to give their spirit a chance to breathe, and do some of those things. While they may not make you money, they can make you happy, and you have to find some way in your life to squeeze those things in. It enriches your life.

(From this lovely interview with Toronto bassoonist Jeff Burke, via Josh Firer)

Here's Jeff, doing his live looping thing:

Welcome 2010

Played this morning for a bit, after more than a week off. I was thinking about playing while away, listening to some other operators on my iPod while sitting in airports (Judith LeClair, Five Sacred Trees; Dag Jensen and the Quadriga Bassoon Ensemble, Pictures at an Exhibition; Tamás Benkócs, various Vivaldi concertos), and thinking about 26, and trying to memorize it. But I wasn't playing, and playing is a physical skill. The muscles lose their tone, the fingers forget, and so on. It took awhile to find a reed that was working for me, and mostly I just played scales. But everything seemed to still work. All in all, not as bad as I was expecting, based on the last time I missed a few days.

My goals for 2010 are more or less the same as they were when I took up playing again: learn how to make reeds, so that I don't feel trapped; intonation; and tone. I'm hoping that a year will allow me to at least make a fair bit of progress in these areas, enough so I can start thinking about what I want to do with music, while being able to stand listening to myself play.