R7 and R8

Unwrapped, wired and numbered R7 and R8. I'm working towards the end of my Rigotti cane, will need to think about buying more. R6 I last touched in January, when I thought I might be able to make two reeds a week. Haven't gotten there, not close. 4 months=16 weeks, and I've made, ooh, well I'm playing on G7 and G14 is sitting on the desk. So I've made about 15 reeds, or two every two weeks.

Also formed tubes on two sticks of Neuranter cane. My previous luck wasn't so great with this cane, we'll see if I do any better after a bit of experience. If not, I won't get more, since its price is a fair bit higher, and I don't find it fun to work on cane that costs $5 a stick.

More microtonal nonsense

The Bohlen-Pierce musical scale is based on odd harmonics only, and uses 13 equal tempered steps to the 3:1 interval (the 12th of the conventional scale). Apparently you can develop the harmony along the same lines as Western harmony, using the mathematically natural generalizations. Here's a BP version of the "Pachabel canon", a work which the uploader says "constitutes an elegant mathematical proof that the diatonic scale is emergent, not a cultural or academic contrivance". It actually starts to sound okay, after a minute or two. A little longer, and I realize that there are fewer BP notes: a tritave, the 3:1 BP replacement for the 2:1 octave, is 50% wider than an octave, and you can't fit as many in the useful range of human hearing. Hence the contra-bass and squeaky treble.



Even nicer is this brief improvisation on a BP clarinet. The clarinet is almost completely missing the second harmonic naturally, so the BP scale doesn't have overtone clashes.

Microtones

This interesting Slate article on tuning conventions through history had a number of comments from tuning geeks. One is in an improvisational microtonal collective; a video is below. To me, after less than a minute of listening, it just sounds out of tune. Maybe more exposure could help. But there's gotta be a limit; 12 tones per octave might be too few, but 200 (!) sure seems like too many.

A lesson

I'm playing a short piece with J next week, and I want it to go as well as possible. So I took a lesson with Matt, to see if he could provide useful advice. I was pretty nervous, because, he hasn't really heard me play before, not much, and not close up, and I care what he thinks. After I'd put the horn together and he'd left me alone to warm up, I played it through, and was happy that I'd managed to get through it without falling apart. Actually, I felt it was pretty much perfect, so I was happy, but then wasn't certain what we were going to spend the time on. Matt said something nice, then started work on my reed.

The reed: I played on G7, which is my best one at the moment. Lots of comments. Wires: rather than essentially glue down the wires with nail polish, he suggested just continuing to tighten wires as the cane shrinks. Wires 1 and 2 could still be a bit loose, and tighten up when the cane gets soaked. Profile: he noticed a slight step change in the profile just back of the tip. I'm not sure if that's a consequence of not working in when shaving the tip, or even left behind from the profiler. He took his knife to the heart, just a few scrapes. Even just that change made a positive improvement. Next, general strength. I'd complained about tiring. Also a thin tenor register means too strong, and I'd noticed thinness (ie less resonance) for eg tenor D in the Louchez recordings. And the whole thing was thick for his taste. He took it down uniformly across the reed, edge to edge, shoulder to tip. We tested by playing C-D-E-F with no lip on the reed, only air support, listening for dropping pitch. The E a little unstable, so he took a sliver off the tip to address this and also repair my skewed tip chopping. Somewhere along the way he took a bit out of one corner to improve symmetry. With that, it was a little easier to support the pitch in the tenor, improved, but not dramatically different in character from how I'd left it. Except for surface texture: it feels much rougher, I think his knife is sharper, and cuts thicker shavings.

Next, he had me play it again, stopping frequently. Lots of stuff. All picky stuff, but the notes are easy, and well, I'd hit them even the first time through. And there was tons of things to fix. Long notes - need to grow. Quarter notes before a breath - have to taper a bit, end the note, before the breath. Repeated quarters - have to grow, esp the low ones, should be accented, kind of like the thuds of a pop tune bassline. The phrases don't really stop, but I was tending to back off on the long notes. Matt wasn't accepting that. He also pointed out a lot of features of the line: notes that have to get emphasized because they break a pattern and need to stand out, parts where two lines happen simultaneously and need to be differentiated, fixed up a few articulations and dynamic locations ("you should ask the composer what he meant here"). Pitch wasn't too bad, he asked for attention only to a high C, where I tended to be sharp, trying to get it to speak, and once a B2, which has always been a flat note for me. We added a few breath marks, some crescendos.

The big thing was just sitting next to and playing with a pro. Really quickly I was hearing his demonstrations and copying the intensity. I was surprised how loud he plays, I sure felt like he was much louder than me, but maybe it's just where I'm sitting, and being behind vs next to the horn. The whole thing makes me think about the usefulness of lessons, though. I went away thinking that it was more useful than I'd expected. Doesn't mean that I want to be back every week, but worth thinking about my "I can do it all by myself" attitude.

Louchez 2

My quest for easier pieces that I can play perfectly isn't going so well. Here's the next one from the Louchez book, #2. It's long and sustained (titled Sonority), and I found it hard; it took me quite awhile to get through it without falling apart. I think it'd sound better with vibrato, but I stopped trying to add any, because it screwed me up. So all the oscillation remaining is the stuff I can't control. Ah well, I guess it makes me sound human.

Using Python with Live

I use Ableton Live, some free version that came with my audio interface, for recording and goofing around. Garage Band seems better in some ways, it's easier to make and fix up a simple recording, but Live is hyped as the right tool for performance. There is lots of flexibility available, and key mapping, midi mapping, etc. Despite this, there are things that I'd like to do that aren't built in: trigger a segment to record say, and have it switch off and start looping after four bars without another interaction, that kind of thing. I think they have a tool (Looper?) aimed at this, which might or might not suffice, but you need the full package, which I haven't been able to justify yet. You can also cruft your own with carefully designed set of mappings and midi triggers in an external virtual midi tool, of which Bome's Midi Translator is the only one that I know will work, and is also just expensive enough to make me hesitate. I'd really like to just be able to program it, in C or a scripting language. A full programming environment does exist: it's called Max4Live, but that requires both MAX/MSP and Live -- again, expensive, and heavyweight for what I want. It turns out that Live uses Python internally, and you can just talk Python to it, if you know where to talk. There's a package called LiveOSC which claims to do this... gotta try it.

G12, G13, and G14

Unwrapped, wired, and numbered. I'm trying to do production, but every reed ends up an experiment anyway:

G12. Maybe I got a little too excited beveling near the butt, inspired by the Herzberg bevel. Noticed some separation along the rails, near the midpoint down the blade.

G13. I found some 22 gauge brass wire at the home center, and was happy to have a local source to replenish my dwindling wire supply. Only later noticed that it's just brass, not soft brass. Tried it on this reed, and while it does work, it takes more force, and puts more force on the reed. I guess there's a reason soft brass is preferred. I cut the rest of mine into 7 cm pieces for convenient use later.

G14. This was the one dried on the forming mandrel.

World's loudest bassoon

Bassoons are normally somewhat gentle instruments, famed for their blending. Increased volume is possible, with design changes. The Bassoon instrument at the left (called Bassoon Prime) is nuclear powered, the tertiary of the only three stage nuclear bomb built. It was played only once, at 5:46 AM on July 21, 1956, above a reef in Bikini Atoll. I'm not sure how loud it was in dB, but it left a crater in the reef 4000 feet in diameter and 129 feet deep. I think you wouldn't want to get too close.

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Execution

Concepts and ideas are worth very little, what matters is execution. If something has not been executed well, whether it's a consumer product, a business, a lab experiment, or a piece of music, it just doesn't work. As an idea person, I struggle with this. I watched another of the Norman Herzberg videos, the one about his teaching. First, they asked him about what orchestras his students got jobs in. He didn't list these, instead he listed those where two (or more!) of his students had jobs! (Indeed, this thesis claims that his former students held the majority of major orchestra bassoon positions in the US. Wow.) Asked about his teaching philosophy, he went through listing his scale and interval exercises and the etude books he had his students do (Milde Scale and Chord studies, Orefici Melodic Studies, Jacobi Six Caprices (but not International edition), Jancourt, Gambaro, Orefici Brauvura Etudes, DuBois, and finally, only then, the Milde Concert Studies). I'd actually worked through some of these in high school, like many of his students, but he'd say "Do 'em again. I wanna hear em." He'd test people who'd claim they'd already worked up an etude, and none ever could play it top to bottom without falling apart somewhere. He had some short dismissive remark about artistry (or that's how I interpreted it); saying, I teach you to play the instrument. But get him started on fingerings, or vent keys, and he'll talk for an hour. His students ended up with great facility, bombproof technique, which is, quite evidently, exactly what you need to win an audition. In a sense, this is the true realization of the operator mentality.

Inspired, rather than stumbling through another Milde badly, I tried getting an easy etude really clean. Here's the first one from a French etude book (Jean Louchez), recorded on the iPod:



The notes are right, and the fingers moving mostly together, and most of the attacks are there, but it's still full of flaws. I'm particularly surprised about how many note transitions sound like a gliss -- I'm not really intending that, maybe a speed of finger motion thing. The tremor in the tone bugs me, maybe softer reeds could help, or adding vibrato to cover it.