Low Notes

The Alto Trombone was a good move. It has helped me understand more of what I'm doing not just on trombones, but on the trumpet.

Today I tried some pedal tones. Well, I've been spending so long on Bb instruments (trumpet and tenor trombone) I hit a clean pedal Bb right out of the bat.

On Alto trombone. Okay, this takes some explanation. The Alto is tuned to Eb, but like all the brass family, this is actually the first harmonic, one octave up from the fundamental frequency of that particular length of pipe. On the alto, the harmonic series goes Eb, Bb, Eb again; that is, 2x the fundamental, 3x, 4x.

So 1x the fundamental is the pedal Eb. A pedal Bb is some fraction, presumably some sensible multiple like 2/3 or something. I also played the double pedal, which is half the fundamental frequency of the tubing or a mere half-wave. It doesn't sound much like a note at that point.

***

So the book goes slowly. I may or may not be back on schedule. I have some clean-up note left on Part III but I am actually struggling to move forward with Part IV and I've given myself two weeks for it.

One thing I discovered during the last couple rounds of rewrites reinforces what my beta reader said. And it isn't something that makes me happy. When I started this series, I intended for Penny to grow into her role, collecting experiences and contacts and specific bits of knowledge.

Which looks fine in the notes, but it is harder to make it work for the reader. Some readers are logging on late in the series and won't have had those original encounters. Others will have forgotten them by the time they get referenced later.

I'm already there within this book; Penny is meeting enough people and picking up enough clues she has to start recapping where they came from by the time we get to Part IV. As early as Part II, I had to start doing things like "...as Beni had said back at the studio park."

I hate this. I wanted to be able to have her contextualize new things in terms she is already familiar with; "I'd seen things like this in Athens." I wanted to be able to justify her skills, "I'd trained for that in London." Heck, even referencing things like the back story of the jacket or the medallion she wears is something I can't expect the reader to remember and I can't afford to veer away from the present story to explain.

The fewer of these things I have, the better. Generically, she is getting more experienced and more skilled. Specifically, each story is largely hermetic to that location and that experience. She can't draw on her experience with learning German to talk about learning Japanese, or her experience doing archaeology in London to talk about doing archeology in Kyoto. I need to focus in on the story at hand -- and make Penny more of a tabula rasa for each story.

Of course I've plotted this one around there being specific things in her past, and I can't get away from those. But those are proving really tough to integrate in.