Music Notes

 I am so overdue to record something new!

Trouble is, my skills keep improving, so I keep putting it off until I am "good enough." Well, that, and until I have time (and with the current plan to write the next two Athena Fox books before I stop trying to push that series...)

That practice really needs to include more reading and more ear training. So I opened the theme to Deep Space 9 on MuseScore but tried to do the trumpet part by ear instead of looking at the chart. I was getting that high note with the screamer mouthpiece, but when I checked it with the chromatic tuner, it was only a D flat. So what's going on?

Oh. My chromatic was set for Trumpet, so properly transposing, but the MuseScore track was in Orchestral pitch. So actually that part is a whole-tone lower than I thought it was. Still a high trumpet note for a non-jazz score.

Incidentally, this isn't just me making up terminology. Kelly really does call the MPC that:

And, yes, that really is a "non-whistling" string I ordered:

I put the new set of nylon strings and the aluminium E on my newly re-fitted bridge and I do like the sound. I had confidence to go through a couple of practice pieces with the mutes off.

See, this is where the chin-cello really helped me. The violin is another loud instrument and it makes terrible noises when you are still learning. This makes it too easy for someone like me to go at the strings weakly, which besides poor tone also leads to things like poor bow control, a lack of authority in string crosses, etc.

I have to hammer at that chin-cello to get it to play, especially on the C. Plus my current chin-cello is based on a solid-body electric so there's not a lot of volume either way.

Notice the extra-thick strings. And that's my carbon-fibre bow.

***

So I have the latest "that would be amusing" project in mind:

I've had versions of this thought before but I woke up with it feeling even clearer. There's a sort of rather formulaic fantasy/epic music with lots of repetitive figures and basic chord sequences that doesn't keep a composer up all night trying to work out the harmony (something that's killing me right now in, say, trying to do proper voicing on the Hellboy theme).

With random ethnic instruments, of course. Well, to some extent, I now play both basic elements of the orchestra and a smatter of ethnic instruments. And although my music theory is basically pants, I know enough to fake my way through a I to IV chord change and a minor second key change on top of it.

It is also more-or-less how I used to build music on keyboard. Question is whether I can do this with real instruments in any sort of efficient way...

Strange Days

This weekend has been exhaustion and depression. I haven't felt up to working on the book and haven't wanted to work on the book.

Today I finally got back to it. Maybe I'll take some days off next week. We're supposed to work this weekend anyhow. We want to redo the test chamber while nobody is using it.

Made a travel mug of strong coffee with my new electric kettle. Had an apple cinnamon scone. Put on my Athena Fox mix tape. And finally got moving again.

Oh, and had a weird insight. I'm listening to one of Carlos Elene's excellent game covers as I start this. He's been working with more and more performers lately and that's all to the good, because while he plays quite competently at piano, bass, and of course his lead sax, I heard something new this time.

And that's the performance choices -- those tiny nuances of accent and phrasing -- are the same in all his instruments. And that I feel is a weakness. I can hear the same thing in SquidPhysics and I assume in other one-man-band recordists. There's a dialog between players, but there is also more richness even if they record separately, because each makes slightly different kinds of choices.

***

But back to the book. This was the scene that felt most difficult. Sure, I'm wrapping up a lot of plot lines and that is either easier or harder depending on how much has to be pulled together and how much time there is to do it.

I just could not find what it was I wanted to say. Actually saying it is easier. Well, the current draft is a total cludge but I think I have something at last.

And did I mention the problems I was having with the diary conversation had propagated back? Yeah, I'm two scenes back, because the problems in the diary scene had grown out of choices I'd made back there.

I'm not looking forward to editing this mess. Well, not the work. I can do that. But rewrites (as opposed to spell check) is a place where you can revisit the roads not taken. And for anyone like me that is a horrible place to be because I'll be back at the crossroads agonizing over the choice again, while my little horse thinks it queer that I'm not pushing on to formatting for publication.

Oh, yeah. I got nothing against self pub. I've got even less against traditional publication. But I feel I have more to learn before it is even worth approaching one.

***

My music has suffered in this time. Being stuck at home unable to practice. Lacking the energy and the time to start any new pieces. I put new strings on my lute-back ukulele and I love it (synthetic gut-and-silk strings -- very medieval sounding).

My original 7C has corrosion pits inside and no longer slots clean. I'd really transitioned to the 5C anyhow, which is more secure slotting with mutes (which I have to use for many of my practice sessions) and is probably good training for the upper register.

But I picked up a screamer to try out. Don't know exactly where it sits but probably close to a 12-something. (That's Bach numbers -- nobody agrees on the numbers otherwise, not even the direction). It leapt right up past the over-the-staff C first time I tried it. But I'm liking more and more the full warm sound of the 5C.

And speaking of full sound. The trombone is still a pain. The second partial is horrible for me. I keep blatting on it. I keep thinking of getting an Alto (plus I could use a better machine -- this one has a noisy slide, no tuning slide, and is heavy). Or even a soprano, which slots exactly like the trumpet I'm familiar with and wouldn't be splitting my training so badly. I've been listening to Seb Skelly, who uses a soprano trombone and shifts it down an octave in the mix and it sounds decent. But all that sort of thing feels like it defeats the purpose.

So best wait until I'm making more music before I set out to add more instruments to my collection!

***

And the grind continues. I'm back up to the diary scene and it is slow going. The immediacy helps. I'm still not doing quotes within quotes, though, and I think I have to. I need to hear what Linnet and Wentworth actually said to each other, not just Linnet's reporting of it.

And there is of course still so much pushed onto the shoulders of this one scene. So slow going and even though it is only two PM I already need a break.

And I put on a playlist of Bardcore and somehow managed to shove my way through the diary scene. I have no idea how much I may end up editing this. The nested quotations are nearly as annoying as I thought they would be.

I offloaded some material on to the last two diary scenes. That's fine. I've realized how this works; the dig ended last chapter and with this scene, Linnet's story moves into larger prominence. I could even say that while the center part of the story is Penny spending her days in the Nine Elms Shelter and going on adventures with Graham evenings and weekends, it is now Linnet spending her nights in the shelter and Penny's adventures have become more serious.

Graham gets one more chapter. I'm still far from happy how I dealt with the complexities of their relationship, but it will have to do until I am ready for rewrites. And beta readers. I really need to score some beta readers. I'm making more these days, though. So I could actually go to the ones who charge for it.

Sad Trombone

I am surprised and disappointed by how long it is taking to pick up trombone. Of course I got a too-cheap one; scratchy slide, no tuning slide.

The embouchure is just different enough I'm having to relearn my slotting. Well, this week I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. I think it is because it is an octave lower than trumpet, you have to adjust the embouchure a lot more than you would on trumpet when valving/sliding down. Basically, you have to move your lip more; the notes are physically further apart.

My current exercise is to play a long note and slide slowly all the way out to seventh and back up to first. I keep getting a horrid blatty sound on the second partial but it is finally clearing up. And today I blew the top C. Which is loud.

***

On the novel, I am pretty much decided I'm going to throw out the entire first chapter. And move the essential material (there's introductions to a bunch of concepts; dialects particularly Geordie, the difference between England and Britain, Panto, the Home Guard, metal detectors, archaeological survey) to following chapters.

It will make it more focused; all in London instead of starting in the Midlands, more about W.W.II -- dropping the Seven Day's Queen stuff. A weaker opening scene, unfortunately.

And that's 3,700 words of work going by-by, plus re-writes of every single scene in Part I.

I'm also contemplating an even more ambitious re-shuffle to shift the mid-point break earlier, bring in the diary earlier, and be able to have Linnet's experiences of the ghastly Kennington Park shelter happening as Penny is being both broke and suffering from an arrow wound. But that's a lot of shuffling.

UV nodes on a Grecian Urn

The calyx model is done. I think. Now I just have to paint up the textures. Artwork, bump map, spec map. And render, of course.

Cheetah3D is growing on me. The best thing, right now, is that no operation caused it to crash or cause the object to become un-editable. And that's way ahead of Carrara on it's best day. The lathe operation puts out a clean UVmap and the built-in tools did a decent job of mapping the handles, too.

I agree with the manual. The bezier spline controls are not good. Better to make a spline in an illustration program and import it. My first take at handles was with a spline sweep, but I didn't like the resulting profile.

So I did a box model, dropped it on a symmetry tool, and then dropped that on a subdiv smoothing tool. All worked just as I'd hoped, with just a little learning curve involved. I think the software could end up being fast, once I put some custom hotkeys into it (apparently you can).

>>>

Meanwhile an instrument I had in my wishlist went on open-box sale:

Yes; transverse flute, otherwise known as Western Concert Flute in C. Closed-hole, C foot, not the longer B foot. And, yes, it is pink. 

I fired up my camera because this is the last chance I am likely to have to attempt to play an unfamiliar family of instrument without any prior study. Yeah; that question has been floating around. My opinion is you can get a sound out of most plucked strings and hammered instruments, including percussion and keyboards. Single reed, a little harder. Double reed and brass, harder yet. Bowed strings, extremely difficult; yes, you can get noises, but not anything resembling the characteristic sound of the instrument.

That's the thing about the piano. Sure, a random child or small animal can't play a Chopin Etude, but when the press down a key, it sounds like, well, a piano. 

Turns out the transverse flute was tough for me. Apparently some people get the embouchure right away. Some don't. Apparently the book method is you detach the head joint and just play that for a week. Then you play the first octave until you are good with it. Then you move on to the second octave.

Five days and I'm playing scales but the second octave is not secure. A very breathy tone I'm not happy with. But as far as adding flute sounds to a composition -- yeah, I've got enough. I may work on it for a few more days but then it is back to the trumpet. Which, for all I may have said about it in the past, is oddly pleasing to play.

Gee!

I invented a "portable practice booth" and tried it out today.

It is a box built of baltic birch ply and lined with acoustic material. Works like a charm. I had no qualms about practicing trumpet during the day, even without the mute.

And something has changed. Either the comfort (of being able to blow as hard as I wanted but without a practice mute to block it) or something in my posture or just that I've been posting at Quora lately and thinking a lot about embouchure and trumpet technique, but I blew a high G.

Clean, and repeatable. I can even run up and down the scale from the C above the staff to the F (first time I did it, though, after three passes I nearly passed out myself). And, yes, I did tap the A once but I'm only counting clean notes here.

* * *

On the other hand...

I had to take a big break on the novel. I had charged ahead into the next chapters but I could sense it wasn't working quite right.

The problem is that this is an origin story. Now she's "origined." So now I have to figure out what kind of character she'll be for the rest of the book (and possible series).

And there's a lot of elements of the character that are there because they needed to be for the origin to work. So Penny is energetic, confident, an auto-didact, physically fit, widely read. Basically, she had to either have the skills to carry off "Athena Fox" in the real world, or be able to learn them over the course of an adventure.

Other things I discovered while I was writing; things that made a scene or moment work and seemed consistent with the character I was building. So she is musical, an experienced actor, and speaks a little bit of a couple of languages.

So there's a lot of directions I thought I would go that in practice didn't work. Some times I got them all the way to a trial scene and they didn't work. For instance, on paper I liked the idea of her thinking of Athena Fox as an alter-ego, as someone she transformed into. So she'd lack confidence in her own skills when in mufti but put on the hat and she'd be all competent. Well, that didn't work. Having her outside the heroism meant she couldn't enjoy it or take pride in it.

Subtler than that is her thinking of Athena Fox as a character, as a fictional thing she portrays. The trap here is that it made her way too genre-savvy to live with in a semi-realistic book. The world of this novel, unlike the Diskworld, does not run on Narrativium. And it also called too much attention to the tropes I was touching on. It is better to continue how I started; that Penny is actually going around traveling to exotic lands and speaking multiple languages and solving archaeological mysteries...she just doesn't quite realize it.

The crossing point, the big moment of the previous chapter, is her realizing she can actually be Athena Fox. But here's the trick. She doesn't want to be a character. She wants to be the person. She doesn't want to have genre tropes happen, she wants to travel and explore and solve mysteries.

Of course I've got the Act III crux coming up. And that is where the "dark side" of the character shows up, and I confront head-on the idea of genre awareness.

But I still need to construct what she is like now.

* * *

Played through to the Minutemen Faction ending in Fallout 4. If you do it right, this is the one with the fewest betrayals. (If you try to complete with the Railroad Faction, you need to follow the Institute thread past the point of becoming an enemy of the Brotherhood of Steel. And both Institute and Brotherhood involve massacring all the other factions.)

It isn't a game without problems. I think it comes down to gamification. There are many things that have to be in there to give a long and rich playing experience, and they can clash with some of the core story.

One of the strongest for me is that most of the encounters, including the majority of all of the Faction threads, are forced to assume you are a starting player; a wanderer, a wastelander, just out of the vault. If you let the Railroad give you a default code-name it is "Wanderer." When you talk to the Brotherhood of Steel even fairly far into their thread they call you "Wastelander" and (as do all of the factions) speak of you as if you are a loner with no connections, no identity, no society you belong to.

Thing of it is, you can already be General of the Minutemen and have personal control over most of the settlements on the map. Which means the other factions should be treating with you diplomatically; as one of the most powerful political figures they've encountered. Okay, the Brotherhood gets a pass on this since they are assholes anyhow. And the Institute, too, couldn't care less for Surface titles. But the idea still stands.

(The other thing that gets me about meeting a faction late-game is the dialog simply can't take into account your history. There are some clever bits, like Preston noticing you already have power armor, but by late game you are basically a Person of Mass Destruction. Heck, they even warn you about the difficulties of the Shining Sea, when you've already explored the entire thing, been to the place they want you to find, and can shrug off a couple of rads without even bothering to wear protective gear.)

Heck, even your own settlers will sometimes wonder who you are and make snide remarks about wastelanders.

But here's a bit that I found really kind of off-putting. And that's dialog checks. Why do these work so much better in Mass Effect?

Well, it might be Mass Effect has better writing. Not the fault of the writers, but more the pacing of the game means plot points need to be bigger and move faster in Fallout 4. So Elder Maxxon can do a 180 with just one line of dialog.

I think it is largely the gamification. In Mass Effect, the special dialog options (Persuade or Intimidate) are available if you have a high enough point value. Otherwise they are grayed out (which is somewhat annoying; you are given the words you could say to resolve the situation but you are prevented from saying them). In Fallout 4, they are a die roll. The higher your skill (Charisma), the better chance of making the roll.

But because this is a roll, the game awards it with a "ding" sound. So the way it all comes together is thus; you are presented with a dialog option in color-coded letters (meaning it is going to be tough to make it work). If you made it, there's the "ta dah!" sound effect and the person you are talking to suddenly agrees with you and changes their mind. It feels...artificial.

Okay, maybe there's another reason. Mass Effect the sound design is much more satisfying even for the Interrupts, which are sort of a hyped-up, QuickTime Event version. And there's no annoying effect for regular dialog options. But also...you are playing Shepard. Shepard-Commander, who talked the Salarians into reversing the Krogan Genophage, who saved the Rachni race from extinction, who talked back to the Council, who was able to get a dozen fractious races to work together to defeat the Reapers. Shepard who brokered peace between the Quorrians and the Geth. Shep isn't just some random vault-dweller who is trying to be persuasive. It is who she IS.

Music not dead

Just don't have any time, between writing and recovering and a crazy project at work.

Took the Shetland Gue into the shop, sanded it down, re-stained, gave it a glossier coat of polyurethane. I'm still lousy at staining and finishing but it didn't come out so bad. Looks like tuning the strings to A and C is the key (ahem) to playing the Game of Thrones theme, but it is still a bad stretch to that top note. Need practice time before I try to record.

Balked at bidding on a horn I wish I had gone for. Soprano trombone, but not one of those ultra-cheap ones: a used Jupiter in mint condition with mpc and case. Closed at about the same price as those Chinese jobs. I have this crazy dream now of three Bb instruments -- so the slotting is nominally the same (err, except the French Horn starts at the second octave so actually no) -- and all are portable and I can pitch shift them electronically to seat them. But...I adjust pretty quickly to different ranges in the woodwinds and when you shrink the dimensions like that the sonic qualities really do start to collapse as well. The piccolo French Horn basically sounds like a flugelhorn. A really out-of-tune flugelhorn.

Really, a better use of my money would be to start the rent-to-own on a used student-level trumpet. (My local store only has an Eastman at the moment, which doesn't exactly inspire me.)

Changed pegs so my lute-back ukulele is now hanging by my desk for those "practice for a few minutes while a file downloads" moments. So I'm getting a bit more time on it.

Went to the shop last night. I needed to look at the paperwork for the crazy project because dimensions are going out Monday but anyhow. The main chance I get these days to blow into an open horn, and thus really listen to my tone. Well, tone was not what I worked on. My slotting is still not firm, especially when making larger jumps. Practicing scales (actually, scale) is cheating; you can work your lip bit by bit and not have to make a dead leap to the next note.

Apparently French Horns are so bad with this even an orchestral player on a professional-level horn will miss their opening. And unlike the Perlman quote, it is really hard to correct that before anyone else hears.

Oh, and I can hit the E above the staff once or twice in a practice session. Working on stabilizing the C above the staff before I really go crazy up there.

Location scouting

Wrote a chase scene today. Set it in Venice the way Bullit is set in San Francisco. Sure, I checked maps and street-level pictures and videos to find places where certain specific actions could plausibly happen. But I used them without regard for where they were in relation to each other. I also didn't name anything, so nobody is going to know.

I also gave up on getting the setting of the next chapter completely accurate. Half the point of this book was to use what I already know. So I'm borrowing the ferry I actually rode instead of trying to describe one unseen. I'm changing the names anyhow.

There's a fine line there and I don't know what or where it is. Books name institutions and public figures and commercial products all the time. Characters in books will buy at Sears, drink Coke, vote for Truman. And it gets more specific and more close to home. Parker named specific books by specific (living) authors, and actual businesses in the Boston area.

Well, I'm naming a few actual places as well. I've just made a point to be even-handed, and the smaller the entity (like a single bookstore in Venice) the more neutral-positive I want to be. Lufthansa I'm willing to criticize. A small tratoria I'd as soon just say, "the food was good" and leave it at that.



Last week I got to fly on a short-hop business airline. Private terminal, no TSA, no lines. Shoes stayed on. Different experience and an extremely positive one. Flew to Burbank, which is an experience all in itself. I managed to remain calm while shaking the hand of someone whose shoes probably cost more than I make in a year. What isn't making me calm is that my company is ordering tens of thousands of dollars of material based on MY measurements. No pressure!



And it has nothing to do with the "location" theme of this post, but messing around with the Yamaha Venova seems to have sharpened my trumpet chops. I'm pushing through the scales fast enough the cheap valves on my current trumpet are starting to hold me back. I'm also getting the first two or three pedal tones on a regular basis. Oddly enough the violin hasn't completely left me; I pulled it out and was able to get through a couple of tunes even without the shoulder rest.

My new neighbor really hates it when I practice at home, though. That's something I have no good solution for. Well, it can wait. A lot of things can wait. I'm walking again (after having dropped a battery-powered drill on my foot from high enough to drive the bit through my shoe), and hoping to steadily increase my exercise and decrease my waist.

And I'm past the mid-point on the novel with more and more of the foundation work already done. Blew through a 2,000 word chase scene in one writing session. I already have the bulk of two or three other scenes worked out in my head. The biggest thing I have to worry about going forward is whether I fall so short of my page count I have to add some new element to the mix.

Musical Interlude

Turns out you do bite.

Now that I've figured out how the embouchure is supposed to work I got a lot better at the Venova, fast. Lower two octaves more-or-less clean and with concentration I can get through the top of the second and into the third. Which isn't supposed to exist on the Venova, and is terribly out of tune on that instrument but anyhow.

Between work and trying to get more exercise and of course trying to get as many words on the page as possible I've had little time for practice, much less for composition.

Maybe that's why more music is slipping into the novel. It started as most things do in Discovery Writing. I wanted to do a take on a story I heard about Army musicians in Italy during World War II sneaking off base past the watchful MP's by pretending to be Italian. So I gave my character a little band geek background.

Turns out many of the fun musical terms that fit the scene (sound like language, are less known as musical terms, etc.) are the variety of bowing terms for the strings. And since I know a bit about violin myself...

Well, one thing led to another. I read a couple of accounts of a woman who survived in the water after falling off a cruise ship; she had kept her spirits up by singing show tunes. Given that my protagonist was in High School theater, she must have done a few musicals. So can at least sing a little. So again one thing led to another and she's singing in quite a few places now.

Plus there was already a scene planned (I started writing that one today) where a couple characters talk about some famous opera arias. No, my MC isn't singing any of those.

* * *

So at some point I'd like to revisit the thought about how experience on one instrument can help with another. I've realized it didn't, for me, start with the recorder. It started with whistling. I got used to breath control, shaping of the oral cavity for tone and pitch (which is necessary for trumpet), and a number of extended techniques; tonguing, vibrato and tremolo (don't get me started on that particular nomenclatural quagmire!)

Those translated to recorder, which adds overblowing and of course fingering. To which I added the extended techniques of diaphragm vibrato, flutter tongue, and chanter fingering. Which helped towards the faster fingering and accents of penny whistle, which also adds a more focused overblow to the necessary techniques.

The Venova isn't a Boem system woodwind. It is fingered like a recorder. So what it adds to the mix is embouchure and general reed control, as well as the care and feeding of reeds (Rico Select 2.0 for the moment).

I still want a practice space. Even better than that, more understanding neighbors so I could just pull out an instrument any time I felt like it and blow a few licks. Well...I guess my current neighborhood is a good excuse to get the new uke out of the case and spend more time with that.

Not lacking in instrumentality

 

Finished a case for the lyre. This was a technology trial; I didn't spend a lot of time trying to make it look nice.

The next cover is going to be the opening theme from Game of Thrones. It also won't be very good. That's one of the reasons I'm doing it.









I'm it doing around the older instruments in my collection; the "Sutton Hoo" lyre, the Shetland Gue, bohdran standing in for early frame drum.

It won't be wonderful because it is too hard to play the gue in tune (and because of the drone string I can't fix it in software). And the very period "block-and-strum" technique is also both harmonically limited and, well, noisy.

But its good for me to work on something that isn't worth spending a lot of time on. Call it another test piece.



One of these days I should get a better picture of the gue. But I keep meaning to re-do the finish on it, and no sense in shooting it before then, right?






So I've pretty much got the kit to do a certain sort of early acoustic music. Mostly where I'm lacking is the skills on the instruments I have. Penny whistle at speed and with all the flourishes. Making full use of the acoustic guitar with combined strumming and finger-picking. Better bodhran and darbuka. Folk fiddle technique.

But more importantly, I'm lacking the theory to do the kind of harmonization and voice leading and, for that matter, the skill in sight-reading the increasingly complex parts I'm writing. The next piece after this is probably "Far Horizons" from the Skyrim soundtrack. A similar project is the "Citadel" track from Mass Effect 1. I have arrangements in my head. Translating them to parts is at the very edge of my current theory skills. (Actually playing the parts may be beyond all of my skills).

So, really, I have much bigger problems than trying to add to the ensemble. That's the problem in thinking like a composer. I hear sounds in my head that don't come from the instruments in my collection. For "Far Horizons" I'm hearing flute, for instance.

And that's just what I need; to get into the esoterics of the Boehm fingering system. There is an interesting hybrid option, though; a Low D tin whistle with interchangeable head to turn it into a simple-system or Irish flute. Which is to say; not quite as mechanically complex as a concert flute.

Another thing that would come in handy is harp. Not pedal harp, here. Just a Celtic harp, lap harp, or even smaller. A nicer shawm and/or crumhorn. And of course more drums. Can never have enough drums.

Yeah, this picture doesn't include the gue. Or the penny whistles. Or the violin -- all of which are perfectly useable for vaguely medieval/folk-acoustic stuff.






I've been listening to a lot of trumpet lately, and the instrument is growing on me. It really isn't a solo instrument, though. What I mean is, yes, trumpet can solo, but that's against a bed of, well mostly brass. It is really rare to hear a trumpet part without hearing some trombone parts. Plus sax, maybe french horn, clarinet, flute, tuba, flugelhorn, etc.

So, yeah. Find other musicians. Tweak the sound to try to sound like trombone (actually sort of works). Or just use synthesis. Doesn't matter so much right at the moment because my trumpet playing is still poor. And it's the instrument I've been practicing with regularly, too.

(When I get back to the Hellboy cover, that's about what I'm going to have to do; use the trumpet and the Venova to try to mimic a full brass section.)

I have to say; the main upside to the Venova is it is rare and it looks unique. As a sort of mini, budget, soprano saxophone it sort of is to a proper sax what the Ukulele Bass is to a proper full-length bass guitar.

Which is to say, looked at from a purist point of view it is tonally compromised (also harder to play in pitch, play the full range, etc.) But looked at from an arranger point of view, you use the sound you have.

The same arguments, only even more so, can be made about the piccolo french horn. Both instruments also get added to the list of instruments I need a practice space for (the trumpet isn't great to practice on Yamaha Silent Mute, but at least I can).

I still want one, though.





I just did a re-listen of two of the "weird but cute" brass instruments on my wish list. The pBone mini -- which is an Eb alto trombone in plastic -- lacks the metallic edge of a real brass instrument. The piccolo french horn sounds a bit like a french horn but just as much as a trumpet. When you get down to it, the tonal colors provided by those two instruments can be better achieved on a trumpet with performance tricks and some audio manipulation.

Painless Upgrades

Finally dropped the bucks on Scrivener IOS. Right away was best money I've spent in a while. Typing into the Scrivener window was much more comfortable than typing into Notes, and better organized. With that and my folding bluetooth keyboard I could probably write a novel on the iPhone alone.

But the real power is being able to synchronize work files between machines. Of course that requires Dropbox, and Dropbox stopped supporting OS 10.9 or below. So finally took the risk of updating to High Sierra.

No, there aren't any whistles and bells I was interested in. I don't need Siri on my laptop, for instance. And I'm not sure I care for the new theme. But...so far all my core applications have worked or been an easy update, and I didn't lose any files, passwords, or even bookmarks.

(Just the usual run-around of turning back off all the, "Please share my identity with the world and while you are at it, put my critical files on the cloud so you can hold them hostage at some future date" stuff.)

(The only real annoyance is the pop-up window that happens when you open an ap for the first time; it says "This ap is not fully compatible with your mac" and the "tell me more" button takes you to an apple web page about how they will be dropping 32-bit compatibility in some eventual upgrade. The "okay" button seems to quit the ap -- or maybe the whole process is just so slow it only looks like it does.)




So did the acid test for Scrivener IOS today. Most things worked. I lost the macro I'd set up to color blocks of text, and selecting blocks of text is annoying on the iPhone anyhow. Also there is no Scrivenings mode (a mode that presents all the selected text as a single contiguous page -- helpful for scanning through a series of scenes nested into chapters). But navigation is smooth enough, typing is fine.

(An odd wrinkle is Scrivener IOS doesn't recognize the "command" key on the iClever keyboard. Instead I have to remember to use the "Windows" key for control-key sequences. But I already went through mental keyboard remapping when messing with programming inside a Raspberry Pi.)

I took it to the cafe and managed to create a new draft of the Agora scene. While I was drafting it discovered an opportunity to plant a couple of ideas; the idea of all Europe being a Euro-rail pass away once you've made the Big Leap across the Pond. And the idea of Penny having this vacation all planned out in her head, a dream she will have to tearfully give up during the events in Germany.

Didn't end up talking about that palimpsest. Although I think I snuck in mention of a well. So it all basically works for me and I can move on to filling the next hole in the current draft.

Oh, one last discovery. Don't synch files unless you have wifi. It takes far too long on cellular data.



Also switched to the 5C mouthpiece in the trumpet to continue my daily practice sessions, and retuned the gue to C - F. Both give me a clearer tone and make it more distinct when I'm locked into the right pitch and articulation.

Best advance? I took out the mute and was able to achieve the high c at pianissimo. That means I'm finally getting some strength in my embouchure. I'm still pressing too hard or something and my lips get a little numb. Is probably a mistake to keep working on the top end of the range. But I got that Disney songbook and the very first number on it goes to the top e on the staff within the first dozen bars...and finishes with the a' above the staff. (The last marked notes are a gliss from d to D).

(For a moment I thought it was the top c'. I'm still learning how to sight-read.)

I have this terrible idea of practicing up enough until I can record my Gue-and-Lyre cover of Game of Thrones before I get a hair cut. I don't have the beard to go Viking on it, though. I am not an actor. I'm barely able to make the music.

Goat

Ran into a guy at the pub who used to fly Airbus320's from ATH to FRA. It was a short conversation, though, and I didn't learn anything I hadn't already grasped from Flight Tracker.

Unfortunately I have to suspend that flight for a bit. I really needed some breathing room in the Athens sequence and there was some thematic business I wanted to work in.

Figuring out the logistics, though, finally took tracking down all the important locations (figuring out where the actual tickets gates to the Acropolis are was a task for memory and a good hour in Google Street View) and painting them on to a screen shot with Gimp.

On the other hand, names have gotten easier for the writer. There are very amusing generators for everything from time-culture appropriate character names to names of classes at Hogwarts. I've never found anything I could use as generated but they can make a good start.

Baby name pickers and "what does my name mean" sites are plentiful these days. Sometimes their research is a little shoddy; I was at one that claimed "Penelope" was a three-syllable name and had no interesting stories attached. Homer doesn't count?

But if this site is right, the French girl that I cast as a walk-on to handle a bit of business on the Acropolis and proceeded to talk her way into an entire chapter for herself and her friend, suffered the same fate as my sister's kid; "Oh, this is a wonderful unique name that no-one else is using!" Eight years later, the teacher reading roll; "Justin? Justin? Justin? Justin..." (My sister's kid is a girl...well, a teen and going to school in New York right now, but you get the idea).

For my last bit of research for this added chapter I'm going into that JSTOR membership I pay for (and the Academic.edu membership I don't) and find what I can on the active archaeological excavations at the Athenian Agora.

And, yes, in this revised scheme my protagonist actually gets to Plaka to do some shopping. She'll have just about enough time to find a new scarf...then it is off to the Hesse, and possibly to scale a Rhein castle (if I can figure out a reason for her to do so).

##

Also abandoned my "Viking" sketch when I realized the title theme to Game of Thrones is plausible on the Shetland Gue (and associated; anglo-saxon lyre, penny whistle, bodhran.) It is a nasty stretch finger, though, and I also discovered that playing with a drone is really, really sensitive to exact intonation. If I hit the notes just precisely right they sing. Even the ones that aren't in a strong harmonic relationship.

But then, that's unfretted instruments for you. The piano forced upon us an era of equal temperament; it is a system of necessary compromises because you can't, mathematically, achieve all the possible intervals cleanly. So the fifth and the third are in tune, the second and fourth are just slightly off pitch and don't sound good. This is why Western music is dominated by the fifth and the major (and minor) triad. But a fretless or equally flexible wind instrument can change; you can play A at 440 at one moment and then, when supporting a different harmonic relationship, shade it to 439.75

Sorry, I bollixed that all up. The standard tuning for electronic instruments is Equal Temperament, which simply divides each octave into twelve identical intervals. The advantage to this is that if you tuned so, say, Cmaj was in tune with itself, then switched to another key (which happens frequently within many compositions), many of the chords would be even more off. Basically, the compromise is that no key sounds WORSE than any other.

String quartets, a capella singing, and so forth can Just temper to the actual key they are in at the moment. So the remarks above.

And, yes, what drives the "ring" in intervalic relationships is the underlying harmonic series. Any simple resonator (a string or bar considered by itself) has implicit in its sound the entire harmonic series stretching up from the fundamental (c.f. Fourier transforms). In reality, the first few are the strong ones; that's octave, fifth, seventh, etc. (Twice the frequency of the fundamental, 3x, 4x...)

Still doesn't change the original problem. At what would be the scroll of the Gue, I have to be accurate to within a quarter of the size of my pinkie. Towards the bridge, it gets...worse.

Practicum; from MIDI to Mixdown

We're overdue for an instructive post. This will be a brief walk-though of the process of recording "Uncharted Worlds."

The original track was composed and arranged by Sam Hulick for the game Mass Effect, and subsequently used for all the games of the original trilogy.

It was recorded, according to Sam, on analog synthesizers for that retro 80's sound.

"Uncharted Worlds" is in the top three most popular compositions of the Mass Effect series, and has been covered multiple times by various fans.

When starting your own arrangement, the first thing to get hold of is a copy of the original track. I always put that into Track One on my Reaper file so I can use it as a reference while I work. The next thing is to figure out the notes. In this case it was easy; sheet music was available from several sources, as well as complete MIDI tracks.

Reaper is a shareware DAW; a Digital Audio Workstation meaning it is a multi-track audio editor with MIDI editing capabilities. It supports plug-ins in several formats including AU and VST and most importantly for this part of the lesson, VSTi; software synthesis instruments. I own several good, cheap, and surprisingly complete third-party libraries, mostly from Garritan, meaning I have available decent approximations of many typical acoustic instruments.

It is trivial to take each MIDI track, fire up a VSTi instance in the SFX chain and assign that MIDI data stream to an appropriate musical instrument. The artistic part is figuring out what instruments will sound good for what parts (I experimented quite a bit on this one, trying out different combinations). And, yes, there's a bit of compromise (no library actually has a U-Bass or a Shetland Gue) and the simulated instruments are often very different from the kind of performance you intend to get out of your own instruments. But it allows you to test if the basic ideas of the arrangement are going to work.

The more technical task is making sure you can actually play that part on the instrument you own. First part is checking the range. Go to the track, find the highest and lowest note, check them against your instrument. In my case, the Sutton Hoo lyre couldn't be tuned that high without snapping the strings. (I transposed the part down a fourth, recorded it that way, then used a pitch shifter plug-in to move it back to where it was supposed to be.)

A similar problem was that the lowest note on the tin whistle part fell below the low Bb whistle I owned. I compromised by playing the parts on recorder but playing in tin whistle style (cuts and strikes, finger tremolo, etc.)

Other than that the parts were technically playable, but I didn't care to rehearse for a month. So I recorded two of the parts at a lower tempo and time-shifted them to fit. Another part I split in two because although I could play it at tempo (and did for the video) I had much cleaner notes doing it the other way.

Which naturally segues to recording. With a DAW like Reaper, you can listen to whatever combination of tracks you like plus the output of the microphone you are recording on. With this capability you set up a custom "headphone mix" for each recording pass. You might mute everything but a metronome track, for instance. Or you might play one or more of the MIDI mock-ups as a guide.

Reaper has a primitive but sufficient notation mode, if you are comfortable sight-reading a part. Having the cursor automatically move down the measures, follow-the-bouncing-ball style, is extremely helpful here. I tend to use the piano roll if anything; it really helps me figure out where to enter.

Most DAWs allow loop recording, where you can select a group of measures and loop through them, creating a new recorded track every time. Keep at it until you think you've got a good one in the can. Then stop, mute the spares, and see how it sounds.

Technical details; for this one, everything was captured on a Shure PG81. It is a cardiod condenser with a fairly flat response, rising a bit at 4K and 10K in a way that is generally friendly to acoustic instruments. I ran that through an FP-10 8-channel firewire interface with phantom power and zero-latency monitoring. No acoustic foam, no studio, just a chair and a mic. At typical distances of under a foot, even the traffic noise from outside wasn't a worry.

As you may have grasped from the above, I'm lazy. I'd prefer to get music done then have bragging rights about being able to play a perfect take. So I'll edit if I have to. On "Uncharted Worlds," for instance, the breath I had to take in the middle of the soprano recorder part was a little long. So I stretched the note before it to tighten up. There was also an out-of-tune note on the tenor recorder note that got a pass through the pitch shifter plug-in.

I am, particularly, a lousy drummer. For drums, I'll zoom in tight and make a bunch of micro-edits, slicing the recorded track in order to drag the drum beats closer to the mark.

After that it's mixology. Make a rough mix first, approximating relative volumes, and don't forget that clashing parts can often be clarified by panning them a little. Then on to the plug-ins. Unlike a traditional mixer, there's no channel EQ. Instead you do that with as many instances of various plug-ins that you find useful, as well as compression, limiting, amp emulation, pitch correction, or whatever else gets you the sound you were after. In the example above, the recorder was mic'd dead-on at about six inches and was far too "airy." So I ducked a lot of the sibilant sound to let the pure tone of the fundamental shine through.

Often, in a mix like this, the task for the EQ is to find the most characteristic sound that will make that particular instrument have an individual identity within the final mix. The classical guitar, for instance, has a boxy body resonance around 400 Hz that is very characteristic (but boost this in moderation!) But in the mix of the day, finger noise might be what helps it stick out and give it character...somewhere upwards of 6K.

For reverb, I usually establish a reverb bus and take an AUX send off each instrumental track so each gets a different amount of reverb but they all feel like they are in the same sonic space. Exception is drums, and some solo instruments; the former often like a smaller "room" algorithm, and the latter often calls for something "special."

Don't underestimate the value of automating parameters, either. The above screen-shot show how the volume of various tracks was manipulated constantly to bring them into greater or lesser prominence through the piece.



And that's basically it. Watch your meters, normalize if necessary after exporting the final mix. (Another hint there; drum parts can have transients that are very spiky but don't add a lot to the perceived volume. It takes a fast look-ahead compressor to tame them; I tend to zoom in up almost to the sample level and knock the transients down that way so I can boost the total volume of that track.)

Next time, I'll dive deeper in part-writing, explaining what to do if you only have partial sheet music, or even none at all.



Just to put all the musician-stuff in one place, the instruments were three ukuleles, two recorders, guitar, home-built lyre and a piece of pipe. To play the top part I tuned five strings of the "Mini-Hoo" lyre to the five melody notes. A fourth down, because the tension was too high otherwise. Incidentally, most processing in Reaper is non-destructive; when I went back to duplicate the track for the video all I had to do is bypass SFX on that track and I had my original pitches back again for reference.

The guitar part is six eighth notes which means it changes relative position between measures -- annoying enough I finally muted everything but the metronome while recording it. It was high on the E string and rather than stretch I used a capo (for the first time ever!)

For the bell note I balanced a small steel pipe on two pieces of scrap foam and struck it with the handle of a paintbrush. Then tuned it to pitch in software. This is actually more acoustically complicated than it sounds. To get a free ring you need to support it at the nodes. The first mode longitudinal has the crossing nodes (the points where the bar isn't moving relative to the support) at about a third in. This didn't sound as good as the second harmonic mode, which has three nodes; one center and two closer to the ends. And so forth. So by picking where I put the supports, I could pick which of the first few modes were least muted and most prominent.

Unless you are using a tuned bar, though, the other vibrational modes won't be in harmony with the longitudinal mode (as they depend on diameter and thickness). So in the software, I EQ'd heavily to focus in on the chosen fundamental. Then re-pitched THAT.

I could play the next part on the lute-backed tenor ukulele. But this is where musical choice comes in again. The desired sound was long sustained notes. There's a pedal on an open string, for instance. Problem is, you play a note low on the B string (I'm tuned to guitar top four) then have to quickly dart up the neck for three high notes on the same string. That means a hard cut-off, and the same happens on the way back down. So I divided the piece into two, recorded two separate tracks, then married them in Reaper. If I was a more skilled musician I could play it in one and make it sound good, but...

The soprano ukulele part was too fast. I could just get through the first measures but then it starts throwing in doubled notes. I thought this might be a mistake in the MIDI transcription (some MIDI processes can't handle long notes and will repeat a shorter note instead). But it didn't sound right. when I deleted them from the reference track. So...Reaper can be dialed up or down in playback tempo. Since the guide tracks are MIDI they still sound at pitch, only slower. And the metronome is still there. So I recorded at 75% playback speed, then changed playback of the resulting recording by 150%. Doing it this way meant I had to pitch correct, and although formant-preserving pitch-change algorithms are good they aren't perfect; it does change the timbre of the sound. So a whole pile of corrective EQ on top of THAT.

Build it and they will drum

I picked up a cheap Typhoon darbuka* and have started learning the strokes (my doum and tak are...okay...but the dak or left-hand tak is going to take a bit to develop. Unfortunate, because it's the rolls I need for the song I'll be working on soon). The sound is a little too...bright? Metallic? Anyhow, it doesn't seem right for the Gue piece I'm trying to record now.

I want yet another drum. Something like a 12" side drum that's 4" deep and has a goatskin head. I could build one... but it turns out the techniques of bending wood appropriate for guitar and ukulele are different from those best for bending drum shells. So much for building a drum as a learning project on the way to building a uke.

Thing is, do I want to build a uke? That's the real question.

It's a strange place to be. Way back when, I started making music on keyboard and rack-mount synthesizers. You'd compose something for, say, violin and guitar and piano, but you'd play it all on a keyboard, capture your performance as MIDI data, and plug that data into a machine that made sounds like violin and guitar and piano.

I talked to musicians and read about orchestration and the thought started even way back then that you'd get better results with that keyboard and those rack modules if you had experience with the "real" instrument.

Meanwhile I was in theatre, and learning how to make things that looked like they were made of polished wood and solid brass but were really plywood and styrofoam and paint. And instead of making things that worked, we made things that looked like they could work and then faked it with fishline, hidden lights, sound effects, re-purposed toys.

My paychecks improved enough over the years to where I could actually afford a decent computer, and make the move to Software Synthesis; the same electronically-created guitar sounds, but without so many trailing wires.

I still dreamed of getting my hands on a real trumpet or even a real violin, but that was a dream that seemed financially out of reach.

Meanwhile the Maker movement was changing the options. I welded for theatre but TechShop offered the chance to work metal in an entirely new way.

I did pick up a ukulele along the way. The face of mass production was changing in the electronic age, and there were starting to appear $40 instruments that actually played.

Yeah, I'd owned a recorder for years. A couple of them (recorders are cheap, as long as you stick to the higher-pitched members of the family). But the uke was an eye-opener. Your first experience with a guitar is going to be buzzing frets and painful grooves in your fingers. A uke has such a light action it doesn't do that. You can start chording the first day. And gain the confidence to face that full-sized steel-string later.

The Maker movement was growing, with processes formerly used only in big companies moving to the small shop and the individual maker. And thanks to the VA, I got a membership to the local TechShop and was able to try some of that myself.

This changed utterly how I looked at prop construction. Sure, I could and still did fake it with styrofoam and paint when appropriate, but I could now actually build out of "real" materials. Metals and hardwoods and so forth were no longer out of reach.


And then I got a day job. The title is a lot less prestigious than "Resident Sound Designer" but boy does it pay more.

That revolution in production was still going on. I took a chance and blew a couple hundred on an electric violin. And that opened the gate. As the paychecks kept coming in, I realized I was able to afford, first, a Chinese-made trumpet, then, an actual German-made student-quality acoustic violin.

And I was learning enough in the process that I could take the risk of cheap instruments and trust I could fix them or work around them anyhow.

I went back to the composing bench with the idea of doing the synthesis-based stuff I'd always been doing but folding in a part or two from a real instrument to improve the articulation and realism.

But then it occurred to me I'd collected enough instruments by this point to actually be able to play all the parts. And that was a really attractive idea.

The prop-building was still going on and the revolution in electronics led me to lean more and more on computing power; "fix it in the mix" works for props as well as it does in the recording studio (or, rather, on the DAW.)

Thing is, I already came out of sound design where altering real sounds to new purposes was a central part of the game. I'd long been exposed to the variety of a similarly utilitarian approach to music, from the washtub bases of various folk music traditions to the experiments with vacuum cleaners and air raid sirens of composers like John Cage to the hectic and oft-compromised business of live sound where often you had to improvise some combination of mic placement and board EQ to get the sound that was musically appropriate for that night's show.

So it really shouldn't have taken the arrival of a jointer-planer at the shop I work at to make me think of making musical instruments -- leveraging the available processes and skills in working real materials other than styrofoam and paint -- that could be used in a musical way -- leveraging here the skills both in playing technique (on "better" instruments) and in musical understanding of how to make use of those sounds and, of course, the electronic tools that could warp and shape the result to fit into a final composition.

There's an element of experimental archaeology in this (going along with my renewed interest in history) as well as ethnomusicology. And that's a dangerously attractive road; not only does every instrument have a playing tradition and an idiom that the composer can learn either to mimic or to learn from, instruments also have a building tradition that the luthier could chose to learn.

My own Shetland Gue is a visual mimic of Charlie Bynum's museum replica, down to the stick bow and the twisted-fibre tailpiece. But I was entirely happy to use power tools to build it.

And that's where I am now. I am conflicted musically, as I want to go in so many directions and finding the hours to practice becomes increasingly problematic (heck, finding storage space is becoming problematic!) I wish I could do as a composer friend of mine did and pick a dozen sounds (yes, on the rack mount synths, but the principle still holds) and just work within their sonic possibilities.

And, yes, the "bardic cover" idea is still amusing. Doing not just acoustic covers of existing music, but doing them with archaic instruments whenever possible, seems like both long-term fun and a decent "brand."

But I like all music, and all instruments excite me. I'm not the type to just do guitar, do everything on that guitar, and, yes, admittedly get very good on that guitar. I'm not cut out to be an ace, but rather a jack.

And same goes for instrument building. As attractive is the idea of getting deeper into tonewoods and sinew and hand-axes and natural materials -- and the concurrent idea of recreating ancient instruments -- is the idea of finding ways to laser-cut and machine and electronify and create things that are unique. And, yeah, to find how the available technologies, both the newest CNC mills and the old theatrical standbys, could be used to make things that look one way and play entirely different.

Like...a playable Goddess Harp.

* Darbuka, doumbek, dumbek, tarbuka, tabla....the closest thing you'll get to an agreement on what to call the "Middle-Eastern Goblet Drum" is that the "Turkish" style with the exposed tuners should probably be called a darbuka.

Uncharted Worlds

So I hauled my ukulele through the local woods (not an unusual euphemism) to get some footage. Snagged some free footage off YouTube (simpler than jumping through all the hoops at the free stock footage sites), and cut the video.

Trying to keep things simple. Really, I'd rather be playing music then messing around in video editors. Especially free video editors (unlike the usual suspects, making smaller frames which zip around the screen is practically impossible in the editor I'm using. So I have to reach for different language in order to highlight the various instruments being performed.)

At least the show is down. I can spare a little more time towards writing...music and prose.

Dorian Inversion

So I decided to write my "Shetland Gue Improvisation" in Dorian mode. For no particular reason. D Dorian, which is basically the related minor of C Maj, only with that major sixth.

That is to say, it is the white-note scale (only starting one pitch up). Since my soprano and tenor recorders are pitched in C Maj, I get the D Dorian just by starting on the second hole from the bottom (if you are wondering what the Dorian mode sounds like, think Scarborough Fair). My penny whistles are a little more troublesome. The D whistle starts on that D, but plays in D Maj. My low Bb whistle comes closer; starting from the second hole it plays C (which is in D Dorian), then the D, then...Eb. And there's no fork fingering for E♮ -- it can only be played with the more difficult half-holing.

Things get more intriguing with my two lyres. The Gue should probably be tuned with the melody string on D, being the root of the D Dorian scale. The fourth is strong with this one in the Dorian mode and traditional for the interval to the drone anyhow, bringing it to a G natural. Which, funny thing, is the pitch of my other two recorders, the alto and the sopranino, as members of the recorder family are pitched a fifth apart.

The downside to this idea is that the drone is (sort of by definition) always sounding, so it really should be tuned to the tonic. This is one of the dirty secrets of modes, really all modes (including major and minor). You are playing from the same collection of twelve notes. The only things that define your composition as being a Maj or it's related Minor or some other mode entirely is the relative frequency of major versus minor triads in the harmony and what note the composition ends on (and neither of these are cut-and-dried).

Oh, yes. And because of the design of the Gue, traditional playing style gives you only five scale tones. If you are tuned a fourth up (to the G) the highest you can reach is the root at an octave. There's no way to play the root of a II or III chord. (not to mention that drone D isn't in the II or III triad -- it only shows up in in a II7.)

My 3/4 size Sutton Hoo lyre has only seven strings. Typical is to tune diatonic, say tuning in C Maj but starting up a third. Remember what I said about wanting to be able to play the IV, or or V chord? Well, if the root of the chord is already on the fourth string, you can only play the second degree of the chord before you run out of strings, having to flip around to the first inversion for the top of the triad. If your bottom note is already the third degree of the scale, you can play all the way up to the V chord and still be in root position.

But again that means you can harmonize to a melody in D Dorian but you can't play it: not without jumping the octave for the root, second, and the leading tone below the tonic -- which the C recorders play quite easily, of course.

Yah. Music theory is another one of those places where a seemingly simple set of starting axioms turn out to lead to a giant set of contradictions.

Tin can what?

Standard practice among professional bodhrán players is to wrap the rim of the instrument with black electrical tape. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about the antiquity of that practice. But then, another standard of Irish music is the penny whistle, and Robert Clark of Manchester didn't start rolling them out of tin plate until 1840. (To be fair, fipple flutes are documented far earlier than that in the isles...back through tabor pipe and flagolet and eventually to what appears to be a bone flute discovered in a neanderthal grave.)

The earliest documentation of the gue in the Shetlands is also in the mid nineteenth century. The presumed ancestor(s) are attested to no earlier than the fifteenth century. But, again, the concept of the bowed lyre goes way, way back. So it isn't terribly presumptuous to assume something like the gue or a two-string talgaharpa -- as well as a frame drum somewhat resembling the bodhrán in shape and material if not in performance practice -- was in use by the Norse of the Viking era.

Not that I care overmuch. I'm composing a piece around my new gue, and I'll use whatever instruments sound good with it.

On reflection going for a worn, found-in-the-attic look for the gue was unsatisfying. Several people have expressed disappointment that I didn't chose to sand it down fine and give it a nice glossy coat of urethane. In all honesty, I would have had to spend a lot longer building it in the first place in order for it to stand up to that kind of detailing. In any case I still took it back to the shop and gave it another coat of polish.

Basically everything worked. It is also kinda neat that I made my own strings, meaning the only parts in it that were designed by someone else as part of a musical instrument are the pegs (and I could have carved my own.) I've been messing around with tuning to various pitches and shifting the position of the bridge. There's a fairly narrow zone of pitches where they work well on the string (not too tight, not too slack) and still sound good on the sound board. Similar constraints on the bridge placement; towards the sound hole improves the melody string at the cost of unbalancing the blend with the drone, but too far stretches the scale length until the fourth finger is no longer a comfortable reach.

The biggest problems are that the strings are a little too far apart to make it comfortable to finger both simultaneously, and the heel is awkward to clamp between the legs (as is not just standard practice, but the best position I've found so far). I've also changed to a reverse grip on the bow; jouhikko practice is apparently to use the forefinger to tension the bow string but I'm disliking the groove that puts in your finger and using the thumb works better for me.

##

Cherry did not work well for me on my first experiment with making a frame drum. I had some strips of 1/16" veneer so I soaked it and applied a heat gun used for stripping paint. It didn't bend nicely. Most of my sources lean towards dry bending, but in any case the hot pipe bending tool seems clearly superior. Fortunately one can be made with as little as a tin can and a light bulb.

There also seems to be a nearly even split between negative and positive forms. I found it a pain to shove strips of wood into a hole so next time I'll try wrapping them around a disk. But, really, I've been doing too many personal projects at work and not putting enough hours on the time card. Spent eight hours in the shop this Saturday and only four of them go on the clock.

(It also seemed to wear me out to where I never quite got it together today to go out and shoot some video. I'm anxious now to shoot the footage for Uncharted Worlds so I can go and retune the instruments from that back to either standard tuning or the Dorian mode I'm thinking of for the new piece.)

I am rather wanting a smaller, higher pitched hand drum for the new piece. That's the second reason to eventually find the time to build it (the primary reason is to learn how to bend wood). Also means buying a goat skin at some point. Oh, and the standard decoration for a bodhrán after the skin is glued down is upholstery tacks and a ribbon. Which would be a natural application for my card loom. Which I have yet to learn how to use. Which also might be short of cards to make a wide enough strip. Which would be nicest if I had a laser to run a few more off to the pattern I already have. Did I mention TheShop is closed for relocation, no other information forthcoming?

And so it goes. At least in the interim I can practice the gue. The Kreisler highway is narrow indeed on that instrument, and the zone where bow speed and pressure and tension (remember, you can adjust bow tension on the fly with a taglaharpa style bow) is equally narrow. Plus of course this is a fretless instrument, meaning muscle memory alone for where all the notes are.

Gue Gone

Shetland Gue is done. Most of the surprises were positive. I was going for the rustic look of the Charlie Bynum museum replica; I didn't waste a lot of time with finish sanding -- in fact I sanded back the stain to mimic weathering. Used linseed oil for the finish -- although I did do a light pass of "Finish restore" to give it a bit of shine. After three days of prep the ebonizing solution did actually work, but I didn't care for how it looked on my sample piece. That's an experiment for another day.

Rather than spend forty-plus bucks on a peg shaver I used the peg hole reamer on a block of white pine and stuffed sandpaper in the resultant tapered hole to make a simple shaper for my pre-made violin pegs. They fitted nice and tight, hold tuning, and move smoothly enough to allow me to get close to pitch so that's a win.

Despite my misgivings three loops of sisal twine plus wrapping proves plenty strong and stable. (Most gue builders follow modern jouhikko practice and use a tailpiece that can be fitted with violin fine tuners. But I liked the nautical look of Charlie's stick tailpiece. That's an actual twig from the local woods, there. The standard is a tail pin, though; the only ones I've seen with holes drilled through the body are a couple of Michael J. King's builds.)

And the strings proved much easier than I'd feared. As per guidance from a jouhikko builder I wet the hank of brown Mongolian horse hair and combed it out. Then I separated the appropriate number of individual hairs, tied a figure-eight in the end and dripped superglue on the knot to secure it. Cut a slot in the end of the violin peg with the bandsaw and it was a simple matter to drop in the new string and tension it up.

My hair count for 28 for the high string and 36 for the drone. I've prepped another string at a 60-count that I may swap in to see if I can tune lower and still get a good sound. But I'm not unhappy with the pitches I get now; scale length is 19" so, unsurprisingly, it seems to want to tune to around guitar.

The other experiment is shaving the bridge -- or carving a new one. I'd like to see if a thinner, more flexible bridge produces more volume. I did find out after gluing a bass brace to the sound board that bracing a sound board generally dampens the low-order modes, producing a stronger top and a brighter sound.

The bow is also a work in progress. I need to rosin it up before I can test to see if I like the traditional jouhikko technique of tensioning the bow with your forefinger. For testing I'm using my third-best bow (the one that shipped with the Cecilio).

The next string instrument I'll tackle will probably be a ukulele. Although I have all the parts to run off a quick solid-body uke (something I've been planning for a while), I'm intrigued by classical construction and wood bending and would like to try an acoustic.

Or I'll make a hand drum. Viking drums are basically unrecorded archaeologically, but frame drums have been found in almost every culture world-wide. I could get my feet wet...wood wet...with bending by doing a frame drum, and I could use a small drum in some of the pieces I'd like to record next.