Talk to the thumb

Wood stain is drying on my Sutton Hoo. I will not be surprised if the tuning pegs don't hold or the tailpiece snaps when I put it under tension, but no biggie. I have proper zither pins arriving Monday. The only reason I went with the brass pins is I wanted to see if it made a sound before I wasted a lot of time doing the finish work.

So I guess it makes sense I've started a Reaper file for "Uncharted Worlds" (the music that plays in the galaxy map and planet probe screen of all the Mass Effect games). The process is a little different on this one; found a MIDI file that seems close enough. Spent the afternoon finding voicing for it that matched the capabilities of my available instruments. And tried the top one (the ukulele part). Not too bad.

(Toughest part is my violin-trained instinct is to fret each upcoming note as soon as possible. For a guitar or uke part you may want to stay fretted in order to let the note sustain.)

Yes, there's a link. I started thinking about baby harps and similar when I realized "Uncharted Worlds" would need more and distinct voices than I currently own. And that got me thinking about instrument kits and one thing led to another...and there will be a fully detailed post on my new instrument when it is done and functional and I've had a chance to record a sample off it.



Bass practice is ongoing for the Hellboy cover. My thumb finally listened to me (I think it was changing my position; took off the neck strap and propped the bass on a leg instead. That freed my plucking hand from a support role.) So anyhow the thumb slide method is working for me now. Still some issues damping the D string but it is much less problematic than that A.

Yeah; on listen through playback other than headphones the test bass part I recorded really wasn't working for me. I need that finger plucked sound and I need to control the excess resonance. And that means learning proper bass technique.



And speaking of a Link:

While I was looking at various people's DIY harps and lyres I ran across builds of the "Goddess Harp" from Zelda: Skyward Sword. It is a nice-looking piece but I'm not sure how to make a functional harp from it.

Here's the sitch. The definition of "harp" is strings running perpendicular to the soundboard: in fact, they terminate in the soundboard. The lyre family -- as well as lutes and zithers -- have strings that run parallel to the soundboard and they acoustically couple to it via the bridge. (Think of a lyre as a guitar without a fretboard, and a zither as a guitar without a fretboard or a neck).

All of these work -- aka, project with volume and a good tone -- because there is a resonant cavity under the soundboard. For a guitar, that's the body of the instrument; try playing an electric guitar unplugged and you'll see exactly what that body does.

So the shape of the upper part of the Zelda harp is like a Kithara, the early Greek lyre. The strings terminate on a crosspiece which is suspended between two horns. However, in a Kithara the horns project from a soundbox -- the lower body -- with a bridge and tailpiece.. The Zelda harp is basically a croissant shape and the strings terminate along the inner curve as if it were a harp.

This would have lousy acoustics. Best I can think of is hide a soundboard inside, and then provide an opening for the sound to get out. There's also the issue of the crosspiece but builders have flattened that and added traditional tuning pegs to it without seriously harming the aesthetics of the instrument.

One alternative would be to make it an electric harp. Trouble is, you have to stick a pickup on every single string, unless they terminate in a single resonating piece (like, say...a soundboard).

Or go completely out of physical acoustics and make a laser harp. You could even stick a laser smoke generator in the body and even 5mW lasers would become visible. I think green lasers would look nice with the gold finish. Of course once you've started adding lights...why not make the harp body glow (gold, of course) as well?

But that gets into a completely different kind of project. One I could do. It is rather annoying, really; I've spent several decades collecting an eclectic set of skills from sculpture to fabrication to electronics and I would be entirely comfortable in approaching such a project. But I'm really more interested in learning the basics of acoustic instruments right now.

(Which also leaves out the Vulcan Lyre; although you could build an archtop, both the body shape and the canonical sound produced argues for it to be heavily electronic. Also, it is even more popular than the Zelda harp and there are at least two really excellent ones made by professional luthiers already.)

Say, I wonder if there are other fictional instruments of the string family? (Yes, there's the Skyrim lute, but I've watched a build of it and it is basically a shallow guitar with a lot of extra gingerbread.) I might be tempted to do that one but only as an electric and with full CNC.

Which is also a direction I'm going of late. Sure, it is fun to putter around a woodshop hand-shaping little bits of hardwood, but these days I'd just as soon leverage every labor-saving, time-saving, technological enhancement available. That's the thing I'm proudest about my Mini-Hoo, at least so far; that it took two afternoons to build (and one of them was mostly the sanding).

All U-Bass is Belong to Us

Once or twice in the past I've thought about getting a bass. Certainly not an upright -- those things are huge, and expensive. But even a traditional bass is rather large and cumbersome. Too much, I thought.

Well, not necessarily. And certainly not as of 2005.

Nathan East with his California 5-string, courtesy of Kala

The small-scale hybrid bass concept is not entirely new. The Ashbory came out in 1986. It uses polyethylene strings to cut the length down to about half that of a standard bass. And then there's Paul McCartney with his Höfner 500/1 (a bass neck on a violin-like body.)

One of the many experimenters over the years is Owen Holt, and he combined a baritone ukulele body with pahoehoe strings (manufactured under his own Road Toad branding -- which name is a reference to the infamous Cane Toads, by the by). He then took the new instrument to Mike Upton at Kala, who had learned ukulele building in Hawaii before returning to manufacture them in California.

The first u-bases were acoustic-electric, constructed not unlike a baritone ukulele. There was some experimentation with truss rods along the way, as bass applies new stresses to the standard uke construction. Somewhere around 2011 Kala brought out a solid-body four-string, and in 2015 had five-string options (as well as fretless and left handed options).

Bass players are converts (or, at least adding it to their collections). I saw a used one at the local music shop and was struck by how odd, cute, and friendly it was (in that, at least, it clearly shows its ukulele heritage).

So, yeah, I bought it. And it is, fortunately, one of those instruments that is easy to pick up (all instruments are a lifelong project to learn to play well.) Ukulele skills translate, as do, oddly, violin skills; the former is in the fretting and plucking, the latter is in the sensitivity. This is not a an instrument requiring you to haul down a thick steel string by sheer finger strength. It is an instrument that registers every fretting finger, every brush, every tap.

The one I got is the Kala sunburst SUB. It looks like a baby electric guitar. It has that Fender solid-body shape -- but an oversized headstock and four thick black gummi-worm strings that look like something that belongs on a toy. Internal pre-amp with volume and two tone control knobs on the front and it is just slightly larger than my e-violin.

It is tuned like a four-string bass and with the 20" short-scale has almost the same range. You can hold it like a ukulele but finger plucking is easier with a guitar strap. With those Road Frog Pahoehoes it has a jazzy upright bass quality (particularly if you thumb-pluck and use the heel of your hand to further reduce the sustain). I'm told that with the optional wire-wound strings you can get more of the aggressive bite of a bass guitar.

It is also almost completely silent when not put through an amplifier. You can't even practice it unplugged (but VOX makes a cute headphone amp for guitars and basses).

I do have what appears to be a set-up problem, possibly inherited from the previous owner; my middle strings rattle. I've emailed Kala and will probably be replacing the nut. The low tension means bending is difficult and snapping doesn't work (slap bass technique). It has frets so slides have that fretted sound and you can't really do vibrato. However, the sensitivity of the pickups makes hammer-ons and pops extremely simple. In short there are still plenty of techniques open to exploration on this instrument.

So I've rethought how I will be approaching bass in my next recording project. I've been aware for a while of the true expressive quality of the bass, a quality and a realism that synth patches are a poor substitute for. Well, my playing isn't much better. But the u-bass makes it just possible I can do those parts live now.

And a u-base doesn't take up a lot of space.