Origin of Species

The Khajiit piece is coming along. Went to a concert of Early Music last night and it has given me ideas.

Mostly about counterpoint...most of the songs performed last night were tenorlieder, in which the outer voices dress a melody held in the tenor voice. Pity I don't have a tenor recorder, and my Susato crumhorn in quality brown ABS plastic is not really suitable for a lyrical line (I can play one, and in theory it fits -- the cat in Prokovfiev's Peter and the Wolf is performed by a low-register clarinet, but in practice the sound is just a little too silly.)



The Bodhran also arrived yesterday. I'm not making a video of that one for the "How long does it take?" series, though. Within an hour or two I could perform the parts I'd written (well...I'd intentionally written parts I was pretty sure I could learn). Before the afternoon was done I also had a pretty good start on the Bodhran triplet.

But then, that series is kind of a fail. First off, I don't have the patience to properly script and edit video (plus I was going for the immediacy and honesty of showing what it really sounds -- and looks -- like when you are struggling with an instrument for the first time.) So it is rambling and semi-coherent (much like this blog).

Second is the question is far too open-ended. "How long does it take to learn to play?" is the perennial question, and the only real answer is, "The rest of your life."

How good is "good enough?" I have been theorizing that there is a fuzzy line you cross where you actually feel like you are playing a melody as opposed to struggling through a technical exercise. But on reflection, I think the question is better turned on it's head; "How bad do you sound after n hours?" Would you be willing to let a friend listen to you after six hours? Would you rather wait six weeks? How long before you tried to play with someone else, in a band, or record?

The other fail is that I'm not a complete noob. I've been messing around with instruments for a long time. I've struck a variety of drums in my life, including as much as a hundred hours on the pads of my electronic drum set. So bouncing a stick off a membrane and getting a good tone is not new territory for me.

The U-bass was a similar exercise. I've never played bass, but I've a couple years of ukulele already. So I'm not starting from ground zero. And in all cases, I have a smattering of music theory, experience in how instruments are supposed to sound (from recording and mixing them), and decades of experience with other complicated manual motions from various sorts of tool and craft use. "Hold it this way and turn your hand this way and then apply pressure like this" is not a terrifying new prospect. It's just one more set of muscle memories to absorb.

And, yeah, the trumpet. I've tried to get a tone from a horn in the past, messed with it enough to be able to get two partials out of a post horn. And I also knew the theory. But the trumpet brings up another problem with the "how long does it take?" question. Because you can practice for a week, but your actual practice time is only a couple of hours.

The reason is, the first hurdle to the trumpet is building strength in your embouchure. You literally can not practice for more than five minutes at a time, and twenty minutes in a day is pushing it. Your muscles fatigue after that and there's nothing more that can or should be done with that instrument that day.

The violin is similar in that getting that rotation -- particularly as an adult -- is bad enough that wrist and shoulder and neck and back strain show up quite rapidly. The pain is enough to mess with your concentration after fifteen minutes. Even now, I get sore if I try to push past thirty minutes without a break. So the time you spent in "days" is not really indicative of the total effort.

(That's not counting watching instructional videos, doing finger exercises, reading up, cleaning and maintaining the instrument, and so forth).



And that also means it isn't actually that silly to be practicing four or five instruments at once. Particularly since I'm practicing the actual instrumental lines I mean to start recording within the week.