Euphonic Remarks

The Hapi drum is a tuned percussion instrument that you tap to have it chime sweet notes. You can try it out virtually to see how it sounds. They come in pentatonic scales for their standard tunings, although other uncommon tunings are available. I would love to get my hands on one. It seems to me that it would be a great instrument to jam around on.

Check out the Hapi drum …

Most online tab sucks. That is not to say that they are incorrect or incomplete (though this is a common crime of online tab) but that often they are an unreadable mash of ASCII that is from a system produced when monitors could only display 16 colours. Just look at the example below. As far as notation goes, it’s very bare bones, and requires great work picking through it to get it sounding right. Blame the lack of rhythm information, blame it on the lack of spacing, but ASCII tab is all too often a big mess.

e|----------------------------------------------|
B|----------------------1-------0--------1---4--|
G|----2----------3b----2---2-------1----2-------|
D|--3---------2-------2--------1-----3----------|
A|--3-------1--1-------------2------------------|
E|----------------------------------------------|

When I came across Songsterr it was like the heavens opened up. Finally a place with full featured tab, the way it was meant to be written. Take a look at this screenshot. It’s beautiful!

Click to see full size

It has note lengths below the bars, full fledged bend and vibrato notation, and the real kicker: IT WILL PLAY THE MUSIC FOR YOU! That’s right, the fancy play button isn’t just for show. You can play, pause, skip around the tab till your heart is bursting with glee. A marker will run along the notation so you know where you are.  Just when you thought it couldn’t get better the songs let you choose which part you want to look at the tab for.

Click to see full size

There are of course two levels of features, the ones that are free and the ones that you pay for. On the list of paid services are: Playing at half speed, Fullscreen mode, Printing,  Part volume control, and Part soloing. The ‘plus’ account is $9.90 per month. I don’t have that much of a need for tab, but if I were in a working cover band I’m sure I’d get my monies worth. If your tired of sloughing through the tons of crappy tab on the internet check into Songsterr, you won’t regret it.

Go listen to some awesome live music at CBC’s Concerts on Demand. There is a plethora of artists to choose from. Hundreds in fact; all free.

I’ve done something that I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Taking my Christmas gift certificate to Long and McQuade, I bought a violin bow to use on my guitar. Let me tell you, it is not easy to just pick up a bow and start playing. First thing I noticed was that the notes I was hearing were not the notes I was playing. That is to say that there must have been some weird harmonic thing going on because, depending on where I stroked the bow on the string, I could make a whole range of pitches occur. I finally found that it sounds best when I bow right over the bridge pickup. I’ll have to investigate this further, but if pressed for a reason, I’d say it was because the bow sets up a fixed node and I’m hearing artificial fundamentals whose pitch corresponds to where the bow is on the string and either the fretted note or the bridge. This explanation could be entirely bullshit, I don’t know. I did try bowing open strings over the 12th fret, which is a fixed node in the string’s vibration. The results of this were unsatisfactory.

It is a good thing I had strung my guitar with flatwounds some time back, as it is much kinder on the bow. Flat or roundwound, either way you end up with a lot of tacky rosin on your strings … and your guitar. Be sure to wipe up after you’re done.

As the fretboard on the guitar is not arched like stringed instruments that are meant to be played with the bow, single note lines are restricted to the E string (your choice of which). If you want to increase the availability of strings for playing single notes you’ll have to either get a modified bridge or a specially made guitar. The later you can get from TogaMan. Currently I’m liking the sounds of the low E and A string drawing out long growly power chords, I suppose I could open tune the guitar to make use of all the strings. I wonder what it would sound like if I did that and used my slide?

I also found I had to wear my guitar lower. This made the action of bowing easier to do. Holding the bow is a bit odd too. So far the best grip I found, that gives me the most control is to hold it like I’m holding a pencil with the frog (see here) underneath my thumb, and my middle finger pressing on the back of the hairs. Not having my right arm to push back against the body of the guitar, I find it taxing to keep the guitar from swinging when I move my fretting hand.

Some alternatives exist if you want a bowed sound without the bow. The Piranha Guitar Bow is a device that shrinks a bow into a hand-held package. If you want to get even further down the technology path you could always pick up an E-bow from here.

Learning to play with a bow is challenging but yields great rewards in the range of expression you can coax out of your strings. If you’re looking to tackle a new technique to add to your repetoire I would highly suggest picking up a bow from your local music shop and spend some time making beautiful music.

Go ahead … what’s stopping you? That’s the tag-line of The RPM Challenge; a one month, one album challenge in the vein of NaNoWriMo. This takes place in February so you have a little over two weeks to get your mojo going.

This is the challenge: record an album in 28 days, just because you can.

That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

Don’t wait for inspiration – taking action puts you in a position to get inspired. You’ll stumble across ideas you would have never come up with otherwise, and maybe only because you were trying to meet a day’s quota of (song)writing. Show up and get something done, and invest in yourself and each other.

Anyone can come up with an excuse to say “no,” so don’t!

For a complete description of the challenge read more …

Ah, the glass armonica. Is there ever a more pleasantly haunting sound? For those that are unfamiliar with this weird and wonderful instrument it is a super-duper, glass-rub-o-matic, Ben Franklin special. You see, old Benny had the brilliant idea of automating the whole rubbing the rim of a wine glass trick by skewering a bunch of glass bowls and spinning the whole thing like a musical rotisserie.

Try playing one yourself… virtually at least. The Franklin Institute has a fun little online armonica to play around with. But to truly get a sense of what it can do mosey on down to YouTube and just look at any of the dozens of videos of Thomas Bloch working it.

You can hardly ever mention the glass armonica on the net without people going on about lead. See, the glass armoninca has gained a reputation for causing insanity and other forms of psychic distress. The popular explanation among commentboard posters is that lead poisoning is to blame.

There are several reasons why I would discount this theory. First thing is to look at is the supposed vectors of lead transmission. Two possible sources of lead contamination on the armonica are in the paint and the glass. While paint was originally used on the bowls to distinguish the notes, gold banding replaced this practice some years before the armonica fell out of fashion. Paint was used in roughly the first 30 years of the armonica’s existence, a time when it enjoyed immense popularity.  Aside from this, the paint (if indeed it were lead paint at all) would be painted on the inside of the bowls as the whole point of the armonica is that you’re rubbing glass, not paint. The other supposed vector of lead poisoning, the lead in the crystal, is just as unlikely. While it has been shown that lead does leech out of lead glassware, the effect is most pronounced with acidic liquids, and long storage periods. The water an armonica player uses on their fingers is unlikely to leech out a substantial amount of lead, and while we all know musicians love to party, I doubt many armonicas were converted to champagne fountains.

Next we should take a look at the symptoms of lead poisoning. We must concentrate on the symptoms that appear in adults, as it is unlikely that there were many child armonica players. We also must confine ourselves to looking at the symptoms which manifest behaviorally which are: irritability, sleeplessness, nervousness,  and loss of appetite. Even if all these symptoms were present in one individual it would hardly seem like insanity brought on by the spooky tones of a weird instrument.  Moreover, these symptoms would not present themselves in the audience (having not been in physical contact with the armonica) who would presumably be as equally affected by the strange tones of the armonica as the player. Also we must consider the immediacy of the symptoms. The onset of lead poisoning through the culmination of what little one might ingest from trace amounts left on one’s fingers after playing the armonica would take many, many years of exposure. Because the effect would be so far removed from the cause, I doubt many would actually come to blame the resulting cluster of symptoms on the armonica.

I suspect that, as is typical of humans, people are seeing causality where none exists. Both in blaming the armonica for ill effects, and in pointing the finger at lead poisoning. The timbre of the armonica was once described as ‘celestial’. Just one listen and you’re sure to agree that it possesses an other-worldly sound. This makes it very easy for superstitions to grow around it, and become the target of blame for events that are synchronous yet otherwise random.

Check out Finkenbeine’s page on the Glass Armonica if you want more information or to purchase one.

Ever wanted to be a record mogul? The Next Big Sound is a new music orientated site that allows you to help shape the future of unsigned acts. At its heart it is a promotional site for artists and bands, much like how MySpace is used now by musicians. The twist is that your popularity is rated not by the number of friends you have, but by the number of moguls (registered users) who’ve signed you onto their label. This difference is more than just semantics though. See, on a sites such as MySpace, registered users can add an unlimited amount of friends, on The Next Big Sound you may only add 10 bands to your label. This restriction means that your level of commitment in declaring that a band is good enough to be signed is not taken lightly. The artificial scarcity of signings assures that recommendations aren’t wasted like so many throw-away friend requests. Read more about the whole scheme on their About page.