Synch or swim

I’ve been attempting to improve my playing by the traditional method: practice. For grins mainly, I’ve posted some of my attempts on YouTube under my human alias, with a mixture of recorders and EWI, along with the computer playing along.

The rather splendid MuseScore website carries what appears to be crowdsourced sheet music, and a free download to read and to write music manuscript, and then to arrange it for bagpipes and taiko drum if you like, although I’ve generally been sticking to flute and strings and rearranging for recorder of playing along.

Telemann’s Canonic Sonata No.1 Allegro, for example, has two flutes playing the same tune with Flute 2 exactly one bar (two beats) behind Flute 1. I turned off Flute 2 and played that part, with Flute 1 and the scrolling sheet music being handled by the computer. The sound was all picked up by the computer’s internal microphone and the webcam captured the video to prove that it was actually Muggins playing.

The other software I use is the free Audacity, which captures just the sound and records it on one channel. Subsequent recordings go on separate channels that can then be edited for volume and timing, and the whole thing mixed. Multi-part playing becomes possible.

My video editing software is the free version of Cyberlink Power Director, so I can, at least theoretically, cut video of my playing each track into a single video file.

That’s a lot of skills to learn: playing, reading music, video capture, audio capture, video editing, audio editing…

Now on to the technicalities of audio capture.

The computer’s internal microphone is appalling. It’s designed for basic voice capture so that Skype is possible. I tried an external hand-held microphone, but that’s simply not sensitive enough. Instrument-mounted mics are both expensive and Not Coming in Doha™. Any noise gets picked up while recording,which includes all the other tracks that are playing, plus the air conditioning, plus any random bleeps and pings if the computer reports any incoming messages, virus alerts, yadda yadda.

One possible solution is to follow the sheet music and play in silence, and have the computer pick up just the line being played. Synching multiple lines then becomes impossible because real rhythm tends to drift without some audio feedback. It does when I’m playing, and I’ve got a good enough sense of rhythm to play drums. A metronome gets picked up on the same audio track and can’t be removed. Another approach is to play along to the other parts, but to pipe these into an earpiece so that I can hear what I’m playing with one ear, hear what the computer’s playing with the other, watch the sheet music, and capture only my live instrument.

Theoretically plugging in an acoustic instrument can work with a flute mic that’ll only pick up what a wind instrument is producing without all the ambient noise. Expensive and Not Coming in Doha™(q.v.)

It’s all a little easier with the EWI. I can plug the output from that instrument directly into the computer as if it’s an external mic. When I play the synch track through the computer I can hear it, but the computer only records what is coming out of the EWI. But because nothing is easy, I can’t hear what I’m playing. So I have to plug the EWI into a separate speaker. I’ve got a Fender Mustang Mini practice amp, so I use that. It’s the one I use for playing when I’m not using headphones and am disinclined to show consideration to my neighbours.

The net result, once I’ve made separate clean audio recordings of each line and separately captured each as audio and video, I can mix the audio and then add that to the video tracks. I do need to get all the video playback speeds exactly right so that audio and video match, and this is proving a challenge. Perhaps I need to pay for better video editing software, or learn how to use the package I’ve got.

The other thing, which is actually pivotal to success, is learning how to play the bluddy instruments!

]}:-{>

I aten't dead

Esmerelda Weatherwax

The blog has been quiet of late because nothing of any significance has happened.

Six days shalt thou labour, and on the seventh day shall thou be confronted by the Client, who has a proper two-day weekend, and verily shall he insist on talking Shop. Yea, and verily shall there be a full, frank, and extremely profane exchange of views.

That was the excitement last weekend.

This weekend, such as it is, consisted of me adding to my collection of musical recordings and uploading them to YouTube. I have at last figured out how to get the EWI to sound reasonable when piped through the computer. Increase the sampling rate. A welcome side effect is the sound that now comes out of the machine is no longer delayed, so I hear what I’m playing pretty much immediately rather than a fraction of a second late, which makes playing to anything like a sensible tempo a questionable ability.

My own ability remains fairly questionable, but abetted by a microphone, some coaxial cables, a computer, a webcam and sound card, and Audacity I have been having some fun recording and mixing. A recent effort produced three tracks of Muggins playing Misirlou on three tenor recorders. Actually one recorder, recorded three times and then multi-tracked. Arranged, mixed, and performed by me.

Interesting that Dick Dale and the Deltones (who did the extremely electric version of Misirlou that you know from Pulp Fiction) hold the copyright. I’m amused that a tune that existed before 1919 and is performed by me off sheet music published in 1936 can be copyright DD&D in 1963. However, I’m not a copyright lawyer, so I guess I’ll suck up the ads that may pop up on YouTube.

For what it’s worth, anyone who wishes to see and hear my eclectic collection of musical work may search for my real name on YouTube with the word ‘recorder’.

The job continues to stink. The Minister of Paper Clips, who says he’s desperate for all the designs to be completed, delights in finding further and more ingenious ways to delay his approvals. A recent one was to resubmit everything he’s already got in a slightly different format. He’ll be getting it in 16-point Comic Sans  if I get my way, along with a plain brown envelope containing some non-toxic crayons.

That’s it then. Day in, day out. Six days a week. I’ve not been out of the region since August 2015 and I’m getting a little stir crazy. There is a trip to UK planned, but that’s not until September 2016, and I have insufficient annual leave to go anywhere else between now and then.

I am holding on to my life, but my sanity is in tatters.

]}:-{>

A flute or sinking

I had a most exciting Friday. First, I rose unexpectedly early despite the alarm clock being switched off, and headed downstairs to the health club for my weekly weigh-in on their hyper-accurate scales. Oh curses and buggeration! Up two kilogrammes. Then I grabbed some semi-skimmed milk from the Kwik-E-Mart and went back to my concrete cube in the sky to cook breakfast.

It’s futile going out on Friday morning in Doha because almost everything is shut, so I had a quick surf of the internet to see if I could find what size ball bearings I would need to upgrade the gearshift on my motorbike from the rather crappy nylon bushing provided by Mr Kawasaki in a cost-cutting exercise. Apparently I need several 8x14x4 caged ball bearings, one 8x1.25x40  bolt, plus a couple of washers, and these - or at least the bearings - should be easily obtainable from an emporium of radio-controlled models. 

It’s a mile to Doha City Centre mall, so I walked. The model shop was as shut as a miser’s wallet, even though the mall was teeming with eaters of fried junk food and purchasers of shoes, these being the products on sale in about 90% of the shops. My guess is that the model shop is shut on Fridays while the proprietor goes out and flies his R/C aircraft. There was nothing worth watching on offer at the Cineplex, so I walked back to my concrete cube.

I went back to the model shop on Saturday afternoon when by some miracle it was open, to be assured that “We sell spare parts” as per the Facebook page actually means “We do not sell spare parts.” But I digress.

I picked up my tenor recorder later on Friday afternoon and spent an hour or two practising, mostly from memory, and also playing by ear along with pre-recorded tunes and professional performances on YouTube. My eclectic repertoire ranges from J. S. Bach, through J. P. Sousa to Henry Mancini, John Williams, Barry Gray, and Iron Maiden. I think playing heavy metal on an acoustic wind instrument is more than a little subversive. Unfortunately, I can only do the melody; chords are beyond the recorder’s scope, and certainly beyond mine. As it is, I mess with the key signatures these things are written in in order to get them into something that’s playable on a recorder with my limited digital dexterity. 

But Aces High, played in 3/4 time on a tenor recorder, sounds amusingly like some ancient English folk tune. This may be coincidence. I suspect that Pirates of the Caribbean and Gladiator both sounding like Packington’s Pound is not a coincidence.

As the fingering of a recorder and an EWI are almost the same, anything in the above list I can theoretically play on my electric wind instrument. I say theoretically, because the EWI requires absolutely accurate fingering, and you can’t bend a wrong note by half uncovering a hole. It’s all or nothing. As far as I know, the concrete cube next door is currently unoccupied. Nobody has complained about the noise yet.

I am under no illusions as to my true ability to play these instruments. It only takes being in the company of proper musicians (and that includes YouTube clips of EWI and recorder players) to expose me as the fraud I almost certainly am.

So, that was my weekend. I put some bread in the sandwich toaster for tea, chatted briefly with Beloved Wife on a flaky internet connection in Amman airport, and then retired to my bed in preparation of the next six days of consecutive frustration, starting at 0700 on Saturday. 

]}:-{>

Recorder tune

Image: Jakegothicsnake
 on deviantART

I’ve been fond of music since my second (Chamber of Secrets) year at secondary school. I joined the school choir and discovered to my delight that I could be a part of polyphonic singing. Chords. Harmonies. Fugues. Clever stuff. I’ve been a member of various choirs, choral societies and barber-shop quartets on and off ever since. It’s helped me to learn to read music. I have never been much good at this, but I can – blob by blob if it isn't too complicated – figure out which note to sing, and for how long.

But as for playing a musical instrument, that skill eluded me. Perhaps I should have gone to recorder classes when I was ten, but I honestly thought the school meant tape recorders, and nobody told me otherwise. By the time I found out that a recorder was a musical instrument, it was too late as I’d been signed up by my parents to play foopball and rounders. We all know how much I love athletic sports.

My kid sister was given an electric chord organ a couple of years later, which I was Not Allowed To Play. She also started on the recorder, but never played it and I eventually ended up with the instrument and The School Recorder Book One.

Almost all of my schoolfriends played the piano; one or two also played guitar and other instruments. I managed to talk the school’s music professor into lending me an ancient clarinet for private practice. I tried and tried, but as the house where I lived was a Wimpey hutch with paper-thin walls, I never got past the tooting and parping stage. 

“Either play a proper tune, or not at all” was my father’s ultimatum, so the clarinet went back to school. There was, basically, no music at home unless you count Terry Wogan’s breakfast radio show and my mother Nanny Goat’s early morning singing (which is just fine unless you’re not a morning person). Hence my almost total ignorance of sixties and seventies music.

I tried and failed to learn to play the guitar. I’ve always been hopelessly flummoxed by any form of stringed instrument, I seem to lack the co-ordination required to play keyboards, I can’t get any sensible sound out of a brass instrument, and although I’ve dabbled with percussion, a drumkit isn’t something you can carry around in your pocket. 

So for about thirty years, on and off, I’ve been messing with recorders, ocarinas, and penny whistles. A former girlfriend gave me a magnificent wooden tenor recorder in 1989 (the fingering is identical to that of the traditional school descant recorder, but it plays an octave lower), and someone in the English Civil War Society (ECWS) gave me a Bakelite treble recorder that was broken, but if I could repair it I could have it. I replaced the missing piece of Bakelite with Milliput and it’s been fine ever since. I still have the original wooden descant, and that instrument’s got to be over forty years old and still going strong  despite much abuse.

I’m sure that I saw someone playing in a live band in an ECWS beer tent on an electric, amplified recorder, but it took about twenty years to do something about it. More of this anon…

For the past couple of years, Beloved Wife and I have attended a pre-Christmas party with some musical friends. The basic idea is to bring a dish, and to sing and/or play Christmas carols in the small music room. The usual suspects play guitars, saxophone, flute, and piano. I showed up with my voice and my recorders.

I was, and continue to be, horribly outclassed musically. I can sing OK, or at least hold a tune in a bucket, but my playing leaves much to be desired in the Department of Correct Notes. Most of this is a requirement to practise, but there’s another issue: competing against a host of concert instruments, the unamplified recorder is virtually inaudible. This is why the recorder dropped out of fashion centuries ago. Orchestras got bigger and louder, and the poor recorder simply couldn’t compete with the volume. You can’t blow harder without making ghastly squeaking noises. Obviously, I need some form of electric pickup. If Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson has one, which I know he has because I’ve seen it attached to his flute, I should be able to buy one somewhere.

At this point, the shop assistant in Thomsun Music, Wafi City, Dubai, showed me Akai’s EWI, or Electric Wind Instrument. It was stupidly expensive, so I bought mine from Sax.co.uk in London. Actually, it was a Christmas present from Beloved Wife. The EWI (“Eewee”) is a MIDI breath controller. It translates breath force and keys pressed into a musical note. Output is through a thick coaxial cable to an amplifier, or directly into headphones. This is win/win. I can now make plenty of volume when playing live, but can practise using headphones so that the rest of the universe is kept in blissful ignorance of my many, many mistakes.

I configured my EWI to play with more-or-less flute fingerings because those are very similar to those of a recorder. Other musicians might prefer to select ‘Oboe’ or ‘Saxophone’. With dozens of different voices to choose from, I can have the instrument sound like a clarinet, bassoon, saxophone, flute, or any of a host of other instruments and occasionally very wacky sounds. I was piping the sound through the stereo until I bought a guitar amplifier than comes with dozens of presets so I can now, if I wish, sound like Hendrix. Yeah, in my dreams.

I’ve been practising. I like to pick up either a recorder or EWI every day, and I’ve been downloading sheet music (most of which is too difficult to play) off the interwebs, and trying to build a repertoire. Most of my stuff is dimly remembered seventeenth and eighteenth century stuff and simple folk tunes, but I’ve also been working on other pieces including Christmas carols, some Bach, Sousa, and Abe Holzmann’s Blaze Away:

I love to go swimmin’ with bow-legged women

And swim between their legs…etc.

Seems a lot of popular music and big-band stuff comes pitched in keys that are awkward for flute fingering. It’s not exactly ‘too many black notes,’ but fingering that’s difficult for a novice. There’s a remark here possibly involving Old Goat and New Trick.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever be a particularly good musician, but I amuse myself. If I can actually amuse anyone else without too much embarrassment, that’ll be a bonus.

]}:-{>

There and back again

Thank you so much, Beloved Wife, for the Christmas present of an EWI. What is an EWI? It's an Electric Wind Instrument; essentially a synthesiser that the player blows into, and produces music by fingering the keys as if it's a flute, or recorder, or oboe, or saxophone. I use the term "music" loosely, but because the instrument is electronic, all the tooting and parping during practice can be limited to the player's headphones.

The EWI came from Sax.co.uk in London, a shop that specialises in saxophones but that has a sideline in other woodwind instruments. They were very helpful.

Unfortunately, my EWI has a fault, in that it won't play if it's plugged in to an external power supply. Sax.co.uk have agreed that the unit should be replaced. All I have to do is get the existing one to London and they'll swap it. Simples.

Herein lies the problem. Aramex, who do so well with their Shop-n-Schlep service, won't insure the package without seeing the original receipt. I did show them a document entitled "Customer Receipt," but apparently that's not good enough. Aramex also want a sizeable portion of the value of the instrument just to ship it: Five hundred dirhams.

At least the thing will run perfectly on four AA batteries, and you can buy a lot of Duracells for less than five hundred dirhams.

But I've encountered Aramex's reluctance to ship from the UAE before. How is anyone supposed to ship used goods when they won't accept them for carriage without seeing some form of invoice, and they won't insure without an original sales invoice that Aramex alone will decide is acceptable. I didn't have any sales paperwork for a small gift that Aramex refused point-blank to ship to Australia.

One solution is to use Emirates Post, where they'll accept a package provided the sender fills in a customs declaration that gets stuck on to the package. Another is to beg favours from colleagues, friends or relatives who are travelling internationally.

]}:-{>