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Washboard, Teabox and other unusual instruments
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Hi Jung, I’m sure you can think of some nice gymnastic exercises on the piano. Maybe you can also give them names, similar to the Tai-Chi exercises. I have already thought of three nice figures:
- Handstand on the piano with one arm, then you can play with the other hand („The Mozart candle“)
- Trampoline jump exercise with a forward roll followed by a touch on the piano keyboard (“Roll over Beethoven“)
- Lying flat under the piano with only your outstretched arms and hands playing on the keyboard („Bach on the floor“). By the way, the name „Bach“ is the german word for creek. So to say „Creek on the floor“. 🙂
I always find it amazing how well „Bohemian Rhapsody“ can be transferred to other instruments. On the ancient organ, which I presented above, the piece of music sounds very good and on the Harpejji as well. A beautiful, varied and full sound. “Queen” has created a complex and ingenious universal song.
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The Mellotron
The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical musical instrument developed in Birmingham, England, in 1963. It is played by pressing its keys, each of which pushes a length of magnetic tape against a capstan, which pulls it across a playback head. As the key is released, the tape is retracted by a spring to its initial position. (Wikipedia)
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A somewhat strange instrument has given us an unforgettable song:
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Jurgen, that is a cool instrument. Amazing creativity went into it using early 1960s technology with a lineup of audio tapes for each key. Nowadays semi-conductor chips and memory makes it simple to do, but back then it was a creative engineering feat. And it looks like the Beatles, Moody Blues, and others made good use of the Mellotron. I won’t spoil the name of that famous Beatles song to pique curiosity, but cool to know this is how they got that sound.
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Thanks for your reply Jung. I had never known exactly how the intro of this special Beatles song was made until I came across this instrument. To me, the Mellotron is a precursor to the synthesizer. A completely different technology I know, but the idea behind it is the same: how can I create a variety of different sounds and tones with just one instrument. Even new or previously unknown sounds.
And here’s another treat, for your tech-loving heart: One of the first commercial drumming machines. The young man who moderates the video should perhaps drink a cup of valerian tea and take a deep breath. Then he would be more relaxed. Maybe another nice topic: unusual video moderators 🙂
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I always thought the mellotron was closest related to a modern sampler, since they both have one recording per key. Same idea, very different technology.
I remember in the ’80s, I think it was, I saw Patrick Moraz demonstrate a Kurzweil, which was pretty expensive, $10,000, at the time. First real sampling keyboard like today’s examples, iirc.
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This is really cool!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XukLEaMbm9k
The white stripes contain rumble strips: parallel grooves running perpendicular to the direction of the road. The note you hear depends on the spacing of the grooves: the closer together they are, the higher the pitch.
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Hi David,
thanks for the video about the most musical road in the world (I had almost forgotten about the topic here). Yes that is a very groovy and nice idea: You don’t even need a car radio anymore.
There are places on our highways where various lane markings are applied across the direction of travel for testing purposes. But this is done to determine the durability of certain materials. Unfortunately, driving on these surfaces only makes noise, but no music.
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That’s pretty creative. Imagine if they extended that for several miles and did an entire song.
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Yeah, they should! It’s not as if cutting grooves in asphalt is prohibitively expensive.
Someone in the YouTube comments section suggested making another set of grooves for the tires on the left side to go over that would play a harmony part or countermelody.
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I also think the idea can be expanded even further. How about certain road sections on certain occasions? When it’s your birthday, then you choose the “Happy Birthday Road”. Or for wedding ceremonies, on the way to the church, Mendelssohn’s Wedding March sounds. My favorite would be the Abbeyroad.
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Abbeyroad! Perfect! How about George Harrison’s “Any Road” just about anywhere?
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Ooh, ooh! “The Long and Winding Road” on an appropriate stretch of alpine curves!
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George’s “Faster” on the Autobahn. Ok…bit of a stretch there, maybe…
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This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by Jeffery Ohlwine.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by
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Yeah Jeffery, „The long and winding road“ on an alpine route. Best in a convertible: Enjoy fresh air and a great view. A wonderful idea. „Faster“ on „Any Road“? Why not? And if the navigation system doesn’t work properly, you’ll quickly find yourself on the „Road to nowhere“ as sung by the Talking Heads.
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Also cool, for those of a certain mindset, would be to record the natural sounds of a stretch of road—the potholes, the gravel, the bumps and patches, and then reproduce that using traditional musical instruments. The very act of performing the sounds in a setting and using the recognized tools of music production would transform the collection of random noises into music, almost by definition.
Well, John Cage would’ve thought it was cool at least. Perhaps.
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In keeping with the season, I found a Documentation about an ice instrument festival in Norway. Really cool sound: 😀
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Truly, the literal sense of taking music on the roads ….lol…
A creative cool concept , Thanks for sharing this besides clip Jeffrey , I wasn’t aware of this , if I was in Hungary, and had my driver’s license to drive, I’d happily drive/cruise along on this road, and would the speed limited be in meternomes !? ( forgive/correct me kindly if I’ve named the thing that measures beats, wrongly, I ‘m just good at somewhat singing, sensing rhythms , kinda fiddles/dabbles around on instruments I like, I cannot read music barely, relay on singing with lyrics rather than music sheets, etc )
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Hi Jacki,
great to hear from you again. Yes the speed on these musical roads is definitely measured in beats and singing along while driving certainly increases the fun factor.
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Why not programmable windshield wipers that could replicate different beats instead of just the steady slap-slap-slap we get now? Have each wiper driven individually for left and right hand.
Sure it might create a safety hazard, but it might make driving in the rain a bit more fun. Imagine the ride with Bobby McGee with some more varied beats…
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Hi David, your idea opens up completely new possibilities for experimental music: natural sounds of a road combined with traditional instruments. For example the song “Route 66” could be remixed and interpreted in a completely new way. And who knows, maybe even a gap in the market: as a nice souvenir or memory of a road trip on your personal favorite route. And for the tough ones: the most beautiful potholes in Dolby Surround. John Cage doesn’t ring a bell, but maybe I’ve already heard one or the other of his compositions.
Yeah and the matching beat from the windshield wipers. Suitable for the respective traffic situations: In hectic city traffic maybe a somewhat slightly calming beat and on long drives on an endless highway a slightly faster beat, so you do not fall asleep. So, for example, Bobby McGee with a slightly more groovy beat.
PS: there are already first attempts to adapt the rhythm of the wipers to the individual driving style. These are still initial test phases, so the control is still mainly manual. However suitable control electronics should already be under development… 😀
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Hi Jürgen,
John Cage was an experimental composer, mid 1900s. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything by him, either. His best known work is something called 4’33, which consisted of the musicians going on stage and then just sitting for four minutes 33 seconds. The idea was to question just what music is and to get the audience to hear the ambient sounds around them as music. He also liked to alter pianos so you could still play it like a piano but it just made different noises based on what he wired into it. All to blur the line between random sounds and traditional music. Like I say, experimental.
Actually, though, I suspect John Lennon and certainly Yoko Ono knew of him. Yoko Ono even collaborated with him on something back in 1962. There’s a video on YT. It’s noise, apparently. Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that his work was one inspiration behind “Revolution #9”. Is it noise? Is it music? Is it a song? Fast forward to Orange and we could ask the same thing about “The Future.”
Oh, and as if this weren’t enough, he’s also credited with the longest composition in history, something that’s supposed to take more than 600 years to perform. Hopefully there’s an intermission. 😉
Great wiper video! I hope I never look over to see the driver in the next lane trying to keep the glass clear in a pouring rain by using a squeegee. Yikes!
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Hi David,
thanks for the background information on John Cage. Some time ago I saw a documentary on TV where such experimental music was presented. The performance took place in an old factory hall to create the necessary atmosphere. On the stage there was a grand piano and some stringed instruments. One of the performers struck some weird chords on the keyboard, and the rest of the performers moved to the fading sound, then stood motionless. The string instruments served a similar function. This is how I could imagine a performance of Cage. It looked very interesting, but I certainly wouldn’t watch something like that for an entire evening.
Oh yes, „Revolution #9“. I’ll be honest: the deeper meaning of that piece has not been clear to me to this day. As you rightly said: a kind of special art. I always thought it was a pity that so much valuable space on the White Album was sacrificed for this idiosyncratic number 😀. I can well imagine that Yoko Ono was involved in this piece of music. She saw herself as an artist and had a strong influence on John Lennon’s later works (whether good or bad, I’ll leave it open for now). The piece seems to me like a foreign body on the White Album.
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I remember John Cage. He did what was called “prepared piano”.
By which he meant, putting things like rocks on the strings inside a piano, for example.
It does change the sound. He did a variety of things like that.
Can’t say I remember any of his greatest hits though.
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Hi Chris, I’ve been out of the conversations here for a bit, but I just saw your comment about Cage. I think he’s the kind of artist that people don’t really listen to as much as they talk about. For instance, one of his best known “compositions” is “4’33” and is four minutes, 33 seconds of a pianist at a piano doing nothing. The idea is for the audience to become atuned to the little sounds all around them and to think about what makes a musical performance anyway (after all, it had a musician at a piano, so doesn’t that count?) He had another one that is currently being performed, apparently, and won’t be done until the year 2640! Ridiculous, in a sense, but also opening doors for more mainstream composers to explore in areas they might not otherwise.
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Sounds like you know more about Cage than I do. I just remembered hearing of him and some things he’d done. Wonder how many tickets he sold for the gig until 2640.
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David, That video made me laugh and brought back a memory. I actually did that once. Me and a friend was driving in Madison WI one time in his old beat up car. I believe we had gone there for concert tickets, anyway his wipers didn’t work and it started raining, not hard but enough to be a nuisance. We tied a piece of speaker wire to each side and took turns pulling them back and forth. I haven’t thought about that in years. Thanks for the video and the memory.
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A somewhat unusual world record, with an even more unusual musical instrument:
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That’s amazing Jurgen. I got nothing to add. Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed that.
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Hi Jurgen, I was talking with a friend of mine that works at the Air Force base in Ramstein near Frankfurt. She said she hasn’t been to the Miniature World in Hamburg but has been to one in The Netherlands. I was thinking The Twins could do a video there. I even know a cover they could do. Godzilla by Blue Oyster Cult. Lol. Mona as Godzilla of course with a flute or maybe one of those big Tubas.
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Hi Tim, I think you mean the “Madurodam” in the Netherlands. Thanks for the hint. I didn’t even know it existed. A beautiful outdoor facility. I believe „Godzilla“ by Blue Oyster Cult could be a nice cover song by Mona and Lisa. But that Mona is supposed to stomp around in the miniature world as Godzilla with a flute: best you should explain that to her…😄
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Lol, Yes Jurgen, On second thought Mona is way to pretty to play Godzilla!!
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That’s remarkable, Juergen! So much tedium went into that: the calculations, the measurements, the placements. But the result made all that effort worthwhile!
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Yeah David, you’re right: the effort must have been enormous. Just the number of countless glasses and then to tune them in fine work. Impressive. Also remarkable because the people working there are actually model makers and not musicians.
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Jürgen,
If they were musicians, I’m sure there would have been more broken glasses. Some planned, some as improvisation, some by accident. Engineers tend to be a bit more deliberate, even though I bet they broke some too.
I was half expecting at the end to see a sign that said:
“No glasses were harmed in the making of this video.”
But it probably wouldn’t have been true.
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Hi Jurgen, that is amazing. I wonder how long it took them to set all that up and fine tune everything til it sounded just right. The miniature world itself is quite impressive taking the trains 6 minutes to complete the course with other trains and planes moving around.
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Hi Jung, we’ve talked about the „Miniaturwunderland“ before. I visited this place many years ago and it was fantastic. The complete facility is located on the top floor of a former granary at the port of Hamburg. The whole thing has been expanded quite a lot in the meantime. Walkable Alps have been added, in the Scandinavian fjord computer controlled ships swim in a huge water basin. Italy is new and the Provence has also been added. In the meantime, a second neighboring granary has been rented and the two buildings will be connected by a glass bridge. The next construction project to be realized there will be South America. Central America and Asia are to follow. I will definitely pay a visit to the whole place again.
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I stumbled across this music video by chance and at first I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what Elwood Francis of ZZ-Top was dragging onto the stage: a bass guitar with 17 strings. Whether you need them all like that? A really unusual musical instrument:
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Hmmm… seems you would need some sort of finger extensions in order to take full advantage of that layout.
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Yeah David, finger extensions and a back corset. The instrument looks damn heavy, like a back killer.
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I thought Steve Vai’s triple header axe was insane, this is a whole other animal. Eric Clapton had to take time out from a tour from the constant weight of his Strat for crying out loud, I can’t even imagine having that beast hanging on my neck and shoulders. Let alone trying to play the darn thing!
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The Octobass. This instrument has already been presented in another topic, but as David correctly pointed out at the time: the instrument actually belongs in this topic and I think, after the monster bass guitar from ZZ-Top, it is now time to present the monster double bass in action:
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Matching the Octobass there is also the „Titanic Tuba“. If only the orchestra hadn’t taken these heavy instrument on board at the time, the ship might not have sunk…
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Not too far afield from mainstream instruments, but a couple decades back, a music store near me had a B̦sendorfer Рtheir top of the line piano, with a list price of $200,000, with the extra keys in the bass. They told me that when Chick Corea came to town he always had them move it to the site so he could play it. The lowest note was pretty close to the lowest frequency humans could expect to hear, although I forget the exact Hertz.
It was definitely my favorite axe in the store. A seriously large piano. And, of course, made in Vienna(!).
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This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by Chris Weber.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by Chris Weber.
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That is niiice Chris, and love it has extra keys on the bass. I think the lowest human ears can hear is 20 Hz, but that’s probably when you are 4 years old with perfect hearing.
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Ok, I was lazy the first time, so now I checked it out. The bottom key on that piano is a C, 4 octaves below middle C, which is called C0. Depending on how the piano is tuned, it’s about 16Hz.
https://pages.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html
As you mentioned, the normal range of human hearing is around 20-20,000 Hz. That’s a range you see cited when discussing loudspeakers, for example.
So at any rate, that key is right around the limit of hearing, which depends on the individual.
When I was playing that piano, I could hear that bottom note, and I was probably almost 30 years old around then. And my ears had a lot of hard rock mileage on them by then.
I remember thinking it wasn’t too useful, it didn’t sound great. Not sure if that was the piano or my ears.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by
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