Percusize Me!: 2016

Tuesday 12 April 2016

Muffling the bass drum in style.

Tried and true instruments/heads combinations exit... Oversized Ludwig Professionals (32", 32", 29" and 26") with REMO heads is a classic, as the Supraphonic/Emperor, Hardtke/Super Kalfo...

The more I play the bass drum, the more I realize this instrument doesn´t sound at its best when mounting plastic heads: they produce funny harmonics, resonate excessively, you can hear the sound of the material instead of that of the instrument, tone is always improvable... Calf heads make the bass drum sound good doing almost nothig but, in exchange, they present their own problems (changes in temperature, humidity...). I do accept these challenges because of the far superior sound these heads produce. So, to me, the tried and true combination when it comes to bass drum is that involving calf heads.

When plastic heads are the tool at our disposal, the usual thing is muffling the head using a hanging towel secured to the counterhoop with a clip. Playing with the amount of material lying on the head, we can control resonance and harmonics.

On this photo you can see a towel hanging as previously described (the ones I use are from IKEA, dirty cheap and discreet on stage due to the black colour). Don´t mind about the length showed, as it´s just a "pose": I just clipped it for the sake of the photo.

Last time I used this trick I had a problem: when playing, the free end of the towel moved up and down, shaked by the head, hitting it, acting as a snare and producing a very annoying buzz. Maybe the audience could not hear it, but it was driving me mad...

When thinking about solutions trying to solve the problem, get the instrument under control and get the best possible sound, I remembered a device used on vintage drum sets. It is a felt pad attached to a round plate with articulated arms which you can fix to the counterhoop. Using wingnuts you can control the pressure it exerts on the head and where on it (by bending the arm). You could see it mainly on bass drums, as the other drums on the kit used to have it inside.

I got one a few months ago. My intention was to not necessarily use it on a kit, but I knew that, at some point, it would come very handy for whatever weird purpose my mind would come up with. This is the one. It has no brand or inscription on it. Maybe a Ludwig? It´s 15cm in diametre and its arm is 25cm long. As with everything, you can go the expensive way if you get a vintage, fancy one, but you can get a modern one for a very fair price (STAGG).

Here it is on the head, ready for some action.

The muffler moves together with the head, you can press it more or less against it, there´s no play between them, you can move it closer or away from the counterhoop and it produces no buzz at all. It works flawlessly. Just one thing: its size is intended for bass drums no larger than 24", 26". As symphonic bassses can reach up to 40" in diametre, its surface may be not enough to get the desired effect on instruments this size. I would have loved some more control, but this device can be very easily modified to get more contact surface. Even that, I got rid of the buzz and the bass drum sounded very well.

A calf head is the best option for a bass drum (I think, in fact, it´s the only option) but, if not, the towell trick has proved (quite) its effectiveness. If the towell is giving you a hard time, this muffler is a fantastic solution to play your bass drum not only with control, but with some style...

…et in Arcadia ego.

Thursday 10 March 2016

"American in Paris" taxi horns: the end of a historical mistake.

There´s a buzz going through discussion groups and forums these last days that, far from calming down, is growing in a very noticeable way... The subject is not trivial, as it has "huge" consequences. An article in the New York Times reveals that the taxi horns we´ve been using all these years in "An American in Paris" (George Gershwin) were playing the wrong pitches.

The article, published on March, 1st (hot from the oven), has left no percussionist indifferent. HERE is a link to it. There you will find the conclusions of Mark Clague, musicologist in charge of the new critical edition of the score.You will also find a recording with the part as we play it today and the first recording of the piece (and the only one featuring the original pitches) by Toscanini and the NBC National Orchestra. Stop reading this blog, open the link and, before going on with Percusize Me!, read the New York Times article. The key is the A, B, C, D notation...

Have you already read it? If not, stop now and go for it... Done? Don´t tell me you are not petrified...

The conclusions in the article make much sense, but they gave cause to doubts, discussions and mistrust, as they could not be 100% proved due to the original set of horns being lost and because no photographs could definitely prove the A, B, C, D notation was not one related to musical pitches but to the order in which the horns were arranged for the recording. The commotion and controversy the article created about this "transcendental" issue enriched the debate, but every doubt and opinion got eclipsed when, on March 5th (only four days after the article shocking the Gershwinian foundations was published), the University of Michigan got the ace hiding up its sleeve that proved almost irrefutably its point. The link to that article is HERE. As before, stop reading Percusize Me!: open the link and devour it.

What do you think? Incredible, isn´t it? This photo is the bombshell that proves we´ve been playing those notes wrong. It´s pretty clear looking at them that the size of the horns is not proportional to consecutive pitches (a, b, c and d), and that they are not even arranged following a size pattern, so the points made by Mark Clague are very valid.

Gershwin himself got those taxi horns during two different trips to Paris, got them arranged on a board the way we can see in the photo and named them A, B, C and D as ordinals, not as pitches. The pitches on the Toscanini recording are A flat, B flat, D (quite brilliant) and A natural (low octave).

Don´t know you, but I´m astonished about this revelation, and the points are valid. This is also the kind of curiosity mixed with academic rigour that, you should already know this, I like so much.

There are rental companies already offering this new set of pitches and percussionists willing to play them in future concerts. I would love to try this new version... What would you do?

…et in Arcadia ego.

Monday 15 February 2016

"Do It Yourself" chocalho.

Last February 12th I played in a concert that, to commemorate its 30th anniversary, "Celtas Cortos" (a very popular band in Spain) gave together with the Asturias Symphony Orchestra.

"El Emigrante" ("The Immigrant") is a song including a batucada and, on it, the chocalho (together with surdos and agogo bells) provides the popular samba flavour. This instrument consists of a frame which holds several jingles ("platinelas"), and it´s played shaking it back and forth.

CC Wikipedia

The chocalho sounds like this:

As I was assigned this instrument and neither the orchestra nor me had a chocalho, I decide to build one myself. For this I used a squared section wooden strip measuring 18x18mm (I chose those measures because they felt just right in my hand) which I cut to a length which, again, allowed me to hold it confortably and could house enough jingles.

Two more small fragments were also cut.

I rounded the edges with sand paper in order to get a nice feel. In the following photo you can see one fragment sanded and the other one still raw.

In this photo all strips are sanded.

Then, I used these plates and screws...

...to fix the small sections to the large one as handles.

Once the frame was done, next step was adding the jingles. For this I used bottle caps (being from beer bottles is pure coincidence, I promess... You can get them at your local pub or you can stockpile them as you drink... ;-). Bare in mind my chocalho features 66 of them, so you are gonna have serious fun should you take the DIY philosophy to the bitter end... :-).

In order to make them sound more lively, I peeled off the plastic at the back.

Using a hammer they got what they deserved...

After working on a few of them, I realised it was much easier to hammer them first and then peel the plastic off, so I inverted the order in my "assembly line". Be very careful: my fingers got some hammer blows and cuts.

I made a hole in the centre (more or less...) using a nail and a hammer (love these subtle procedures!), and then enlarged it using a hand drill.

Then I made bunches of jingles inserting groups of six (why not five or seven? who knows...) into nails.

Each bunch was hammered onto the frame with a 7.5cm separation from their colleagues.


© David Valdés

And... Voilà! The chocalho was ready.

If you are observant (and I bet you are), you can see bunches follow an alternating pattern: they never face with the one on the opposite side. I took this idea from the jingle arrangement on Grover tambourines.

So, this is how my home-made brazilian stravaganza sounds like:

To be honest, despite being made using very cheap and recicled materials, it sounds quite good and produces a more than decent volume. Now you only have to get the DVD to hear it in context.

Have you ever built an instrument using simple, common materials? Tell me, give me ideas, as I´m in the mood for this kind of projects.

…et in Arcadia ego.

Monday 11 January 2016

"The timpani and percussion instruments in 19th-century Italy".

Because I´ve been a very good boy during this last year, the Three Wise Men brought me as a present the book "The timpani and percussion instruments in 19th-century Italy", written by Renato Meucci, translated into English by Michael Quinn and edited by Banda Turca.

As you already know, I have a sincere interest in timpani parts containing "errors". I have also explained how I deal with them and my interest in historical instruments and historically informed performance. Because of it, reading this book has been a real treat.

This is a 92 pages delicacy which you will devour in no time... Its size is very handy (so you can carry it on your stick bag for reference), paperbacked, printed on quality paper and uses a very appealing type, making for a very nice reading.

Already on the preface, the author gives us some tasty pills (the italian orchestra and its components as "singers" who play their instruments the same way as a singer would use his/her voice -thus the endurance of three stringed basses, concertmasters conducting from their desk, "peculiar" flutes and clarinets, performance practices in the percussion section already obsolete north of the Alps...-), and what follows is a vast amount of very detailed information, documented with many footnotes

So, there´s a chapter dedicated to timpani, the different models built at that time (I already mentioned some of them and also cited Antonio Boracchi on "Editing timpani parts" I, II and III ), performance practices, notation (which also entails technique, with things like striking one drum with both hands simultaneously or press rolls) and "wrong notes".

Another chapter deals with the Banda Turca, and reveals many interesting issues, like the very improvisatory and open character of the parts, the "ad líbitum" orchestration of the section, the concept behind sistri (which makes me suspect some editions requesting "sistro" may well be wrong) and the inherent flexibility of the percussion forces when it comes to augment or diminish them depending on the available musicians at the theatre playing those works.

The author then explains single instruments in detail: the snare drum, the tenor drum (which, even then, was regularly mistaken and, like I explained on "The tenor drum: the great unknown", it is still the case nowadays), the bass drum, cymbals (making clear that what we now think was the norm -playing "alla turca"- was not regular practice nor an accepted one by composers/conductors), the triangle, the bell lyra, the jingle Johnny, the tam-tam and the glass harmonica (who can now convince flautists that their big solo in the mad scene in "Lucia the Lammermoor" was not written for them, but originally intended for this exotic instrument!).

The book is completed with an appendix, a vast and very detailed bibiliography and very interesting illustrations.

The only objection I find in this book is that it doesn´t clarify something I´m really interested in: how Italian timpanists dealt with "wrong notes"... Other authors like Blades ("Percussion instruments and their history") and Pfundt ("Die Pauken") make clear that it was common practice to change them. Notes were amended in the United Kingdom and Germany, and I´m conviced Italy was not an exception (I was lucky to have lessons with David Searcy -La Scala- and have talked with Riccardo Muti about this issue, and both confirm it was common practice). I´m convinced Italian timpanists changed "wrong notes" (they had the knowledge and the instruments), but the author doesn´t dig deep and leaves me with the feeling of wanting to know more.

I´m also not convinced about the chapter on the tam-tam, which is very short and doesn´t clarify much (specially with regard to the measurements of the instruments of that period).

Despite these two tiny spots, the book is magnificent, and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in enriching his/her percusive vocabulary, whether he/she is going to apply these ideas to his/her day to day orchestral work or not. Definitely, this book will be a great influence on my future musical decisions when it comes to playing Italian repertory form the 19th century.

You can buy it online on www.bandaturca.com at the equivalent of 26 Swiss Francs. If I were you, I would buy it now.

…et in Arcadia ego.

Posts by themes

Percusize Me! en español.

Tuesday 12 April 2016

Muffling the bass drum in style.

Thursday 10 March 2016

"American in Paris" taxi horns: the end of a historical mistake.

Monday 15 February 2016

"Do It Yourself" chocalho.

Monday 11 January 2016

"The timpani and percussion instruments in 19th-century Italy".