What an enjoyable thread.
New to me, last year, was the charango, which I saw played by Young the Giant here.
If you hang with early music groups, you’ll get to buzz with crumhornsup close. I love them. I’ve tried playing, and the fingering is easy, but the breath pressure is insane.
That wasn’t a nitpick. Thanks for the info.
Q: at the NAMM show I once played a mellotron. A four part chorale. No idea what the tape source was, it just sounded like a mellotron to me. Anyway, I didn’t time myself but I’m pretty sure my performance lasted more than eight seconds, more like half a minute. IF my memory is accurate, what was happening with the source tape during that time? (I think I might simply be asking how long it took for the tape to rewind/reset.)
Harry Partch was a genius. He used to live about a mile from my house (70’s).
A bit more in depth on the sheng
Here’s a great demo of a Casio CZ-101 from way back in 1984: CASIO CZ-101 PD-Synthesizer (1984) - YouTube
There’s squillions of different bagpipes. My favourites are the musette and mizwad. The former for its almost gentle tone (for a bagpipe - it even plays well with others), the latter for its medieval-sounding simplicity.
If a cartoon character built a player piano, it would probably be the Photoplayer.
These things were built to perform the score or photo play for silent movies. The piano parts and much of the percussion was controlled by player piano rolls, and the performer still had quite a few buttons to push and “cow tails” to yank for the rest of the sounds. The advent of “talkies” made these beasts disappear almost overnight.
Here’s what it looks like when a mellotron plays a note. There is a 5-foot section of tape, it plays until it runs out, and when you release the note, a spring pulls the tape back down to the starting position. She demonstrates here playing a note to the end of the tape and releasing it, so you can see it in action.
Huh. Looking up some info on the Mellotron, I found that there was a spin-off called the Birotron that did use (8-track) tape loops, and was principally funded by Rick Wakeman of Yes, who was a Mellotron aficionado himself, but got frustrated at the 8-second limitations of the tape sounds.
Thank you! Very interesting.
Okay then. But I was still wrong- I’d always just assumed it was tape loops in the origiinal mellotron.
Sound nothing like what you would expect looking at them.
Just found the cornu de Pompeii. Doctor Seuss would have loved this thing:
The carnyx, a Celtic war trumpet :
You see a bit of didgeridoo as in Goanna - Solid Rock (live)
Back in high school I took the mouthpiece from my baritone sax and put it on a tuba. The resulting sound was surprisingly similar to some of those tromboon sounds, and it made my band director very angry (he somehow thought I would damage either the tuba or my sax mouthpiece).
Another contrabass: Leo P meets our CONTRABASS SAXOPHONE - YouTube
Here’s one of a Vietnamese orchestra that focuses on the bamboo instruments of Vietnam’s hill tribes.
The k’ni is sort of a hybrid between a bowed string instrument and a mouth organ, and the t’rưng is basically a bamboo xylophone.
A 60 Minutes piece a month ago featured Sona Jobarteh, the first expert-level female player of a west African stringed instrument called a kora. Here she is in concert with her instrument:
The venerable sackbut:
