Project for Chateau d’Ars (and maybe Halsway) in 2014: fit gurdy with wheel speed measuring device, record traces of different peoples’ trompette styles.
Twelve Days of Show of Hands Christmas
On the first day of Christmas Steve Knightley gave to me the Keys of Canterbury
On the second day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me two Tracks of Words…
On the third day of Christmas Steve Knightley gave to me three Cutthroats, Crooks and Conmen…
On the fourth day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me four Beaten Bushes…
On the fifth day of Christmas Steve Knightley gave to me five Bristol Slavers…
On the sixth day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me Six O’Clock Waltzes…
On the seventh day of Christmas Steve Knightley gave to me seven Galway Farmers…
On the eigthth day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me eight Blind Fiddlers…
On the ninth day of Christmas Steve Knightely gave to me nine Silver Daggers…
On the tenth day of Christmas Phil Beer gave to me ten Preachers on islands…
On the eleventh day of Christmas Steve Knightly gave to me eleven Crazy Boys…
On the twelfth day of Christmas Show of Hands gave to me twelve Twats Twittering…
Rejected lyrics included “sallys free and easy”, “gallons of red diesel”, “inane youtube videos”, and “old jokes”. Songs: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Lots of good, if a little bizarre, #gurdy playing in this video (fr):
Found this lovely chart of 17th century Viol ornaments (notation+equivalent notation) in The Division Viol:
Learnt about the Txalaparta from @begoesti — a rather wonderful Basque percussion instrument.
Looking to join/start a casual recorder consort in Reykjavík — anyone know of one, or people who might be interested in joining? Preferably with a focus on early music, not vital though.
EEEEVIL:
“Council can now steal instruments from #buskers. civil disobedience campaign begins” [1] — @indyrikki via Jovian Salak
As reported by: Ham&High News Change org
Threatening to fine someone £1000 is bad enough, but for musicians, confiscating instruments is much more than theft — an instrument is an extremely personal extension of your body.
Of course, no-one wants excessive noise pollution, but charging buskers a yearly fee and holding legal threats above them is going to achieve the exact opposite goal, by putting acoustically playing children and amateurs off, leaving more room for the serious buskers - the ones who can make troublesome noises with all their amps and equipment.
As a long-time busker in the UK I’ve always found the police to be supportive and helpful (once memorably dragging a drunkard off me at Christmas late night shopping). Hopefully the police in Camden are equally reasonable and won’t strut around intimidating children.
Bag romance — still a better love story than Twilight: #clangers
The Clangers is so synaesthetic. Everywhere there’s physical/visual representations of music.
Whether or not you like the song, the photos in this video of The Devil Went Down To Georgia are hilarious. There’s even a catbus at the end!
Recorded an unnamed #gurdy tune yesterday + saw #aurora for the first time today = easy tune name! Lights In The Sky:
Want to play it? Have a peek at the sheet music.
Trying to find some creativecommons.org licensed folk/trad recordings — any ideas?
Ordered a bunch of #raspberrypi stuff — let’s create the future of musical instruments and personal devices.
Heading over to Bergsson Delhi — I’ll be demoing my hurdy #gurdy! Pop over if you want to hear it. Also they have good sandwiches.
My old school is publishing tracks from their concerts under CC-BY-NC-SA. Good for them! soundcloud.com/sdcc2012
Brave has some of the best Pixar film music since Ratatouille, and an excellent depiction of a lute — placing it alongside Ghibli’s Whisper Of The Heart for interesting (non-tropic) #film music.
I have this bad musical habit of always hearing music in my head as sung vocal notes (dum de daa, etc.). New project is to train myself to constantly experiment with reorchestrating it in as many different forms as I can.
I’m loving the feedback loop of using the things I build.
Wasn’t blogging much → improved typography, design → want to write more and better.
Started using my tune stream → discovered a bunch of problems → fixed them, now I can practise more effectively.
Lessons?
- Hacking on stuff does have a wider beneficial effect on life, provided you’re making stuff which matters.
- Stuff which matters doesn’t have to be life changing in order to matter
Trying to think of a good reason to make a #js library called bach.js