Why Acoustic Music

We're thinking of keeping the music at the Music Room mostly acoustic for a number of reasons.

* Any time music goes through any kind of microphone / amplifier / speaker, something is lost. Sound waves produced by musical instruments have much more depth and complexity than electronics can ever capture. It's also the case that the electronics change what they do pick up, making some things louder and others softer. Live acoustic performances will always have richer and more natural sound colors than recorded or amplified music can ever achieve. With so many people now listening to music with earbuds and very low-fi mp3 computer files, we're thinking a niche might be opening up for experiencing music as it has been through all of human existence until the 20th century.

* Amplification can be very helpful for quieter instruments and for allowing people to sing without yelling and still be heard over the accompaniment. But it's also the case that a lot of musicians who use amplification develop tolerances to how loud they are, and what to them sounds like a good level of volume, can seem assaultive to people not used to being around that much sound. A number of times over the years I've noticed people entering a room and having a very visible and very visceral negative reaction upon seeing sound equipment set up.

* The acoustics of the Music Room are amazing. I have never been able to sing so softly with a guitar and be so clearly heard throughout a space. Our sound consultant remarked that the slap echo time is around two seconds, which is comparable to a large church. If anything, we'll have to do acoustic treatments to make the room less alive, and even then any sort of amplification would probably create unpleasant effects, along with way too much sound.

* We want to be good neighbors. Over the past several years a number of wedding venues have popped up around Orange County, and some of them feel entitled to degrading the quality of life of their neighbors with amplified bands and DJs creating a low frequency throbbing for anywhere from a half mile to a mile radius, depending on the humidity. Community building is a major part of what we want to do with the Music Room, so creating ill will with neighbors isn't a good fit.

Performance Diary

Here are two pics of the Kenwood Players at the annual Fall Festival in Gordonsville, which supports the local volunteer firemen. It's always the first Saturday in October and we've been doing it for years.

After we did two sets, the Rapidan Pops came and used the same sound system, which is why there are so many mics.

Audio Note

The photo below is from a little Mardi Gras performance in a local French restaurant. Because of space considerations, we had just four players, along with a couple of guest vocalists. On the left you can see one of the speakers, and just a bit of the other can be seen near the bottom of the wine rack on the right. The mixer is right behind me, where I could easily turn around a tweak the settings, and the mics for the guest vocalists are on top of the speaker on the left. The mic for my occasional vocals is attached to my music stand and the foam cover is just barely visible above my music books.

The main thing I want to point out is how the speakers are set up so they work at least as much as monitors for us as they do to put sound out to the audience. Since I started performing publicly about ten years ago, I've discovered a lot of people have been traumatized by overly loud sound systems, which sometimes are so loud one can't carry on a conversation, and sometimes actually hurt one's ears they're so loud.

The way they're set up here, if they're too loud, we the players will be the first to know. The sweet spot for the sound was right in front of us and a bit to the right. People siting at tables in that area said the mix was very good. I recorded the gig with the recorder up near the tin ceiling in the corner of the room back above the left shoulder of the person taking this picture. From there the vocals, the only thing amplified, are not as present in the mix. The catch is, had I turned up the sound enough for the mix to be good there, people would have had to yell to converse. So there's never a perfect solution. 

Audio Note

Here's a post by Bob Shingleton on the value of the bass sound in the enjoyment of music, and I've added a comment on my experience.

Performance Diary

Here we are Saturday a week ago playing the Gordonsville Street Festival. We've done this event for a number of years now. It's put on by all volunteers to support the volunteer fire department of the town. I always feel we're giving a tip of the hat to Benjamin Franklin by helping continue an institution he thought up.

One of the most fun things about this event is the number of small children who come by and are absolutely fascinated by seeing real musicians playing real instruments. The look of wonder in their faces is terrific.

Over the years I've used this event to test out various ways of doing sound reinforcement. This year we had the best sound ever due to some new equipment and better ideas on how to use it.

The new equipment is the Mackie mixer on the little table in front of me - and the Rockit speakers just barely in the frame on the far right. The mixer has plenty of inputs with phantom power for condenser microphones which I use for the tuba, clarinet, my vocals and Dick's announcements between songs and his vocals. For my banjo, which has a very directional sound, there's a small dynamic mic on my music stand right at banjo height.

This mixer has onboard compression and reverb for each channel - and just a touch of compression really helps the clarinet and vocals by making the softs louder and the louds softer. And a touch of reverb on everything makes for a warmer sound outdoors.

The real difference, though, was the speakers. They're meant for mastering audio in studios, not for outdoor work, but I was careful with them and their sound makes it very much worth it. Compared to the Peavey keyboard speakers I've used in the past, their sound is much warmer and more full. The visual analogy would be going to a much higher resolution computer screen and seeing so much more detail while it's even easier on the eye. 

I had the speakers on a little cart, angled so that they worked half as monitors for the players  and half as sound reinforcement for the audience. When I wanted to have them be a bit more monitors for us, all I had to do was change the angle by moving the cart a little bit.

One of the speakers is a subwoofer and it really helped the tuba have a fuller sound down in the low range.

Overall, there's lots of room for improvement in doing the audio, but this setup gets us well into the ballpark of good sound.

Performance Diary

Back on Saturday morning 5/17 we played for a fundraiser put on by Doris W in the parking lot of the local nursing home. I've been doing this event for years, originally just by myself, and in the past few years some of the Kenwood Players have been joining me. That's Dick and Maggie on trumpet and clarinet. Crawford is the tuba player with his instrument at rest so he can smile for the camera, with Bill next to him taking up the slack on the bass line. 

The fellow in the background with the children's train shows up at most community events to give the kids a ride and they love it. One of the tunes we played was "Take The A Train". 

One thing to notice is how bundled up everyone but me is. After a long cold winter we've had a chilly spring and it was just in the upper 40's. My hands and fingers didn't go numb, but fretting even easy chords took a little extra mental effort. I've also decided to go with just banjo a lot of the time, as the guitar is just one more thing to lug around, and the banjo has a more focussed sound that projects better. What that meant was playing some familiar songs in unfamiliar (without the capo) keys.

In this shot above you can see Judy playing the drums. You can also make out my current sound system which gives enough support to be helpful, without overkill - or heavier stuff to lug around. My sense in that 20 feet away from us you'd be hearing half what we're doing ourselves and half the reinforced sound.

The tubas have one large condenser mic between and above them. Maggie has a small condenser on her stand for the clarinet. I have a small condenser on my stand for vocals, and a small dynamic mic at banjo hight, because the banjo is very directional and without amplification to spread the sound around, people I'm not facing will say they can't hear it.

The little mixer on the folding table is a Mackie that has four inputs for condenser mics. For amps I'm using one large and one small Peavy keyboard amp - sort of a woofer and a tweeter. We need at least one large amp for the tubas, but just one seems enough. The smaller one is to point is a slightly different direction to fill out the sound of the clarinet, vocals, and banjo.

Thanks to Jeff Poole of the Orange County Review for these great shots.

Performance Lessons

Our performance at Piedmont this summer was the most ambitious we've ever attempted in terms of repertoire, length and sound system. The response that night, and in the days following as I saw people around town who'd been there, was terrific. This post is to sum up why I think things went as well as they did.

A performance is more than just making music - it's a kind of enchantment or spell casting - and the setting is important. In this case, our hostess worked very hard on all the details on the setup on a beautiful lawn with a stunning view of the Blue Ridge. Just walking from the parking area down to the tents was a wonderful experience, and I'm sure put people in a great frame of mind. So before we even started playing the enchantment had begun.

Given the responses we got, my sense is a lot of people have often felt assaulted by bands with overly loud sound systems playing music they don't particularly enjoy. Lots of people said to us things about knowing and loving all the songs we played, and that our sound was wonderful. There's a reason, "give the people what they want," is a cliché.

While I didn't use the word "curated", with all it's hipster vogue, our hostess had expressed a love of jazz in general, not just Dixieland, so the tunes we did all illustrated the various threads woven into jazz and as I announced each song I pointed out how they all fit into the overall notion of jazz. I think it also helped that the narration began as soon as the applause for the previous song ended, so that if there was time taken to shuffle music, the audience knew what we were doing next and not left hanging.

We also had a wonderful audience. A number of them are members of a group that arranges for regular house concerts of very high level musicians over the course of the year. I'm convinced we played better than usual because we could feel their appreciation of what we were doing. There was applause after every number, and during the second set when there were slightly fewer people in the audience, the applause got louder and more enthusiastic as that core of music loving people showed themselves. 

We also had more help than usual. Ed ran the sound system, leaving me more brain capacity for narrating, strumming, singing and general band leading. My cousin John helped with the logistics of the setup and by walking around the venue checking how we sounded and being a liaison with the hostess. 

On the purely musical front, I remain convinced part of our appeal as a group is that we have such fun making music and that joy gets communicated to the audience both through the music and our behavior. 

We are also blessed to have some really fine musicians in the group, especially Dick on trumpet and Steve on trombone. In the "Summertime" video I put up, I'd made a bare bones arrangement based on the original piano sheet music and Dick and Steve helped me tweak it into playable form - but everything they're playing was improvised in the moment.

We're also very lucky to have Dave on drums. He was in the Army band and played for the troops in Vietnam back in the day. We only have him on occasions when the venue is large enough to take a full drum kit. He's simply terrific and we play on a higher level when we have him. For the Dixieland tunes he's reading music, but on all of mine he's just playing as he feels.

One thing that was sort of scary to me about this performance was that most of my arrangements were new to the group, and were being tweaked right up to the final rehearsal. I can be a worst case scenario kind of person, and there was a great scope for failure. In the event, though, things went well, and the very newness and freshness of the arrangements ended up being a positive. We weren't "covering" the tunes so much as recreating them in this performance in a new way just for our instrumentation and personality. 

Audio Note

The audio system we set up for the Piedmont performance was the most ambitious ever. There were six inputs into the mixer. One mic for my vocals, one Dick's vocal, one for the tubas, one for Maggie's clarinet, one for the banjo, and then a line for the onboard pickup inside my acoustic guitar. In the photo below you can see my vocal mic and then one affixed lower on the stand for the banjo. 

In this photo you can see the mic for the tubas up high in the back and the one for Maggie's clarinet on her stand.

We got a lot of positive compliments about our "wonderful sound". I'm convinced part of it was due to the extreme humidity (there had been downpours off and on all day). Wet air transmits sound better, and I think people felt our sound as well as simply hearing it. 

Another acoustic phenomenon that just about drove me crazy was a weird disjunct between the sound space the band was in and the other one the audience was in. In the top photo you can see how we were each in our own tents with a bit of a gap between. Particularly when I was singing, it sounded as though there was some sort of out of phase interference in that space between us, and though people said they could hear my vocals just fine, it felt to me I wasn't connecting with the audience.

On balance though, this system worked very well and I'll use something very much like it in the future for large events like this. If we can all hear each other we play well, and if the audience can hear us comfortably without our being too loud, that's a success.

Performance Diary

Last Friday we played at an assisted living facility in Gordonsville and then on Saturday outdoors at Gordonsville's Bicentennial Homecoming picnic. For the indoor performance there was no need for any audio, as it's a small room and we and the audience can all hear everything easily. We played very well, and received what to me was a wonderful compliment from the activity director - that it was the first time she could remember a group holding all the residents' attention for a full hour, that usually people want to start drifting away after about 30 minutes. There was a lot of foot tapping and sort of dancing while seated.

For the outdoor performance there needed to be audio so we could be heard over a fairly large area. This photo taken before we started playing shows the amp on a stand I had halfway facing us so we could all hear one another. The tubas, clarinet, banjo, guitar and vocals all had mics.

The two monitors flat on the group were for the group after us, but just under their speaker on a pole, right behind the blue chair, you can see the other of my amps, which was facing over towards where a lot of the crowd was. After we played I heard that we could be heard over the whole area nicely, without being too loud anywhere. I was also pleased that I didn't produce a single feedback squawk. 

Right in front of me with the guitar you can see a wooden box with the mixer on it, which lets me tweak the audio between, and sometimes during, numbers.

As I've said several times, learning audio is as difficult as learning the horn. Lots of unseen variables, and if you make a mistake it's really noticeable, but if you get it right it's a wonderful thing. We've got one more big outdoor performance this summer and my hope is to set up a situation where it sounds to us and to the audience a lot like being in a small room where everything is clear and distinct, while not being too loud.

Audio Note

The Kenwood Players have already had one outdoor performance this summer, and are looking to have three more. Unless we're on a porch and the crowd is small, I always use some amplification for these events. If nothing else, at least a set of very small speakers used as monitors for my guitar, so everyone in the group can hear me even though I'm in front and facing the audience.

One thing that I find remarkable is that whenever I mention using a little amplification, it's not unusual for the person arranging for the music to get what I can only call righteously angry about past events where a band used so much amplification people were unable to talk to one another. When I talk to friends about this, almost everyone has a horror story of an event being ruined by a too loud band - and years ago I walked out of a Judy Collins concert because the sound was so loud it hurt.

During a period when live music is on the wane, sonically assaulting the audience seems a weird thing to do, but it seems to happen with great frequency. I think one problem (besides the members of loud bands having lost hearing over time and not realizing what they're doing) is the way the main speakers are pointed at the audience, with monitor speakers facing the band. With things set up this way, it's easy for the band to not realize just how loud they are to the audience.

Over time the way I set up has evolved into not distinguishing between speakers for the audience and monitors for the band. I put the speakers a bit behind and to the side of the band and turned at something like a 45 degree angle inward so they work as both monitors for us while also sending some sound out front. That creates the danger of feedback, but I've found that turning the treble down on everything lowers the threshold for that by a lot. And, of course, the precursor to feedback is that nice reverb feeling where you can feel the sound as well as hear it. As long as I keep the sound levels in that range, things work really well.

As to who/what gets a microphone - I have one for vocals and the clarinet gets one so she can play with good tone low in her range and be heard. My acoustic guitar with the onboard pickup gets plugged in, and if it's a large event I put a mic up for the tubas so we can have a nice solid bass line without them having to work for volume. 

Also, I've started using a small dynamic mic on my music stand to pick up the banjo at large events. It's hard to believe, but the one comment I get on the sound system over and over is people coming up afterwards and saying that couldn't hear the banjo. I think the issue is that it's so very directional in its sound - if the drum head is facing you, you hear it, but if it's angled away, you don't.

Performance Diary

The Kenwood Players recently performed at the annual summer family barbecue and picnic over at James Madison's Montpelier. Thanks to my cousin Ada and her husband Ed for taking these photos and passing them along, and to the Montpelier Foundation for granting permission for me to put them up on the blog.

The threat of rain moved the event from the back yard of the mansion to the Grand Salon in the Visitor's Center. While people were gathering four of us played some music from the time of James and Dolley Madison. We started out with flute, alto flute, clarinet and drum playing selections from Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. While people were getting their barbecue I switched to guitar and we played Mrs. Madison's Minuet and Mrs. Madison's Waltz, both of which were originally written for the piano. More info on the music of the Madison era is here.

I'd asked brothers Don and Bob (a docent at Montpelier) to help us out by singing some of the period songs and here's a nice shot of them doing that.

Here's a shot of the group during our second set. You can see the little monitor speakers, which were all the amplification we needed indoors. The most important thing they do is to let the players hear the guitar. I use them even in small churches, because when I'm out in front of the group the guitar is hard for them to hear.

In this photo you can see a little condenser mic which is meant to be clipped onto an instrument, but works very well clipped onto a music stand. It reinforces my voice just enough that I don't have to strain to project when in the lower register.

Here's a shot of Ed doing the sound for us. We used that larger condenser mic for the period vocals by Don and Bob, and for announcements. The Mackie mixer just has that mic, the guitar, my vocal mic and a mic for the harmonica (which one of the tuba players used on a few tunes) running into it and going out to the monitor speakers. Having Ed (who for years ran the TV studio for WETA up in Washington) adjusting those levels throughout the performance was a great help. We were loud enough people could hear us, but could chat with others without having to yell. 

Here's a shot taken between numbers that nicely captures our mood. We had a wonderful time.

Performance Diary

Recently the community band had a couple of performances, I played Dixieland with a very high level group of players, I did the music for a small country church Sunday service, and my group played for some military veterans the day after Memorial Day.

One thing that strikes me over and over with the community band is just how much the acoustic environment affects our sound. Because we are such a relatively large group, approaching 50 members, the balance of what I hear in the horn section is remarkably different from room to room. I've gotten used to the fact that it's always going to be different from how we sound in rehearsals, but it's still a little unsettling trying to play to a room on the fly.

The other thing about the two venues the band plays in is that one is smaller and people sit closer to the front and to each other than in the other, where the same number of people are scattered throughout a larger auditorium. We always get a better response in the first.

The Dixieland performance was on the front porch of Ambrose (brother of James) Madison's home for a Garden Week afternoon party. I'd played with the trumpet, trombone and drummer before, but had never even met the clarinet, tenor sax and double bass players. I've heard about pros getting together and sight reading for performances, but never done so myself, and was amazed at how well we played. (I had gotten the banjo music a couple of weeks before and the pieces I was unfamiliar with I drilled over and over - so I wasn't sight reading).

At the time of the performance I was completely focused on listening and trying to play as supportively as I could. Only listening to the recording could I fully appreciate just how good the other players were and how nearly every tune settled into a great rhythmic groove. Listening to the CD the first few times induced a sort of delayed flow that I was too busy in the head in the moment to appreciate.

For the church service I played solo horn for prelude and postlude, alto flute while the offering plate was being passed, and led the congregation in hymn singing with the guitar. The church was full of family and friends, and helping people on their spiritual paths with music is something I find deeply rewarding.

The Kenwood Players played for the Ride 2 Recovery for a second year and had a great time. We played well and were very well received. I was also pleased that over time I've gotten more efficient setting up and striking the audio equipment so that it took less than an hour for each and the system worked well.

One thing I noticed at this event as well as the Dixieland event was how at the beginning of brass licks when a player is really laying into a riff, a few audience members will spontaneously yell out something like "Yeahhh" in just the instant after the riff starts, almost like they're making music with us for a moment. I'd love to know exactly what it is that triggers that reaction, as it's such an intense engagement of a listener.

Analog vs. Digital

Back when CDs first came out, a lot of "golden ear" types lamented the passing of analog reproduction, saying the digital just wasn't the same. I couldn't hear the difference, and decided that even if I could, the absence of all the little pops and hisses of vinyl more than made up for it.

Here lately I've dug out my old reel to reel tape deck so as to transfer some compilation tapes I did back around 1970 to CDs. The first thing that happened was my wondering where all the static was coming from and checking all the connections, only to realize it was simply the popping and hissing of vinyl that I'd forgotten about.

The next thing I realized was that I could hear the difference between analog and digital and now understand what was lost. The best way to explain it might be to compare it to the resolution of pixels on TV or computer screens. Sometimes when it's very low resolution you can sort of see what's being represented, but it's fuzzy and your brain has to supply the detail. 

The first thing on the tape is a cut from the Baptism album of Joan Baez where she's singing the e. e. cummings poem "all in green went my love riding" put to music. The arc and continuity  of her phrasing took my breath away. That movement from moment to moment in the music is in no way pixelated and the effect is much more engaging than the digital sound of the CD. My brain needed to filter out the pops and hiss, but the beauty of line of the music through time was fully there.

iPod Therapy

iPods are being used to great effect in nursing homes. This video which popped up on Boing Boing is narrated by Oliver Sacks and shows something I've experienced a number of times when playing music for elderly clients suffering from various dementias and depression. While I think live music is nearly always more effective, the ease of use and enormous capacity of iPods are tough to beat.

Delayed Auditory Feedback

Here's one of several stories that have come out on this new speech jammer some Japanese have come up with. This paragraph frames the science using singers:

The idea is based on the fact that to speak properly, we humans need to hear what we’re saying so that we can constantly adjust how we go about it, scientists call it delayed auditory feedback. It’s partly why singers are able to sing better when they wear headphones that allow them to hear their own voice as they sing with music, or use feedback monitors when onstage. Trouble comes though when there is a slight delay between the time the words are spoken and the time they are heard. If that happens, people tend to get discombobulated and stop speaking, and that’s the whole idea behind the SpeechJammer. It’s basically just a gun that causes someone speaking to hear their own words delayed by 0.2 seconds.

Voice Diary

One project I've had on the back burner for a couple of years is making a recording for friends of the the Dylan songs I've been singing for over 30 years. There have been several sessions with Dave the former Army Band drummer and Dr. Andy on bass, separately and together, to get a feel for how to do them with a small ensemble as opposed to just me and the guitar.

Here lately I've been doing some test recordings to figure out how to best use the audio equipment to get the best sound on the voice and guitar. Running the sound through the speakers and/or headphones has been a revelation. It's like holding a magnifying glass to both tone and articulation. In a purely acoustic environment the sound of your voice is a blend of bone conduction and what the room sends back, which has the effect of buffering and delaying it for the tiniest bit of time.

Using a nice condenser mic no more that a foot away from the mouth and having that feeding headphones gives the voice a temporal immediacy and a clinical clarity. Small details I never noticed loom large. (Dr. Andy says it's the same for him using headphones with both the cello and the bass.)

One thing that's become particularly apparent is my not articulating clearly throughout a song. Just because I know the words as well as I do from memory doesn't mean someone listening will.

Something else is that the tone of my voice doesn't always sound like I'd imagined it does on some of the songs, and isn't conveying the sense and mood of the song as I intend.

All of which is to say recording yourself is a wonderful aid to learning to make music, and that using headphones while making the music amps up the experience.

One small audio procedure that seems to work well setting volume levels at that sweet spot that's at a high level comfortably short of feedback shriek is paying attention to the EQ settings. With my Mackie mixer there are knobs for high, mid and low EQ and I've been turning up the volume enough to hear a little room noise through the speakers, then dialing back any EQ that creates any sort of hum or white noise, and then turning up the gain. It's dawned on me that feedback shrieks are as much a creature of poor EQ settings as they are of too much volume.

Audio Note

Our group, the Kenwood Players, had an outdoor performance of Dixieland jazz last weekend at the Gordonsville Street Festival, and I took the full set of audio equipment. Over the past several years, learning how to set it up and get a good sound has been something of a challenge, but I'm making progress.

Last year at this event I pointed to two large keyboard amps (fed by the mixer) straight out from the porch we play on, and there was this weird edge to the sound on the recording, especially the trombone. I decided it was the result of something like an infinite regression like old time barber shop mirrors, with the sound bouncing back and forth across the street. This year I placed the amps so they were at a 45 degree angle to the porch, one pointing up the street and one down, and the sound was much better.

As usual, each tuba had a dynamic mic clipped into its bell, there was a condenser placed near the clarinet and one for me to sing into, a dynamic for Dick to announce songs. A new wrinkle has been clipping a small condenser to the banjo, because its sound is so directional. Having it go through the sound system means I can face any direction I want and everyone can hear it.

The other part of the system was a set of small powered speakers used as monitors, and that worked well. My sense is that besides helping us hear each other better, monitors help round out the sound. I'm used to thinking feedback is always a bad thing because of the howls it can create, but a little feedback, i.e. the sound from the monitors blending into the overall sound, can be a good thing.

But I always forget something. This time I had a knowledgeable music friend there evaluate the balance of the various instruments out front, but I didn't ask the players themselves if they could hear everyone else well, and it turned out the trombone player was too far from the monitors for them to help.

When we first began the wind came up, blowing one music stand over, and creating a low rumble in the mics, even though they all had foam covers. I dialed back the bass EQ on them all and the rumble went away.

The balance on the recording is about as good as we're going to get in a live situation, with the exception of the tenor sax not being strong enough because I forgot to put the vocal mic over next to him when I wasn't singing. I forget that even though the balance of the mix can sound good to me in the middle of everything, the recorder is in a different place in front of us and what it's picking up is a different mix altogether.

One thing I did in preparation for the event was to mark the inputs on the mixer with what was going to go where (there are four inputs with phantom power and trim controls and four 1/4 inch inputs). That meant I could set the EQ for each input ahead of time to best suit each mic, so that at the event only minor fine tuning was needed. All the pans were set right down the middle.

Psychoacoustics

Here's an article in the NYT discussing the latest in simulating the acoustics of a great concert hall in your living room, as well as making hearing aids that do more than simply amplify sound. The word "psychoacoustics" is used to cover not just what the ear hears, but also how the brain interprets that information.

Anyone who has ever tried to mix and master audio for a CD will immediately appreciate this quote:

. . . One factor that slows the pace of innovation, Dr. Hartmann suggested, is that the human auditory system is “highly nonlinear.” It is difficult to isolate or change a single variable — like loudness — without affecting several others in unanticipated ways. “Things don’t follow an intuitive pattern,” he said. . . 

. . .“Often our changes were worse than doing nothing at all,” Dr. Kyriakakis recalled. “The mic liked the sound, but the human ear wasn’t liking it at all. We needed to find out what we had to do. We had to learn about psychoacoustics.”

Like music therapy and music pedagogy, this is another field where the new neuroscience looks to bring a much deeper understanding to what works and what doesn't. 

Performance Diary

This past Thursday my great nieces and Crawford and Judy and I played down at the Orange nursing home to a mostly wheel chair bound audience. We did the same program we did at Oak Chapel, adding Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior, Sweet Hour of Prayer and Down By the Riverside.

I have never received more effusive, heartfelt and sincere thanks from an audience after a performance - ever. While I was packing up and schlepping equipment back to the car they kept rolling up to have a private moment to say just how much the performance had meant to them.

A small part of it has to do with my being down there once a week for years, so there's a nodding acquaintance with most of the residents. What just melted me was that two residents who've suffered strokes and have speech problems, and who normally don't really try to say too much because it's so difficult and frustrating, rolled up and really worked to say thank you.

The main reason for this was that the girls totally peg the cuteness meter. Once the audience realized we were really going to pull this off and successfully play the old hymns that mean so much to them, they slipped into a relaxed state of pleasure. The room just got sweeter and sweeter the more the girls played and sang, and when I got the audience to sing along with us (and most of them knew ALL the verses without hymnals).

Having done music in institutions a lot over the years, I couldn't help notice we pulled a lot of staff into the doorway of the room. The staff at places like that have heard it all, and they're very busy people, but when something special is happening, they notice. When I was leaving, several came out from back offices to say just how much they appreciated our playing.

My main contribution to the event was figuring out what the girls are capable of doing at this point and arranging music to suit. Skylar on trumpet is just starting her second year in band, and just got braces, so her range is Bb below middle C to the Bb an octave above, so mostly everything was either in Bb or Eb to accommodate that, and when it wasn't, she played the drum.

We just worked our way through the books I'd done up for them and did as many iterations of the hymns as we could get away with, with me calling out who took the next time through each time. That gives everything an improvisatory feel as opposed to plodding through a preset program, and it keeps the audience on their toes, so to speak.

Towards the end we had Crawford sing "Good Night, Irene", as the hurricane had just recently passed, and that went down very well as well. 

Judy P is the proud owner of a new ukulele with an onboard pickup I can plug straight into an amp. The amplitude of a uke strum is about half that of a guitar, so she can go much faster and throw in delightfully quick syncopations. Makes me realize one reason I so love Judy's drumming is that her background as a strummer so informs it, so it's great to play guitar and banjo with.

Back in this post I talk about what one blogger calls "transmission". And in this post there's talk of transcendence. What keeps coming back to me is that it's the sort of thing that can happen in all sorts of places outside concert halls, but in the era of recorded music and with fewer people playing in small catch as catch can ensembles (which was the norm for human society until the past couple of generations), people seem to have lost touch with that. If I can create some materials that will help facilitate more of this kind of small scale playing, I'll count that as a success.

Performance Diary

Yesterday we performed at the large Presbyterian Church in the town of Orange and last week we performed at the small Macedonia Christian Church down in what my father used to refer to as  "the lower part of the county" (it's more coastal plain than piedmont). I don't think we've ever sounded better than the audio at the link for Macedonia from two years ago as it was one of those times when everything sort of magically gelled. These two recent performances were very good, though, and I want to note what went well.

At Macedonia the minister, one of our tuba players, made our music the central feature of the service. We led the singing of the hymns as well as performed some tunes on our own. Crawford specializes in short sermons and services, and in a service of less than 60 minutes, we played for 35 minutes.

Crawford says it's the best he's ever heard that congregation sing, and that was my feeling as well. I've pitched most of the hymns a step or three lower than the hymnals, so they were more in the range of regular people. I led the singing with my voice and the guitar and the players did a marvelous job of supporting the singing, with a different instrument taking the lead for the singing of each verse. On hymns of three verses we added two instrumental iterations between the sung verses and built the mood.

I'd done up a keyboard album of the transposed hymns for the organist and having her play mostly the bass and harmony lines was a real treat, filling out the sound. From past experience I knew that when I faced the congregation, she and the other players can't hear the guitar, so I took an amp and put it back next to them with just enough volume for them to hear it but that I couldn't detect. That worked very well. 

We've slowly been working up an improvisatory Dixieland version of The Church in the Wildwood, which is sort of a theme song for that particular church, and that went down very well.

At the Presbyterian Church yesterday we just did music before and after the service with a couple of mostly instrumental hymns during the service. Crawford was still preaching down at Macedonia, so we were down to one tuba, and Bill B our sax player didn't make it due to a freak car/power line pole accident near his house preventing him for getting out.

Before everyone else got there I set up our equipment and sang that long song of Dylan's, Boots of Spanish Leather, from up in the choir loft where we were going to perform. It takes me high and low in my range and is a great workout, both for my voice and for testing acoustics. I figured out the best ways to aim my voice into the wonderful acoustic space, and how much to project it to get just the right amount of reverb.

Once everyone else got there we played right up until the service as people gathered below. At one point we got a nice round of applause (after Just a Closer Walk with Thee) and during the "joys and sorrows" portion of the service one of the members said how wonderful it was to walk into the church with everyone smiling and the music coming down from upstairs.

One thing I've never had happen before is that while I was singing the one verse of Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior I did between instrumental iterations, my ears popped twice in that pressure adjusting way they can. The hurricane had passed during the night, so I don't think it was a big pressure change in the environment. I think it was just that I was opening my jaw in that "yawning" way voice teachers talk about and it allowed things to equalize, which in the normal course of things wouldn't have needed to.