'Oonmoot 2021: Day 1 - Introduction of the 'Oons

okay before we get started uh can someone just verify for sanity that we are audible anyone there yes we have a yes audible but only out of the left ear that is true okay i may not let me let me check real quick and see if i can fix the the the stereo thing i'm not sure i'll be able to clockwise test test is that better okay i think that that should be fixed it that should be fixed it that's not grammatically correct but oh well okay good okay well let's get started i almost pressed stop streaming okay hello hi so uh we uh so my name is richard bobo i'm brett newton and we are in uh here in the bustling metropolis of johnson arkansas with the what we believe to be the largest assemblage of bassoon family instruments ever so oh yeah it look at least the most diverse collection of bassoons the most different sizes that have ever been in one place yeah yeah and that's really what we're going to be focusing on on day one of uh what we're calling unmute what we're calling the first annual unmute in in case someone uh in case this happens again i think it should happen again because this has been fun yeah well the only problem is in order to be fair next time it would have to be where you live and driving the contra the sub contrabassoon across i mean that's a logistical thing it may have to be here locally so but yeah i know i got up early this morning and i drove about five hours to get here bringing uh several sizes of bassoon with me so that we can have the complete bassoon family in the first place for the first time in history and those uh the the instruments that haven't been assembled before we went ahead and just made pretty much yeah okay so uh we're gonna get started we're just gonna introduce the instruments uh and we're gonna start we're gonna go roughly in order of how crazy they are or um how common they are and let's see if we can get our little slideshow going and we're going to start with you know the bassoon right because that's what we're all that's why we're all here at some point someone asked our that's brett and i at some point we played bassoon and then we started looking at the the other instruments yeah so let's take a look at uh the bassoon yeah so we got my bassoon out yes uh uh gutrum volf would be proud because we have two of his instruments here uh brett's bassoon is actually a wolf or wolf or i i don't know i don't know how we're supposed to pronounce it in american english i don't think he would have minded really either way no but yeah so this is going to be your standard bassoon um as it says on the screen this instrument is in the key of f however it is written and always has been in the key of c so it is a non-transposing instrument uh the reason we say it is in f is that the fundamental scale of the bassoon is in f rather it's f lydian what we would call a hard scale meaning that the fourth scale degree is raised and all bassoons have this [Music] property yes that's the fundamental scale of any bassoon f lydian or a lydian scale the bassoon itself it just happens to be pitched in f yeah so usually when we talk about woodwinds we might say an alto saxon e flat and that e flat is when we just shorten it to n e flat we're hiding two distinct things the key the instrument is built in and the key the instrument is transposed in it just so happens that on the alto sax really all saxophones all oboz all flutes and arguably all clarinets those two notes are the same the key that it's transposed in and the key that it's built in on bassoon there's a there's a disconnect and the reason we're we're stressing that right now is because it's going to come become important when we start talking about some of the weirder sizes yeah so so while everybody thinks of the bassoon as being a c instrument because that's how it's written and that's kind of how we think of it you see a c play a c [Music] yeah c6 doesn't want to come out right now but uh so you see you hear a c and that's how the bassoon works except you know that's not the fundamental pitch of the instrument the fundamental pitch is f so for the most part for today we're going to be talking about the key the instrument is built in not necessarily the key that it's written in we have some ideas for tomorrow to discuss some uh details of notation and transposition because brett and i actually have some different opinions here i know amazingly enough brett and i do not agree on literally everything just most important things yeah i think um we should kind of stress how this idea came about it starts year and a half year ago probably on our so richard and i november of 2019 a few months before the pandemic it was that about right or was it before then uh or the road trip out to lubbock well i mean it would have to be before the pandemic right was it so was it 2019 or was it before then i feel like it was earlier than that but i'm not entirely certain anyway we um richard was driving out to lubbock to pick up a cersaphone and he just happened to be driving through my hometown of gainesville and so i said well let me just hop on and we'll just drive together turns out it's probably a good idea because you avoided a snowstorm that way yeah um but yeah so in roughly 10 hours in the car together we started really talking about different sizes of bassoon uh at this point richard's well on the way of having the subconscious center built and i hadn't you mean several years in but several years away right right i had had in the back of my mind to expand the bassoon family i'd done a video uh several years ago it's i think my second most popular video on my channel called the missing bassoon and so that kind of got and we got talking during this and we just started talking about the dearth of instruments within the bassoon family how it used to not be that way back in the renaissance the renaissance had this huge consort of dulcians also called curdles depending on which area of europe you lived in oh look a wild colonel appears believe it or not we didn't plan that uh because you know planning uh is work uh and you know we were he and i were both busy just trying to get all this straightened out uh but yeah this is a dulcian or curtal it's an example of the a renaissance era bassoon these are the same pitch the uh they're in the same pitch however this only goes down to c this is before these instruments were extended to low b flat so basically everything from here up is an extension for the bassoon in fact but you can already see the basic form factor of two parallel bores here they're drilled into one piece of wood and on the bassoon they're drilled into four pieces of wood and then assembled together and the separation of the bassoon into multiple joints is really the one of the finding characteristics between a dulcian or a turtle and the bassoon in fact um what we've got here is a baroque bassoon this is a bassoon that would have been seen uh in the uh early 1700s uh this happens to be a broken baroque bassoon uh because it has no keys on it so it's not currently playable and the vocals also spinning uh but this is um a little more advanced than the dulcian again it is the same pitch as the bassoon however the the big difference here is that the baroque bassoon this particular bro bassoon is not pictured at a 440 it is pitched at a415 so it's half a step lower so you could think of it as actually being an e or b depending on how you're thinking of the transposition but by this point the uh the more exotic sizes of bassoon had already kind of disappeared right so the with the dulcines you would have lots of different sizes the base which is what richard had a tenor and alto a great base and rarely you'd see a contrabass or a descant so on either side of that so you'd have five six sizes of dulcian and the baroque era you've got just the baroque bassoon there are was it three or four surviving examples of baroque contrabassoon there's they are terrifying looking like 10 feet tall have to be played at a 45 degree angle i mean you look at a stage with one of these baroque you know reproduction baroque contrabassoons on and that's all you see yeah it looks like a piece of architecture and it's not always a reproduction if it's the orchestra the age of enlightenment it's an original instrument it is the instrument that um handel used um you would also in the broke era have smaller bassoons as well there's a few surviving examples but we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit right but yeah you've got there's a few surviving examples by dinner of both tenor runes and octave bassoons so uh are we ready to move on to the i think we can move on because there's not a lot to say about the bassoon itself or there's so much to say about the bassoon that literal books have already been written on them yeah i mean there's a the encyclopedia yeah but let's uh let's get this one off screen here so about oh uh we'd have one quick question what is a moot uh moot is like a gathering brett and i are both lord of the rings fans so we were thinking of the the word int moot a gathering of ants that happens in uh the two towers uh you know so big giant trees get together and discuss things we thought well that's perfectly appropriate for bassoons yeah absolutely it's a it's an old english term okay so the next instrument and the instrument i play uh the most often at least uh professionally is the controversy so once again uh there's not a whole lot to talk about on contraption that hasn't been covered elsewhere on my channel or on the internet uh but yeah but to but as far as the the relationship between the bassoon and the conscious and the contrabassoon is one octave lower also built in f so if i play that uh the the seven finger pitch that woodwinds usually use to to think of the uh the fundamental note [Music] it's sounding a little sad today sorry i haven't warmed up but once again there's that lydian scale yeah so it's a controversy uh it plays down to uh towards the bottom of the piano the low b flat b flat zero [Music] i think i would have actually grabbed the wrong read okay anyway yeah so contrabassoon pretty basic uh orchestra instrument at this point uh although sometimes in in smaller orchestras that they're a little bit harder to come by because you know it is of the the standard orchestral woodwinds it is the rarest by far uh it is the most expensive and that is a huge determining factor but both of these instruments uh the bassoon and the conversation are instruments that you could write in orchestra and no one would really bat an eye um likewise uh even in band music bassoons are standard contrabassoons controversies have been used in band music since the 1730s so it's not like you'd be breaking any new ground adding a controversion in yeah you just might have to accept the fact that uh it might not happen yeah it might not get played it might be played on a different instrument um oh look here's our inevitable contra forte question yeah so uh like we were talking about in the beginning uh our main goal here is to talk about uh different sizes uh brett and i are both of the opinion that the contra forte is a very interesting uh variant of these contrabassoon uh you know they're both built in the key of f uh they both play in the same range uh their boar profiles are i would argue within the expected level of deviation that you might see for example between a french bassoon and a german bassoon or between a historical bassoon and a more recent bassoon um so it's not that the concept is bad or that we're not thinking about it we're just kind of including it at underneath the umbrella of contrabassoon in this case historically if you look at controversial develop particularly uh contributions before 1870 when heckle came out with their model this is a heckle style contrabassoon it was just you know every maker had their own shape on size of contrabassoon and we kind of settled on this and for me wolf's design is just a departure much of the way you would see in those 19th century designs not necessarily superior just different all right you ready to move on sure so here from uh mike is a bit quiet we can we can bump that up a little bit is that better is that better test okay uh we'll raise it a little bit at a time uh from here there's a huge gap in um uh common how common well really how much of a real instrument it is yeah i mean so you look at textbooks uh pretty much any textbook written on composing for bassoons is going to only talk about bassoon and controversy and it may have a footnote for um one or two other instruments and it talks about them as you know yeah they're there uh but nobody uses them and historically no one has used sizes other than the bassoon the controversy there are a few uh rare examples throughout music history um and what richard has here is um what i call a tenor bassoon what a lot of people call tinaroons and we will definitely talk more about the nomenclature on this um but but the way i might think about it is if you choose to use the word tinaroon it's just a contraction of tenor bassoon uh we're as much fun as we might have uh talking about these instruments as oons as though oon is the real name of the instrument we both know that it's not i mean it's a bassoon it's not an un but it does make for some some fun little whimsical words when you consider oon the the name of the instrument hence the name of this gathering unmoot so uh this is uh a tin roon i recently made a fantastically crazy purchase of this is my own uh wolf tinaroon it's their fg5 model [Music] foreign so uh it's i mean it's obviously a real instrument right i mean it exists i purchased this off the shelf this wasn't a special order so why why were we talking about how it's maybe not as real an instrument well before the mid-1990s this basically didn't exist as oh no go ahead um it didn't exist as an instrument that was an option for really anybody and then uh um uh with a bassoonist in england decided they were going to start producing these smaller instruments to teach children uh europe had a real problem in music education getting bassoonists started their music education system is very different than ours in america yeah well and bassoons are at a dis bassoonists are at a disadvantage when getting started i mean you can start a flute player pretty young you can't start i mean there are people who aren't physically large enough to play the bassoon until they're nearly adults yeah and that is the main reason or really the only reason these instruments are designed is as as a pedagogical tool to teach young bassoonists and that has a lot of uh consequences in how the instrument is designed yeah and so it's designed to be kind of simplified it's not designed with a professional in mind specifically it's tuned as though it's going to be played with a bassoon reed and with a sort of underdeveloped embouchure so as i got this instrument a little over a week ago my biggest struggle has been working on reed making trying to make a read that's small enough to produce a more characteristic tinteroon sound so it doesn't just sound like a flabby bassoon but it's also long enough so that it's not horribly sharp and i'm still working on that and the the the intonation is still uh leaves some to be desired because i'm i'm using this instrument for something it wasn't designed for as an upper extension of the bassoon family when it was instead designed as a pedagogical tool to teach bassoonists now i do think there's potential for this instrument oh absolutely absolutely um and in that potential i included uh a part for tenerone in my symphony two technically also included in symphony one but we don't talk about symphony one much because it's weird um but uh yeah so i have written for uh that instrument in my symphony two and in order to get the part played and uh the recording is coming soon hopefully in another month or so i'll have the recording fully finished uh but i went ahead and i i rented a tinaroon and i played the part myself um in fact i rented this tinaroon um and here in we get to the tinaroon problem there's two of them um richard's tinder one is in the key of g well it's actually in the key of c uh meaning that like we said on the bassoon of the contrabassoon the fundamental scale is f lydian the fundamental scale of that instrument is c lydian g g sticking yeah a little bit that's pretty standard weather is going a little wonky this instrument however is in b flat or it's built in b flat [Music] yeah so uh that that creates some issues when you're if you're thinking about using these instruments uh in a series composition because you don't really know which one may be available the f is well dead the way i like to to use it just to avoid the whole is it in c or is it in uh g issue is by calling them by the fourth higher or fifth higher so this instrument over here is a fourth higher than bassoon this one is a fifth higher than bassoon the fourth higher instrument is much more common but for some reasons we're probably going to get in more into tomorrow brett and i both think the there's more potential for a g or for a fifth higher instrument as a upward extension of the bassoon family for professionals that yeah sound about right yeah so um and yeah the the intonation on this instrument is uh is not great uh and i remember that when i uh recorded the part um yeah it's it this is just a regular bassoon reed that i'm using on here whereas richard's using a special made uh tinaroom read yeah uh seeing how i actually made a tinnaroon shaper i figured i might as well get to use it maybe wasn't the perfect shape i probably could have made it a little bit wider so because this one's a little bit narrow and it tends on the high side okay so is that uh i think that's up for it for now on tenerone so now we're about to take another leap into the uh the less common and talk about the instrument that brett absolutely hates being called altoon and i love calling it the altoon it altoon just sounds wrong honestly okay and right off the bat uh we want to thank a vocal majority absolutely for um for graciously loaning us uh an altoon an alto bassoon uh whatever you want to call it now this is uh in the key of f just like a bassoon it's one full octave above the bassoon and just like the uh the tinneroon its primary uh function is as a pedagogical tool for for really quite young children i think they've started kids as young as three and a half yeah that that is what it says on the on the wolf website three and a half and i i've seen kids that young holding these before and it doesn't look ridiculous now this one has a pretty simple simplified key work uh you might notice that it only has three keys for the thumb instead of you know bassoonists we're used to what four they don't this one only has 247 oh yeah sorry two keys and one tone hole uh now but it does have a range down to that lowest b [Music] flat [Music] a uh you you can really start to to tell that these instruments are are not designed as it's not like a piccolo and a flute where the piccolo is designed as a professional instrument these are built for different functions and i think the the altoon for for for both bret and i kind of exceeds at least the current designs what you might be able to use in a you know performance right and the instrument as it exists it's just it's limited um were it fitted with full key work and uh volf does have a uh an altoon now all of these instruments have wildly inconsistent names if you you know uh almost every maker that that makes them calls them something different but the the instrument that's an octave above the bassoon sometimes called the octave bassoon uh yeah yeah the the other word that you know we don't know if we'll get demonetized or not yeah that's um but um uh so sorry so so wolf does make them with more key work um and i've played one i i have played uh a wolf uh altoon with the you know the the register keys and that didn't have the low b and c sharp i believe so okay yeah that much that's a more recent development when they first came out sorry they first came out with them they offered the two models the fg85 which is this one here in the fg-8 the eight had three additional keys of this one so it had an octave vent it had a c-sharp key and it had a thumb b flat um this one doesn't have an octave key so really you're limited to about two octaves tops i can get i can get up to a high g on there [Music] i'm gonna all right so you have on here you have to use baroque basin fingerings and that's a written high g sounding the g above the treble clef uh just the space above the treble clef yeah that's a badass well i can get an a flat [Music] and yes oh uh martin or mark martine it is a lot like quarter size or eight size violins the big difference is uh because we're dealing with um with air columns when you make it smaller you the pitch has to change you can actually uh small size violins are usually tuned the same as a regular violin it's just less resonant because the strings are thicker and less under less tension in order to play the lower notes because at least for humans if we're playing in air that humans can breathe when you make the instrument half the size it has to get an octave higher yeah and that's just and the problem with wind instruments the higher they go the more difficult they become because everything gets smaller and it gets more pressure just more difficult in general so and i think tomorrow we're going to talk a little more about maybe what potential we see or how much potential we might see in some of these uh less common instruments but for now let's move on to so we've we've officially exceeded the with the altoon we've exceeded the instruments that you can actually buy um and but we still have several instruments left um so the the bassoon the tinneroon and the altoon we've gotten into the kind of the half octave pattern that we were used to with with woodwinds right saxophones are built roughly a half octave apart you can find the the main species of clarinets are about a half octave apart there are flutes that are about a half oct apart sometimes a fourth sometimes a fifth um but there wasn't at least in the modern era there hasn't been an instrument um between the bassoon and the contrast soon because remember there was a full octave below the bassoon in the contrabassoon and that's where brett comes in so instruments between the bassoon and the controversing have existed in the past um they never really had a standardized name so uh richard knight kind of came up with the idea of calling it a great bassoon and i think that really kind of stems from our that road trip where we you know great bass was always probably going to be in there i think i i need i need to look at look it up because you you've been thinking of this idea for a long time in fact the first time we spoke uh you contacted me to do uh kind of like a miniature interview for your blog about uh the sub contrabassoon project and you brought up the idea of an instrument between here and i and i'm and i'm wondering what if if that name came up in that conversation as well i don't think it did uh we might have to look that up i might have to okay i think i think we at least settled on it being a single word instead of great bass bassoon um which does get to be a mouthful or what i would consider even worse great bassoon uh if you if you split the words up you're no longer parsing it as a size of bassoon you're parsing it as a quality of the super right and this this is also something we're going to get into tomorrow when we get into nomicliture and spaces all of a sudden become important yes um so what we've got here is the prototype of great bassoon unfortunately it is not going to be able to play today i keep hitting the fan okay so when the instrument's six feet eight inches tall um a little over two meters tall um and you live in the south hitting the ceiling fan is inevitable um as you can see um well it doesn't fit into the screen let me see if i can back up some not hit any of the ooms um so yeah this is the the great episode um again historically these instruments have existed the last uh that i have been able to confirm was built was about 1850 it's made in london by the maker sam s s-a-m-m-e pitch and now this instrument is pitched in c meaning the fundamental scale is the c lydian scale it is uh one octave lower than the tender one here the ten room in g or c and uh initially when i first came up with the idea i thought about putting it in f um makes sense right it assumes in c then the next one should be an f richard is the person who convinced me that no it needs to be in g well i don't think i use the word it needs to be i tend to be a little more diplomatic i think i probably put it in several layers of well if it were up to me i would prob i would definitely move towards putting it in c but of course i'm not the one blah blah blah yeah yeah so richard being the diplomatic uh person that he is um basically is the reason that uh did we did ultimately decide to put this in the key of c which of course makes sense but but historically they were built in both uh c and b flat which creates a horrible problem because the way what the way they used to refer to these instruments was the quint bassoon which was a fifth lower uh in b flat or the quart bassoon which was a fourth lower in c unfortunately they also use those exact same terms to describe tin rooms that were a fourth or a fifth higher so if you just came across the word quint bassoon you didn't know if you were talking about a great bassoon in b-flat or a tenor oon in c so basically the two instruments that i have in my hands here are both court bassoons this is a fourth higher this is a fourth lower okay sorry that just the one thing i left at home back in texas is the floor peg for the the great bassoon and uh i i don't need it for good so but yeah so we've got two different you know having said that if something goes horribly wrong it's going to get clipped right oh they're gonna they're gonna take you saying it'll be fine and then immediately cut to something going wrong yeah yeah that's exactly luckily uh pretty much every piece on here is not the final version um uh there will be more ev everything here is going to get reprinted except for that the bell is a pop-up version uh but yeah so this is um these instruments have existed they go all the way back to the early dulceans in the renaissance era and they were called great-based dulcineas well you could also call them court base or quint-base and then you would see some classical instruments in this pitch as well as early romantic instruments in this pitch uh this is the first modern iteration in 170 years as far as we can tell yeah and it's it's a prototype uh you know it's it's in active development and uh we're new instruments are being built yeah um it's kind of kind of exciting that new insurance aren't being built i mean we haven't seen a lot of new instrument development in the last well especially yeah double read developers are highly conservative well yeah well and there well there's just so much less uh economy of scale yeah you know like uh saxophones almost any weird saxophone you can think of there's 20 people that will buy it um weird bassoons maybe not quite that much so you you do there's a good reason to be a little more selective on you know building a new instrument yeah i'm building a new double reed instrument right in case some good case of point is the heckle phone most people know about the apple phone but a few people know that there's probably only about 75 working examples in the world yeah there's probably more orchestration textbooks that mention the heckle phone than there are playable heckle phones and that's orchestration textbooks uh just by different authors yeah yeah so yeah it's it's not a common instrument at all but it exists and with uh you know orchestration books talking about it you see it brought up every now and then okay so let's let's move on uh to what you've all been waiting for right if you've subscribed to this channel there's only one thing that interests you the soprano okay so this is when you what happens when you when you're talking late at night and you're talking about what's going to happen during this unmute and you just say you know what it would be silly if uh i 3d printed a soprano instrument just as a joke to to finish out the unmood and of course then i ended up printing like six revisions of this darn thing and it's almost in tune um now it doesn't sound that great because i mean this is still the first readout that's ever been made for one but it is you know broadly functional uh it doesn't have any key work right now so all of the keys that are not covered directly by a a finger are covered with tape and i've done one little cheat which is as i've moved the the uh what would be the low d key i've moved it to a tone hole for the left pinky so i can play a full scale down to what would be the low c on bassoon which is the low g on supernoon or in brett's non-clatura soprano bassoon it so the soprano is one full octave higher than the tinner rune in c and two odds it's blending it it's the same color as the the big ominous blob behind us yeah yeah so anyway this thing actually ended up turning out uh much better than i thought it would um so uh i i don't know if my standards are getting lower or i'm i was pleasant i've been pleasantly surprised with everything you've posted on it yeah that that highest note is it's it's more in tune and better sounding than the alto well well this does actually believe it or not i did put an octave vent here [Music] yeah i don't know why that fingering works but it does this what note is that i i think i think when i checked it with the tuner it was b flat seven oh yeah luckily you can't play chromatically up that note so it's pretty much useless but uh yeah yeah so yeah this thing for me for me as a composer it's like well that just came out way better than it should have yeah and i said it to a friend of mine who's a professional um commercial orchestra it's like ah i really like that so honestly i'm actually thinking about using this in a recital because i have a a piece that's you know plaintive and would work well in an upper register and isn't very uh it doesn't have a large range uh but it's still hard for me to look at this and not see the joke i originally intended it to be yeah that when you make a joke and then the joke turns out to not be funny and the joke is like oh that's actually a real thing yeah so so so historically though there have been instruments of this size from the dulcian family the um descant dulcian well it wouldn't have been in c it probably would have been in d um actually a step higher um but more or less this is not a historically inaccurate instrument so since let's face it i failed i tried to make a joke and i failed so i had to try again this is where brett groans i'm not groaning i'm just i'm thinking what everybody else is thinking at this point okay so this is what i would call the pickaloon uh i think what brett would prefer to call the sopranino bassoon this is two full octaves above the bassoon an octave above the altoon uh matt miller i usually use uh inventor for designing uh it's just the program i'm most comfortable with autodesk inventor yeah so this is now the the supernoon the basic scale is actually the same as an oboe uh so one two three one two three four is c4 the big difference is with the the extra range of the bassoon it goes down to the low f of uh below that so the second lowest note of an english horn i tried to convince him to call it a bobo b-o-b-o-e it um it did not stick you know funny story that's exactly my sister was dead set she wanted to play the oboe when she was in middle school and then someone pointed out oh like your last name she never considered it again uh anyway so so i so this is has a fundamental scale an f which puts it in the same key as an f piccolo oboe which is they're just comically small um and you're taking that and you're folding it in half uh so things just get really cramped and uncomfortable uh and i haven't played this one probably since i made it so uh who knows what's gonna happen [Music] [Applause] [Music] the low c was amazingly perfectly in tune who knows yeah but uh you might be able to see there'd be almost no way to put a full chromatic key work and that's really the limiting factor on some of these tiny instruments like the piccolo oboe the piccolo clarinet is it's one thing to design something like a dulcian that's that small that uses cross fingerings or a garcline recorder even a sopranino recorder a soprano crumb horn or sopranino chrome horn which i just have in within arm's reach because of course i do but for an instrument like a bassoon family instrument if you can't fit it with full key work it's really not going to be useful okay so but this is technically playable right yeah you played it yeah so naturally we have to go to what you cannot play and i didn't make a fancy graphic for this because i didn't want to possibly mislead anyone into thinking this was a viable instrument but this would be the size of a i guess you could call it a garclone [Music] [Laughter] um now i also made it out of bright purple just to further i think you need to make them out of green now call them perkins yeah and you can see like this is literally physically too small to play [Music] um yeah like it can't be done it does have an octavent uh i don't think the vent does anything and i don't have a read that works with it and even if i did it wouldn't be playable but this is the rough scale of what the instrument two and a half octaves above the bassoon would be to give you an idea this is the same fundamental scale as the piccolo so and this is uh three full octaves above the bassoon why nobody knows and you really run out of names right i mean like once you've gone from piccolo to garcloom to well that's why i would go sapper nino then call that the piccolo and then call that one stupid yeah but what's the point what's the but you have two stupid instruments i kind of feel like the board the the term piccolo is important enough it should be reserved for something that's at least physically playable anyway so no fancy overlays on these two these were just demonstrations of why these instruments are not viable now for the i believe we call this the elephant in the room yeah well actually there's one thing there's one in one other instrument so we've been going in half octaves right yeah so contra bassoon then what's a half octave below contra bassoon well neither of us are really think that there's a reason to have an instrument down here no and acoustically there there's not a reason because once you get down that low a half octave on an organ you call that a resultant you play two notes half octave apart uh a perfect fifth part and they just result in an octave lower so there's not a huge someone asked for me to play it there i'm covering like i'm half covering like four tone holes because my fingers are too fat i'll just try to mash everything down and see what happens yeah that was actually an e5 so you could you could just use any of those like stubborn high e's that happen you can just have one of these on hand just [Music] no don't don't do that okay anyway sorry dana right okay so yeah anyway anything anything a half octave between el monstro here and the contrabassoon is just not acoustically feasible for uh human ears well if it were the most extreme instrument available it might be used yes yes but at that point you know if you've got the full elephant here um you don't need a half elephant yeah and i think the the practicality argument's important because once you're getting to this size all the instruments are going to be huge cumbersome and expensive so you might as well go for the the instrument that's huge cumbersome expensive and a full oct gives you a full extra octave you want the most bang for your buck now so this should be now i was up really late last night the in order to get this so i could play a few notes uh the last piece finished printing at 4 00 am um so brett and i have goofed around with it a little bit the limiting factor of playing around with it is we we actually don't have any tape that'll seal the tone holes consistently the tone holes are so wide that electrical tape uh doesn't provide a good seal because you have to use multiple strips uh so we were getting leaks went through a whole row of electrical literally a whole roll of electrical tape and we we believe it or not and i'm gonna have to upload this as a separate upload uh but we do have a recording of me playing an a negative one acoustically on subcontra with a few caveats this this body joint here uh doesn't have tone holes yet so this these would be the tone holes for open f down to c sharp so essentially the bassoon version of a wing joint and this uh you can't see this is just a big column at this point you can't see the shape of the instrument at all um this bocal is temporary i've 3d printed this out of plastic with some uh strategically placed brass inserts for uh strength and to accept the vocal that's i uh that's that's also where brett's great bassoon vocal came from his temporary grape vocal um i also had the 3d print this this tube so if you can see it's going to be easier if you turned it a full 90 degrees so you can see it real clearly through right here okay yeah so well so there's this metal column and then behind it there's this plastic tube uh this is eventually gonna be made out of metal uh right now this is a very large fragile piece that's made entirely out of plastic so it's probably not going to hold up okay so right now we have the instrument set so it should be able to play a low e so that's e0 roughly 20 hertz uh the the larger tone holes weren't holding the tape and weren't holding the seal so real quick i'm going to just do a once over actually i'm going to tease you all even even longer and talk about what happened this morning so i had finally the the plastic piece uh the the descending tube was finally printed and glued and dried and i put it on the instrument and it just wasn't producing anything like i mean i could get sounds to come out but it wasn't the right octave it felt like there was just a massive leak somewhere i was actually worried that uh the shallow or the taper was just too shallow and that the whole design was fundamentally flawed um and was just never going to work with a bassoon-style reed and then i realized that i have a water vent down here to drain water from the descending tube and i had forgot to cover that so that's why it wasn't getting sound or it wasn't getting the correct sound okay okay this uh well it's the wrong height now this is adjustable um but i'm not gonna do that right now okay so this should be a low e e0 20 hertz yeah and the the i don't know if you all can hear that but with it right in my face there's some leaking going on uh in the back of the reed uh which is getting some gurgling um okay i think you do it again okay let's see if i get a better start than that yeah so i should i just want to just to give myself plenty of weasel room here this is essentially like someone who built or designed their own contrabassoon reed having never played contra bassoon and then playing it live so there's a lot of room for error so like i have no idea if this is the best redesign i i think there's some work that could be done to to help it respond better i know that i'm not well practiced at producing notes these low so what no one is what i'm getting at is i'm i personally am still willing to entertain the possibility that the subconscious soon is not a viable instrument but i don't think any difficulty that i experience in these first few weeks is going to be evidence of that if that makes sense okay [Music] yeah so um and right now the intonation um we're i'm i literally just played the first few notes of this uh a little a little before noon so there's still a lot of a lot of work to do to study the intonation to figure out what might need to be changed right now the instrument is overall a decent amount flat some notes more than others so maybe that means the read uh is too big maybe it means the vocals the wrong length um maybe it means that the uh formulas that i used to calculate the boundary layer effects were never aren't viable at this scale so there's there's still a lot of research to do uh i should also say these tone holes are also undersized uh so that i could finish them by hand i don't think that expanding them out a little bit is going to make the difference and bring it up to pitch but you know it could help at least so let's real quick i'm going to open up some more tone holes here what i'll say well richard is doing that just being in the in the room with the instrument and hearing it it it to me feels very much like the the sound that he was going for in the digitally created videos it uh it is definitely a bassoon sound it also feels much more powerful than i think either you or i would have imagined yeah because it's it it is loud well i i still think that it's probably [Music] if composers misunderstand it they i still think they're going to misunderstand it on the two thinking it's louder than it is inside just like bassoon uh i still think it's probably an instrument that's going to be more useful and more exposed maybe not not necessarily solo but more no i i do not envision this as a solo yeah you you might notice that my friend here brett newton in his composing 30-something miniatures for woodwinds left out sub-contrabassoon this an instrument this low it this is your supporting cast and i think richard will absolutely agree with me you don't hear pitches moving that low without the support of the upper octave yeah and that that well that actually wasn't that low that was the the g so that's just a a whole a minor third below contrast that is the lowest note that exists in contrabassoon uh repertoire yes there is a piece for contra assuming that includes a low g uh agnogram by michael tilson thomas uh there's some wonderful pictures online if you look up stephen bronstein it's a bronze signer bronstein i should really know this i'm so sorry if you're listening i'm so sorry uh um uh when he recorded the the piece i we we were exchanging ideas and i you know sending random pieces of plastic across uh across the country so he could play this low g but uh here is the the less reasonable way to play that low g now i once i will say one thing i was pleasantly surprised by is it records better than it sounds when you're playing like like when the reed's in your mouth it kind of sounds you hear a lot of read sound like [Laughter] but it does tend to record a little bit better yet uh so uh lucy would i play the contrapt zoom's lowest b flat on the subcontrary well for one thing the subconscious tune actually goes down to low a um now right now we don't have those tone holes plugged and it would probably take about 30 minutes of fussing to try to get those tone holes plugged but i do have we do have a recording of it and i'm going to upload that to my channel uh separately as soon as we're done okay uh uh so uh matt miller was uh just asking about inventor my uh i don't know if i should say this uh my dad's bit my dad has a metal fabrication and design business he has inventor that's where i learned uh so i i have access to his inventor at his shop so that's where i get my inventor okay so we have i think we've exhausted the ends yeah i don't think we can we can ooh you don't think i you don't think i have a purple uh three octave lower instrument that i made just just for this video like five hundred dollars worth of plastic do you no no sorry i i i know uh for that level of absurdity you're gonna you're you're only your only option is the gigger racket um uh but yeah so it was really exciting uh this morning and brett was here for a lot of it yeah uh to to play the first notes of the sub-contrabassoon it's not uh it's really encouraging so it is i think we can literally say it is not a pipe dream anymore i i don't have any queued up sound effects wait wait wait wait can i do a womp womp on this thing [Music] no no no okay i keep on hitting the lights yes uh or it's being touched by angels oh okay i okay that makes more sense so i think what they're asking is for the the same um so what we can do is i can play a low c would you mind grabbing that green reed and grabbing the contra bassoon how about i grab my contract oh awesome okay so i'm gonna open now since this doesn't have all of the tone holes yet the highest i can play is c1 uh so that'll be one two three c on the subcontra bassoon or low c on the controversy so what note am i playing low c but let me just three fingers see no no no no don't see below that screw coming out oh no no it's supposed to be like that it's one of the nylon ones right yeah yeah yeah those don't go in all the way let's see you have those keys interlocked in your instrument maybe one of these days i'll get comfortable handling this thing but right now it's still you know so much of my life and finances have gone into this thing that uh that just holding it is stressful okay so um now this is going to be out of tune uh because as we said the instrument is overall flat um for reasons i haven't quite determined yet uh maybe it's as simple as to read uh so go ahead and play your low seat now that is one thing because the subcontractors actually has a shallower taper the uh it might actually be a little bit easier to hold that note longer i'm also really trying to break it down a bit oh yeah yeah let me pull out the uh okay so uh lucy wants to hear one at a time okay okay so anything else to to to cover oh uh so importantly so we're gonna make this a little bit more of an event uh and for tomorrow's stream where we're gonna be discussing uh some more uh more technical matters of notation nominature viability for composing uh we're going to be doing that stream tomorrow on brett's channel uh there will be a link to brett's channel in the description below uh the vod there isn't right now at least i don't think but there will be for the vod um and do we remember what time were we planning that i have no clue you want to do it at 10 i'm a musician 10 a.m okay okay yeah 10 10 a.m we'll do it at 10 a.m uh tomorrow uh and uh so there'll be links to that uh any last questions we have okay well and keep in mind any any tomball differences or between the instruments right now might be might be uh it could be a consequence of the read uh so maybe as i read uh uh refine my read making for subcontrabassoon that will change maybe the instrument will get darker maybe it'll get brighter um and you obviously i would say you want a difference yeah absolutely you know uh the the purpose of a a lower instrument like a contrabassoon or a subcontra bassoon it has a dual function of a practical function of more notes lower notes but there's also value in the overlap register of a different timbre yeah i mean physically the the low c on this instrument is going to come out of a different or the actual middle c on this and she was going to come out of a different place than it is on this instrument on this instrument the whole nearly the whole instrument is vibrating on this one only half of the instrument is vibrating yeah and it's it's also it's not impossible to imagine that um that once the reeds are worked out that uh the middle c on the subcontra bassoon will be more flexible and uh than the low c on the on the contrabassoon so maybe someday 50 years from now someone has a sub contrabassoon on stage for also zarathustra just to play that first uh i'm assuming the instrument might be able to play uh softer than contrabassoon down there maybe maybe not okay yeah uh oh there was one one more question that was kind of that was kind of interesting someone wanted us to play octave c's oh so b take uh so like the same yeah both okay once again this is going to be out of tune but you know [Music] where's the register event for c uh which one is it these two i actually do have register vents modeled on this tube it's kind of funny i don't have some tone holes but i have all of the register vents let's see let's see if i can get the overblown c to come out can you play the your seat yeah so i'm probably going to need to make those register vents a little bit larger so so it uh because you can feel you can hear it's hesitant to come out in the the upper octave [Music] okay well i think that's going to be it for this stream like i said we're going to have more more uh another stream tomorrow and there's probably going to be some special videos that get uploaded as well uh we have some more shenanigans planned uh thank you all so much for coming i hope this has been a uh enlightening trip through the un family both the the common the less common and the absurd well and you know if for no other reasons are absurd well hey because i made those purple oons the subconscious is not the most absurd instrument in this discussion not the most absurd instrument of this room that for the for no other reason those instruments have value and i keep on hitting okay well once again thank you all uh there'll be a link to brett's channel for tomorrow's activities have a good day are you going to say something no you don't you don't want them to have a good day i guess they're going to have a good day okay you're laughing i want you to have a good day brett will allow you to have a good day if you want one see okay neither of us are in a good position to turn off the recording right now i'm going to have to there's going to be some awkward yeah oh the mouse is here who okay i think that went well

Channel: Richard Bobo

Views: 2,283

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: eAgzPZlUgSM

Length: 73min 34sec (4414 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021