music Archives – Structured Procrastination

What does negative harmony sound like? Here’s the answer!

Adam — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 10:00:00 +0000

In the last year or so there’s been quite a buzz in the music theory world about the concept of negative harmony, mainly thanks to a few YouTube interviews with Jacob Collier which have gone viral, especially the ones by June Lee.

But while this has been great for introducing the idea to many people, still most people don’t really know what music based on negative harmony actually sounds like! And as Jacob mentioned in some of these interviews, clever theoretical tricks are rather pointless unless you can actually make some great music from them. Most of the videos just focus on a few chords, which is a great start but far from the full picture.

Introducing the SHIMANator negative harmony app!

So I’ve built an app called “the SHIMANator” which can convert any music into its negative harmony equivalent, and I’m very excited to finally announce it to the world! Check out the video:

ARVE error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode

OK, but what’s the point?

I mainly wrote this app because a) Jacob asked me to, b) it sounded like a fun challenge, and c) the thought of being able to instantly hear the negative harmony equivalent of any music was very appealing.

But in the process of getting it working, it became apparent that this could actually be a useful tool for generating fresh new musical ideas and sounds. For example, I’ve talked to film / TV composers who got excited about using it to quickly generate music which is coherent with and relating to their existing material. For example if a musical motif in a major key represented a character in a film, flipping it about an axis would give you the negative version, which would sound in a minor key and could be used to represent the “dark side” of that character’s personality.

Can I try it out?

Not yet, but I’m aiming to offer early beta access to a select group of people at some point soon. Please show your interest by taking the following actions!

2. Let me know what you think and win a free copy!

Do you find this app interesting? Could you imagine using it yourself? If so, would you use it for composition, or as an extra effect in live improvisation, or maybe even for something else?

So I’d love to hear what you think – and the person who gives the best feedback will win a free copy of the software when it’s fully productised and ready to publish!

Please leave comments on the Facebook page or the YouTube video.

How does it work?

At the simplest level, it takes MIDI events in, does some magic to convert to negative harmony, and then outputs the same events with modified pitches. So it should work with pretty much any piece of MIDI-compatible software or hardware under the sun.

The actual algorithm for the conversion is very complicated, so I’ll save the explanation for another time. But you can see from the video how melodic motion is inverted, as is motion around the circle of fifths.

How did this all come about?

Here’s the history, in case you’re curious.

I was introduced to negative harmony a few years ago by Barak Schmool, who later taught Jacob in his role as professor of jazz and world rhythms at the Royal Academy of Music. (Barak’s awareness of the technique was heavily influenced by his friend Steve Coleman, an incredible jazz saxophonist who has been using negative harmony in his music for many decades.)

At the time I built a really dumb prototype for fun, and fed Mozart’s 40th Symphony through it. The results were promising, but also sounded amusingly terrible due to every high note being converted to a very low note and vice-versa.

It was clear that without some magic octave transposition algorithm, notes would stray too far from their original register and completely screw up the voicing “texture” which the composer had intended. So shortly afterwards, Barak and I basically forgot about it, and instead got distracted experimenting on Giant Steps with some brilliant ideas he had regarding unequally tempered systems of intonation (which later inspired some of Jacob’s great work with microtonal voice-leading).

A year or two later, Barak told Jacob about my prototype. He was interested enough to get in touch, and you already know the rest of the story.

By the way, there is already some great music out there made entirely using negative harmony. For example see Steve Cruickshank’s fantastic YouTube channel, which is full of negative harmony covers of famous music. And I’m not even the first to come up with a negative version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. But I’m not yet aware of any other software which does what mine does. Hopefully you find its potential interesting.

Have you made any other music software?

Funny you should ask! Actually yes: in an earlier collaboration with Barak I built the Scale Matcher – a free app (web page) for finding which scales match a given chord. Check it out

If you read this far, congratulations – you are a most excellent and dedicated music theory nerd. Let’s have a pint some time. But until then, don’t forget to subscribe and let me know what you think!

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Rethinking traditional scale practice on the cello

Adam — Sat, 20 Dec 2014 01:28:00 +0000

(Please note that while this post was written with the cello in mind, several of the principles apply to other instruments too.)

I’ve previously blogged about how back in 2011, I decided to get serious about trying to become a jazz cellist. Since then I’ve had some really interesting and fulfilling musical experiences, but it’s also been a struggle in some areas. I studied and performed classical (in the western sense) cello for many years, but the demands of jazz are so different to most things I worked on during my classical training that I’ve had to fundamentally rethink many aspects of the way I practise.

Scales are one good example of this. I was taught to practise B♭ major something like the following:

The first interesting thing to note about this is that it omits almost the entire bottom octave of the instrument! There’s really no good reason for this; the bottom octave deserves attention just like the rest of the instrument. It’s only taught this way because the tradition has become incredibly “tonic-biased”, with no awareness of the different modes which even beginner jazz students get taught about.

So one of the first adjustments I made (and I probably stole this idea from one of my mentors, the great jazz violinist Christian Howes, who calls it “extended range”) was to always start from the lowest note of the scale reachable on the instrument:

Similarly, if the top tonic is not near the top of the range you want to practise in, just keep going until you hit a note high enough to make you think “OK, I don’t need to practise any higher than this!” Whether or not that note happens to be the tonic of the scale should be irrelevant; the most important thing is that you are practising the full range of the instrument which you need to use when performing.

Turning it all upside-down

Another bias which exists in the western classical tradition for dubious reasons is that everything is bottom-heavy: almost all exercises start at the bottom, go up to the top, and come back down again. This inevitably results in the bottom end being practised more than the top, which is particularly bad because the top end is way harder to play well. So let’s swap it all around!

(By the way, along similar lines I recommend this great blog post on back-to-front learning by Anton Schwarz.)

Developing new “real world” fingering systems

The next odd thing to note about the classical tradition is that scales are almost always played using a single fingering, and that fingering is typically tonic-biased in another way: the tonic notes are very commonly played using first finger. Perhaps the classical pedagogy evolved this way simply because a single fingering system for each scale was perceived as easier to teach and also for students to memorise. But this approach is hopelessly inconsistent with the real world. If you don’t believe me, take a look at every fragment of a B♭ major scale present in the solo part of Boccherini’s cello concerto in B♭ major, and count for how many of those fragments it would make sense to use the fingering system shown above. If we don’t use those fingering systems when playing actual music, why spend so much time practising them?

So it seems clear to me that practising multiple fingering systems is beneficial for technical reasons, and in the case of jazz for musical reasons too: the improvisatory nature of which means that unless you rely very heavily on licks, you rarely know far in advance what notes you want to play, let alone what fingerings to use. So for any given tonality and position on the instrument, you should practise as many fingering positions as possible, so that when you are in the moment of improvising a solo, whichever hand position you’re in, as many notes are physically accessible from there because you’ve already covered those transitions in practice.

A system for practising all fingerings

But where do we draw the line? After all there are an enormous number of different possible fingerings for a 3-octave scale, and there’s just not enough time in the day to practise even a fraction of them. Or is there?

Violin fingerings

On the violin, this is a bit simpler to understand because pretty much any scale can be played in any hand position without shifting (at least, until you hit the top or bottom notes in that position). So on violin, you can simply practise any scale in any position, and carve up your available practice time accordingly: for example on Monday you could focus on 1st position, on Tuesday 2nd position, and so on.

Cello fingerings

On cello, it’s not possible to play any diatonic scale without a considerable amount of shifting of the hand position, so the problem of how to methodically practise all possible fingerings is far less obvious.

I think the answer lies in considering how to group notes into hand positions. It’s clear from the above examples that typically the hand position shifts every three notes, i.e. the majority of notes in scales on the cello are grouped in threes: 1-2-4 or 1-3-4 in the lower octaves, and 1-2-3 when playing higher up the string. Most exceptions to this are when the open strings are played (but they could be considered as “outside” the groupings anyway), and in the higher octaves of most cello scales, where 2-note groupings are common (e.g. the 1-2 1-2 1-2-3 type of fingering system is very commonly taught in the classical tradition for the top octave of a 3-octave scale).

My opinion is that practising 2-note groupings is really not that useful (at least to me as a jazz cellist), because

the shift distance is smaller so the shift is easier,
2-note groupings require 50% more frequent shifts when compared to 3-note groupings, which is a big hindrance when attempting to play at speed,
every 2-note finger grouping is already covered by a 3-note grouping, and
I’ve already logged years of classical practice covering 2-note groupings anyway!

So I decided to practise all my scales in only 3-note groupings:

Notice here that I’ve also stopped using the open strings (except for the bottom C, since there’s no other way to play it). I made this decision for three reasons. Firstly, in jazz it’s important to be able to transpose to another key at any moment, so I don’t want to become too reliant on scale fingerings which use open strings, since they only work in one key.

Secondly, it makes it very easy to extend this system so that it covers every possible fingering of the scale using 3-note groupings! This is possible simply by shifting the starting hand position by a single note:

and then shifting it once more:

String variations

Thirdly, it allows freedom to introduce variations on which string is used for a particular group. For example bars 5 and 6 of the above example could be played like this:

I don’t use a strict system to ensure I always cover all possible string variations; instead I like to improvise the choice of string on the spur of the moment, since this matches more closely what can happen when improvising on stage.

Connecting the dots

Of course this system of 3-note groupings with 3 different starting positions for every scale triples the amount of scales to practise! However since I would normally practise each scale more than once anyway, I aim to seamlessly join up the different offsets in order to cover all combinations without requiring significantly more practice time:

and so on. Actually the hand position “offset” can be changed at any point in the scale, and this is also something I like to improvise on.

Changing the tonality

So far the examples have all used a major scale. The classical tradition also covers harmonic minor and melodic minor (which is different ascending to descending). In the jazz world (especially for more modern jazz), the ascending form of the melodic minor is particularly important, so I practise that in both directions:

Jazz also uses the harmonic major scale and many other scales, so I mix some of these into my practice, although I find it easier to spend a few weeks/months focusing on one particular scale rather than attempt to cover all scales in every practice routine, which just seems too ambitious. Incidentally, back in 2013 I built the “Scale Matcher”, a web application to show which scales can be used for improvisation in any given chordal context.

Changing the key

Fortunately not all music in the world is written purely in B♭. Unfortunately this means we have to practise other keys too! I try to change key seamlessly without stopping, because this is one of the most fundamental requirements in jazz for improvising over a series of chord changes. Again I like to avoid any tonic bias by changing key on other degrees of the scale. For example, after completing one cycle of all 3 hand positions in B♭ minor, I could shift tonality up a semitone to B minor, changing near the top of the instrument:

or on the lowest note of the instrument:

or even somewhere in the middle:

This is a fun workout for the brain as well as the fingers!

Hand position “windows”

Above I’ve suggested a system for dealing with the cello’s limitation of not being able to play a continuous scale in any key without shifting the hand, which ensures that every possible fingering of a given scale can be methodically covered during practice.

However there’s a completely opposite approach, which is to embrace this limitation and simply fix your hand in a single position and only play the notes of the scale which you can reach from that position, dropping the others! This is particularly useful when improvising at speed, since it drastically reduces the amount of shifting required. I learnt this idea from three of my all-time cello heroes (Erik Friedlander, Mike Block, and Rushad Eggleston), and then extended it to apply to every scale I work on:

I’ve found that improvising within a given “window” can result in some interesting melodic shapes.

Patterns / shapes

Rather than simply ascending or descending, there are an infinite number of patterns to choose from for varying the shapes generated by traversing the scale. Here are a few simple examples:

(The last two were shamelessly stolen from Christian Howes.)

Rhythm / metronome usage

So far I haven’t said anything about rhythm or use of the metronome (which in my opinion is an essential part of scale practice). In fact this topic is so huge I’ll leave it for another blog post at another time! But of course there are an infinite number of ways to vary rhythm, and the western tradition tends not to examine these in much detail. One thing I enjoy doing is freely improvising the rhythm when playing scales, even if everything else (notes, fingerings etc.) is fixed.

Articulation

How to articulate with the bow is another huge topic, but this post is already way too long!

Conclusion

It’s clear that there are zillions of ways to vary scale practice and keep it interesting whilst challenging yourself in new ways. Perhaps the most important thing for any diligent musician is to constantly invent their own new practice systems, rather than just copying someone else’s verbatim.

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! This is pretty dry reading, but I hope you found it useful or at least interesting. If you have any feedback of any sort, I’d love to hear it, so please leave a comment!

P.S. For the curious geeks, this blog post was created from a single text file with the combination of some incredible free software: the GNU Emacs editor, GNU Lilypond music typesetter, Org mode, org2blog, and the Org-babel-lilypond backend to Babel.

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new music video: acoustic version of Jóga by Björk, with Emma Smith

Adam — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 12:20:07 +0000

I’m a long-time fan of Björk, and was recently lucky enough to snarf a spare ticket to a show here in London at the end of her Biophilia tour. It was a fairly insane show (in a good way), involving an all female Icelandic choir, a drummer, an organ, a musically aware lightning bolt generator, a pin-barrel harp, and David Attenborough (obviously). Really impressive to see how she’s still trail-blazing rather than just churning out the old favourites (although some of the latter were presented in imaginative new ways).

On a related note, back in February I revisited my old haunt the Royal Academy of Music to record/film a version of Björk’s famous tune Jóga, arranged and sang by the amazing and consistently entertaining singer Emma Smith. Yesterday I finally finished the video editing (done with the awesome Kdenlive video editor which is Free Software), and here is the result. Hope you enjoy it!

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announcing the Scale Matcher!

Adam — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 18:00:26 +0000

I’ve been a bit of a hermit the last few weeks, burning the candle both ends and spending the majority of my spare time building a new toy … well actually it started out as a toy, but now I think it’s good enough for musicians to use as a serious tool for improving their improvisation / compositional skills, and harmonic understanding.

So I’m very pleased (and relieved) to be able to announce … … the Scale Matcher! It should work equally well on your computer, phone, and tablet. Please try it out and let me know what you think! You can also click the About and FAQ buttons to find out more.

Thanks to Barak Schmool for providing the original inspiration to do this, and for the time he spent testing it out and suggesting improvements.

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London Tango Orchestra featured in BBC Persia documentary

Adam — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:06:24 +0000

These days I have the regular pleasure of playing in the London Tango Orchestra with some wonderful musicians. A while back we did some filming for a BBC Persia documentary, and we recently received copies of the videos, which came out pretty well! Take a look …

This next one is the gorgeous Piazzolla tune Milonga del Angel. Unfortunately the video and audio don’t match for the first half, but it gets back in sync at 3’35”:

and finally …

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music industry learns nothing from the Avid / Sibelius saga?

Adam — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 22:46:10 +0000

UPDATE 26/02/2013: Daniel has replied to this post, and I have replied to his reply.

As George Santayana famously said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. In light of recent news regarding music notation software, I would add with some disappointment and frustration that those who choose to ignore the past are also condemned to repeat it.

For those of you who don’t already know, Sibelius is a proprietary software product for music notation which has for many years been one of the most popular choices for professional musicians and composers. For many of the more experienced customers in the technology industry who have already been burned in the past, a heavy reliance on a single technology is enough to trigger alarm bells – what if the company providing that technology goes bust, or decides to change direction and cease work on it, or simply does an awful job (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) of maintaining and supporting that technology? Then you’re up a certain creek without the proverbial paddle.

In the IT industry, this is a well-known phenomenon called vendor lock-in. A powerful movement based on Free Software was born in the early eighties to free computer users from this lock-in, and is now used on billions of devices world-wide. You may have never heard of Free Software, but if you own an Android phone or a “broadband” router, or have ever used the Firefox browser or Google Chrome, you have already used it. The vast majority of the largest companies in the world all run Free Software in their datacentres around the world; for example, every time you access Google or Facebook you are (indirectly) using Free Software.

What does any of this have to do with Sibelius? Well, in 2006, Sibelius Software was bought by Avid Technology, Inc., and despite remaining a very successful business, in July 2012 Avid laid off the entire Sibelius development team, effectively condemning the product to rapid decline and a very uncertain future. This decision received widespread condemnation, and yet Avid have refused to waver from their course, potentially stranding millions of users in the medium to long term.

I do not wish to criticise those users for locking themselves into a proprietary solution in the first place. Many of them will have been encouraged along that route during their education (many music colleges provide Sibelius to students, for example), and will have never heard of Free Software, let alone realised that viable alternatives do exist. These people are specialists in music, not in technology, so it’s entirely understandable that they just want music software which works well, allowing them to focus on making music rather than learning technology. (In contrast, I have no sympathy for anyone working in the IT industry who subjects themself to proprietary lock-in; full-time technologists really should know better… but I digress.)

However, what does really frustrate and disappoint me is the news that the sacked team of Sibelius developers have announced that they are repeating history by starting work on a new proprietary product at Steinberg which has the same fatal flaw. In that blog post, Daniel Spreadbury writes:

Of course there are dangers inherent in starting again from scratch, but since we don’t have any code of our own to use, we have no choice in any case.

As a long-term professional musician and professional software developer who has recent experience of enhancing music notation software, I simply cannot understand this statement, since both MuseScore and GNU LilyPond would serve as excellent starting points for a world-class music notation product. Daniel is well aware of the existence of LilyPond, as shown by one of his responses to a reader who commented on his blog:

Lilypond is wonderful software, and it’s great that its proponents advocate for it so strongly. I hope we will demonstrate to you that our experience and, yes, our taste in musical typography makes our new application a worthy rival, even if it is (to you) a useless, closed source white elephant.

I am sure that he and his whole development team are equally aware of the existence of MuseScore. Therefore despite a clear, publically stated awareness of the risks, they are deliberately choosing to start from scratch, rather than enhance existing pieces of Free Software in a way which would benefit everyone (more on that in a bit).

I can only hazard a guess as to why Steinberg have decided to go this route, but let me first bust some very common myths about Free Software which are relevant here:

Myth #1 – you can’t run a business or make a living off Free Software.
This one’s incredibly easy to address, because I can and do! – quite comfortably, thank you very much. I work (part-time) for a highly successful global software vendor which has sold services related to Free Software for over 20 years. We are (still) profitable, and growing fast, as is the number of other companies following suit. How is that possible? By selling services, not licenses. In other words, selling good old-fashioned honest expertise. That can come in many forms: software maintenance (i.e. bug fixes), upgrades, technical support, documentation, consulting, training…

Secondly, it’s “Free” as in free speech, not as in free beer. The founder of the Free Software movement specifically encourages the sale of Free Software.

Myth #2 – it only runs on certain systems which most people don’t use.
Both LilyPond and MuseScore already run on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux.

Myth #3 – it’s written by a bunch of hobbyists / it’s lower quality / you get what you pay for etc.
These statements are no more useful than any other sweeping generalisation. Are Firefox and Chrome better than Internet Explorer? The vast majority of IT professionals would say yes. But there are also plenty of counter-examples. So let’s focus specifically on music notation software.

I suspect that Daniel and his team would gracefully agree that LilyPond produces extremely high quality output, in many cases (admittedly not all) even slightly superior to the output from Sibelius. This is no surprise, because output quality is LilyPond’s primary concern. They would also quite rightly point out that LilyPond is challenging to learn for less technically-minded people who tend to want to be able to do most work with the mouse. MuseScore has an interface somewhat similar to Sibelius and goes a long way towards addressing this group of users, but its output is currently nowhere near the same quality. There are also promising front-ends for LilyPond, such as Denemo.

Since these are Free Software, any developer is free to take the existing code and enhance it in any direction they want. So the Steinberg team could have for example used LilyPond’s superb rendering engine as a starting point, optimise it for WYSIWYG rendering, and build a superb Sibelius-like graphical user interface (GUI) around it. Or they could have started with MuseScore and work on enhancing both the rendering engine and the GUI.

You may ask, but why should they? What are the benefits of Free Software? Here’s one rather amusing answer, and a slightly more helpful one. I’ll add two more specific examples in this context. Firstly put yourself in the shoes of a poor music student, or a musician trying to make a living in a very poor country. Without access to good Free Software, the only choices are: obtain an illegal copy of a commercial product, or go without. Now imagine you are a high-earning film/TV composer, and whilst working on a contract you discover a bug in the proprietary software which makes your life very difficult. You report the bug to the company who develops and sells the software, and they politely decline to fix it (or more likely, ignore your request). The only choices here are: live with it, or switch your whole studio setup to another product.

So it’s clear how Free Software makes the world a better place. So why then have Steinberg decided to start from scratch, despite the extra risk and man-years of work this will cost? Only Daniel and his colleagues can answer that, but my guess is one or more of the following:

They just don’t “get” how well Free Software projects can thrive and offer opportunities for making money.
They do “get” it but they believe that the profit margins in Free Software are too low for their business strategy which involves making truck-loads of money e.g. through being the sole distributor.
There’s a perceived technical barrier. For example, maybe they really really don’t want to use C++. (I can sympathise with this sort of stance, but it’s still not justification for working on a proprietary product.) Or maybe they have a fundamental concern with the existing architecture of LilyPond or MuseScore. For example, in a response to another comment on Daniel’s blog post, he writes:

The difficulty with complex applications like scoring programs is that a great deal of the richness of the end result that you see visually on the screen or on paper is worked out algorithmically from the small amount of data actually contained in the file saved on disk. Even if you consider Lilypond, the Lilypond file format itself does not describe exactly how the finished score will appear, because it is up to Lilypond itself to handle positioning, spacing, etc. based on its own internal algorithms and rules.

but that misses the point that it is entirely possible to get LilyPond to output positioning/spacing information which could then be fixed across LilyPond versions and embedded within a non-brittle output file format. In fact, with a few hours of help from Jan Nieuwenhuizen, one of the co-authors of LilyPond, I implemented that recently myself for the ly2video project without even having to modify LilyPond’s core C++ code.

It further saddens me that this announcement is being considered as a reason for celebration, when as far as I can see a different path could so easily have been chosen which would benefit everyone more. However I suspect these sorts of opinions are simply due to an honest ignorance of Free Software. I hope that in a very small way this post might help address that.

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cello lessons from a dead genius

Adam — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:05:50 +0000

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time …

In the summer of 2011, I quit my job to resume full-time music studies. During the summer semester at the Berkeley Jazzschool in California, I started learning John Coltrane’s solo on the title track of his famous album Blue Train. It was really tough going, but addictive – I was getting my arse handed to me on a plate on a daily basis by a dead person, but I felt like I was way off the well-trodden path and that was really satisfying!

After 3 months studying in various places in the USA, I got back home and resumed work on this transcription in earnest. It became part of my daily routine, and I craved the day that I could play the whole thing note perfect at the same speed as the original. There were so many notes to fit in that I had to come up with totally new ways to use my left thumb, on which the normal cellist’s callus grew to epic proportions. Trane became the best cello teacher I never had. Unfortunately, just around the time I was getting close to being able to nail it, real life intervened, and I had to refocus on earning money. Inspired by Benoît Sauvé’s incredible rendition of the same solo on recorder (recorder?! what a mofo – check out his other videos), I did a couple of very rough recordings with my compact camera for posterity, and moved on.

Sometime later, I discovered a John McLaughlin video on YouTube (sadly no longer available) which had an awesome animated transcription at the bottom – a really cool glimpse inside the craft of a master musician. Then it occurred to me that I could do the same kind of thing with my video, and publish it in case there are any other jazz cellists out there who would be interested in it. I put a lot of effort into notating and fingering it, so it seemed a waste to just let it rot and never see the light of day. After all, I already had the source files and a video, so it was just a simple matter of combining the two, right? How hard could it be?

Very very hard, it turns out. I had to write two new pieces of software, completely overhaul a third, and fix some obscure bugs hidden deep inside a fourth. But I didn’t discover that until I’d reached the point of no return …

I’ll probably blog more at some point about the software engineering hoops I had to jump through in order to make this all work. Email me if you’re interested.

In the mean time, hope you enjoy the video! (You can also view it on YouTube.)

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Rediscovering music

Adam — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:18:08 +0000

I’m sitting on a plane from LA to Chicago. This is my fifth flight in the last two months, having already been to New York, Ohio, Florida, and California, and it’s probably about time I explain what the hell I’m doing, as I have friends and family who have seen various confusing status updates I’ve posted on Facebook and Twitter whom I owe the full story.

Just over two years ago, I blogged about taking a leap of faith and turning down two great jobs because they didn’t involve doing something I was truly passionate about. It was a gamble, but even after two months I could tell it was going to pay off. Sure enough, two years later, I found myself with a wealth of new experience and knowledge which I’d had a ton of fun acquiring, plus a healthy boost to my CV and set of friends and connections within the industry.

Then the stars aligned again, and I found myself with another life-changing dilemma: take an even more awesome job than the one I was in, or quit IT altogether and face an indefinite period of zero income. Pretty obvious what to do, right? I quit.

If that sounds crazy, it’s because it probably was – definitely another leap into the unknown. But I’ll try to explain my decision. I’ve had a number of life-changing decisions to make over the years, and I’m gradually learning to trust my gut instincts in those moments, because they’re generally right. I think they work out well because they’re usually based on my need to keep doing things I love doing (or to put it another way, my pathetic lack of tolerance for things I don’t enjoy), rather than concerns about money and other tedious “real world” distractions.

But wait, I hear you ask – didn’t I just say I decided not to pursue an even more awesome job than the one I loved doing for the last two years? How could my instincts guide me away from that? There are two parts to the answer.

Firstly, I had a bit of luck recently which combined with existing savings and investments meant that I could afford not to work for a while. Secondly, I’ve had an itch for a long time to play more music, and it just wouldn’t go away. In fact it kept growing and growing, until (20 years later than would have been ideal) I identified it as a basic need that I’m stuck with for good. When I say “play more music”, I don’t mean the kind where you go off and play along with CDs in your bedroom every now and again, or join an amateur orchestra. That’s enough for some people, and I totally respect that – but for some reason (false pride, perhaps) I could never bear to think of myself as a hobbyist musician. For better or worse, I only ever enjoy playing music when I’m playing to the best of my ability, and experiencing real progress.

Unfortunately, in music as with many things in life, progress requires hard grind – the standard blood, sweat and tears formula. Jazz musicians call it “shedding” which is short for “woodshedding”, because the idea is you lock yourself in a woodshed for 6 months and practice non-stop. If a 15 year career in IT has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t develop your musicianship quickly alongside a full-time job outside music. So I quit. Or at least, I’m taking sabbatical. To be honest I have no idea what will happen. Maybe I’ll go back to IT full-time, maybe part-time, maybe never. Right now I’m just focusing on studying, practising, playing with other people … whatever I can do to improve.

I decided that I’m most interested in developing my non-classical skills, especially jazz but also various types of folk, pop, Indian, and whatever else takes my fancy. I’ve played (Western) classical music my whole life and had some of the most incredible experiences from it, but now I want to explore what can be done on the cello outside that – cello is such a versatile instrument and there’s a whole new sound world which is a mostly untrodden path at this point.

That’s all I have time for now, but I’ll blog again soon about the amazing experiences I’ve already had around the USA in the last two months – I have a whole ton of photos, audio and video, so watch this space!

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Flying with a (carbon fibre) cello

Adam — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:17:46 +0000

When flying, most cellists are faced with either buying an extra ticket or getting a flight case, paying oversized baggage fees, and praying. Experiences vary widely and are in places well documented and full of useful advice, e.g.

My situation is different because I have a Luis and Clark carbon fiber cello which is incredibly robust and generally does not even go out of tune when checked in as normal baggage and placed in the hold of the aircraft in a normal hard case. My case is a Bam Hightech measuring 54.5 × 21 × 13.75″. It seems virtually all airlines policies regarding oversized baggage operate in “linear” or total dimensions, which generally means by summing up the 3 separate dimensions together (although in some cases the wording is so confused, even that’s not clear). This means my case has a linear dimension of 89.25″ which unfortunately is outside the 62″ standard limit, and even just outside Delta’s second tier limit of 80″. Having said that, so far I have always managed to get it treated as normal sized baggage just by behaving exactly as if it was a normal suitcase, or even need be simply by confidently pointing out that the height is 54.5″ which is under 62″. In my experience, most staff at the check-in gate are not familiar with the exact terms in their airline’s policies, so having the right attitude (confidently knowledgeable and up-front but non-confrontational) can go a long way.

I’ve done some research on the policies of some popular airlines and referenced the relevant extracts below, with one section per airline. The quotes I’ve taken are focused mainly on national flights within the USA, because despite being from the UK, I’m currently flying around the USA a lot. However the policies for international flights seem similar, although sometimes with higher fees.

N.B. In addition to the below fees, most airlines typically charge around $25 for checking an extra bag.

Delta Air Lines

http://www.delta.com/traveling_checkin/baggage/special_baggage/musical_instruments/index.jsp

What Musical Instruments Can Be Checked?
Musical instruments or equipment can be checked if the total linear dimension (length+width+height) does not exceed 115 inches (292 cm) and provided the weight, including the case, does not exceed 100 lbs. (45 kg).
Standard rules and fees for overweight and oversized baggage

http://www.delta.com/traveling_checkin/baggage/excess_baggage/index.jsp#oversize

175 USD/CAD* for bags measuring 63–80 inches (161-203 cm) in combined length, width, and height. Some Specialty Items may be exempt from this fee.

300 USD/CAD* for bags measuring 81-115 inches (204-292 cm) in combined length, width, and height. Some Specialty Items may be exempt from this fee

Summary – could cost over $300 but been lucky so far.

Jetblue Airways

http://help.jetblue.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/webisapi.dll/,/?St=351,E=0000000000047971896,K=4928,Sxi=18,Case=obj(2132)

Musical instruments as checked baggage:
There is no charge for Musical instruments as long as they are within size and weight requirements. JetBlue accepts no liability for damage to Musical instruments. We suggest packing them in a hard-sided container designed for travel.

http://help.jetblue.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/webisapi.dll/,/?St=351,E=0000000000047971896,K=4928,Sxi=18,Case=obj(634)

63 – 80 inches (203.2 centimeters): $75 per bag
Bags over 80 inches: Will not be accepted

Summary: could be forced to buy an extra cabin ticket, or even turned away. However they have a good reputation amongst cellists.

United Airlines

http://www.united.com/page/article/0,6867,50773,00.html#music

Maximum weight/size for musical instruments as checked baggage
50 pounds/62 linear inches
(23 kg/158 linear cm)

However standard oversized baggage allowed up to 115 linear inches:

http://www.united.com/page/article/0,6867,52907,00.html#oversize

for fee of $100:

http://www.united.com/page/article/1,,53403,00.html

Summary: musical instruments discriminated against and limited to max of 62″ whereas other oversized baggage can go up to 115″ for cost of $100.

Frontier Airlines

http://www.frontierairlines.com/frontier/plan-book/travel-info-services/baggage/baggage-chart.do;jsessionid=5DBD43BCE9C1368C59705E648F626AD4

For musical instruments, no extra charges but excess, oversize and overweight charges apply if applicable.

http://www.frontierairlines.com/frontier/plan-book/travel-info-services/baggage/checked-baggage.do

We know it’s a weighty issue, but please remember items which exceed 62 linear inches (length + width + depth) or weigh more than 50 pounds will incur a fee. There is a $75 fee for bags exceeding these weight limitations and a $75 fee for exceeding the size limitation. These fees are charged separately and one item can incur multiple fees. You can read more about baggage in the Contract of Carriage (PDF).
We take the safety of our passengers and employees very seriously. Frankly folks, our employees have to lift and carry these bags to get them to your flight and we’d really like to keep those checked bags under 50 pounds each. And, as much as we’d like to help, we don’t accept baggage that weighs more than 100 pounds or exceeds 110 linear inches (length + width + depth). If you need to transport items this large, please check with your favorite package delivery company. Thanks for your understanding of our policy.

Summary: $75 worst case – the best policy I’ve found so far.

Continental Airlines

http://www.continental.com/CMS/en-US/travel/Pages/BaggageExcess.aspx

Oversized Baggage

Customers who travel with checked baggage exceeding 62 linear inches (157 cm) (total length + width + height) will be charged at the rate of $100.00 per piece for travel within the U.S., and between the U.S. and Canada, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Customers to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America with oversize baggage will be charged at the rate of $200.00 per piece.

These charges are in addition to any charge assessed for additional or overweight baggage.

Baggage measuring more than 115 in (292 cm) (total outside dimensions; length + width + height) will not be accepted as checked baggage.

Summary: $100 worst case.

American Airlines

http://www.aa.com/i18n/travelInformation/baggage/baggageAllowance.jsp#overweight

Checked baggage which is larger than 62 in/157 cm will be charged at the rate of $200 per piece.
Baggage measuring more than 126 in/320 cm will not be accepted as checked baggage.
…
Instruments may also be transported as checked baggage, however, due to their fragile nature AA does not accept liability for damages and has limited liability for loss. AA is also not liable for any damage to checked musical instruments not presented in a hard-sided case. If the outside of the hard-sided case does not have visible damage, AA is not liable for any damage to the musical instrument inside the case.

The implications of the last two sentences don’t make any sense – if they do not accept liability for damage (as in the previous sentence), why even bother specifying requirements for hard cases and visible damage on the outside?

Summary: as bad as Delta, and with highly ambiguous wording regarding liability for damage.

Conclusion

Any cello case, even a non-flight case, will exceed the standard 62″ limit for oversized checked baggage, and unless you are lucky at check-in, will incur a fee typically around $75 to $100. Most cello cases are unlikely to top the overweight baggage restrictions. Generally musical instruments are subject to a slightly different “special baggage” policy to normal checked baggage, but usually this amounts to a disclaimer of liability and similar or identical rules regarding dimensions. Some airline policies are much worse, e.g. Delta, will potentially charge a whopping $300 for exceeding 80 linear inches, but having said that I have travelled with Delta several times and they didn’t charge me any oversize fee at all, just the extra checked item fee. United could potentially require a cabin ticket, and Frontier have the cheapest and most tolerant policy I’ve found so far.

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Audio looping with Free Software

Adam — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:24:15 +0000

I’m currently on a musical pilgrimage around the USA. I brought my Digitech JamMan Delay unit with me, because I was attending Christian Howes‘ phenomenal Creative Strings Workshop in Columbus, Ohio, where I knew I would learn how to turn this gadget into a hugely useful practice tool. (Incidentally, I was not disappointed, and will blog more when I get time about how awesome Chris’ various educational offerings are. Until then, click the links!) Unfortunately at some point after leaving Ohio, the JamMan stopped working. I guess it didn’t like being surrounded by a bunch of smelly clothes and then getting thrown in the hold of a plane. (UPDATE Sept 22nd: actually it turns out that it was fine – the power adapter just needed the UK standard of 240 Volts, and the US standard of 110V wasn’t sufficient …)

So the other night I found myself desperate for a replacement. I do have a Boss ME-70 with me which has a built-in phrase looper, but it only stores 38 seconds which is barely enough to get to the bridge of Cherokee. Even worse, there is no way to undo/redo loop layers or store the whole thing after you power the unit off.

Then it occurred to me that I could potentially combine my laptop (a cheap Samsung N150 netbook) with a microphone, headphones (as a poor man’s substitute for an amp), and some software to achieve the same thing. At this point, those of you with a Mac will exclaim “sure – use GarageBand!” However, as shiny as Macs are, they are expensive and I also can’t stand Apple for philosophical reasons. (I can’t stand Microsoft either, which is why I use Linux, but I digress.) If you are interested in an alternative approach to looping with software, read on!

My netbook already has a built-in mic, which while surprisingly good for something so tiny, couldn’t ever hope to compete with a proper mic. Plus it picks up noise every time you press a key or click a mouse. Luckily however I recently bought an excellent little portable PCM / MP3 recording device when I was in New York: the Sony PCM-M10. I’ve been using this to record all kinds of things on my travels – private lessons, groups classes/workshops, masterclasses, performances, jam sessions etc. However one really cool feature is that if you press the red Record button, it goes into paused “ready to record” mode, at which point, any audio captured by its built-in stereo mics get passed straight through to the 3.5mm (1/8″) headphones / line out socket. In other words, it will behave just like a pretty decent stereo mic! So, one trip to Radioshack later, I had a male-to-male stereo cable for connecting the headphones socket to the microphone input on my laptop.

So at this point I could record fairly decent stereo audio directly using any simple recording software. The next step was to see if I could find some good looping software… I tried out SooperLooper which looked very promising and is Free Software (free as in freedom, not just price), but I found the interface very confusing and poorly documented, despite only needing to do basic looping. From 1996 until a few weeks ago, I was an IT professional, so if I struggled, it’s likely that less technically minded people would too. Plus it only runs on Linux and MacOS X, which rules out anyone with Windows. To be fair, I do believe that SooperLooper has a bright future – with a few tweaks and some comprehensive documentation, most of the difficulties could be eliminated. But for now it isn’t quite right for what I need.

Then I looked very briefly at other Free Software loopers: Kluppe, and FreeWheeling, but neither had enough polish, and trying to progress as a musician is hard enough without the distractions of trying to help fix software bugs.

Finally I realised Audacity, the superb cross-platform sound editor, could do everything I wanted, and actually do it surprisingly well! So, here’s a first stab at explaining how to emulate a loop pedal with Audacity. (Later I may collaborate with Chris to produce an instruction video on this…)

Download and install Audacity – it’s Free Software (as I said above, Free refers to freedom not just price, which is much cooler than freeware) and it works on Linux, Windows, and MacOS X.
Ensure your computer can record audio via some kind of microphone (ideally a decent external one as explained above, but a built-in mic will do) or line in.
(Obviously) ensure your computer can play back audio to you. When you add new layers onto the loop, you will be playing along with the existing layers. If you’re using an acoustic instrument with mic, and want to avoid including sound from the existing layers getting mixed in with the new layer being recorded, one cheap trick is to use headphones instead of an amp/speakers. This is what I do because I can’t lug an amp around on my travels.
Start up Audacity, click the red Record button, and check that it’s correctly recording sound from your mic or line in. You should see a waveform appear, then hit Stop, and Play to check it’s working.
Click the cross in the newly recorded track to discard it.
(Optional but recommended) Record a count-in track. This could simply be you saying “a-one, a-two, a one-two-three-four”, or four clicks from the metronome app on your phone, or whatever. Leave a few seconds of silence before clicking the Stop button to stop the recording.
(Optional but recommended) Click “Audio Track” at the top left of the new waveform, click “Name…”, and enter something like “count in” as the new track name. Optionally click the up arrow at the bottom left of the new waveform to shrink it vertically, if you want to save screen space.
Click the Record button, then record your first loop layer after the count in, then stop recording soon after (it doesn’t matter exactly when). Chris Howes recommends that if you are using the looper as a practice tool to improve your internal pulse and groove, your first layer should contain as many of the subdivisions of whatever meter you’re playing in. So if you’re in 4/4, consider starting with a chopping or comping pattern which covers all the eighth or sixteenth notes. Then the bass line can come later and lock in with these nicely.
(Optional but recommended) Rename the track you just recorded, as in step 7.
Repeat steps 8 and 9 to record additional layers (you can also skip this for now and do it later).
Select the portion of audio across all tracks which corresponds to the loop you want, i.e. omitting the initial count-in and any trailing silence or noise. To do this, drag the mouse from the left-most point within the second waveform (track) from the top (remember the top one was your count-in track) where the loop starts, and then drag to the right-most point where the loop ends in the bottom (i.e. most recently recorded) loop layer. You should now see the desired loop region in all tracks but the count-in track turn a darker color.
Now hold down Shift and click the Play button, and you should hear your loop. If the start or end isn’t quite right, move the mouse over either boundary, and drag it left or right, then stop playback and start it again to check that you got the right loop region.
When you’re happy, click Edit > Play Region > Lock to avoid accidentally changing the loop region. (If you want to change it later, you’ll have to unlock it first, then repeat steps 12 and 13.)
Carry on recording new layers at will. Existing layers can be muted, changed in volume, panned left/right, deleted, and edited in a zillion other cunning ways, because Audacity is primarily a sound editor, not a looper.
(Advanced usage – entirely optional) If you want to temporarily focus on practising a smaller portion of the loop, for example you can’t quite nail the Cherokee bridge or those pesky 9th and 10th measures of Countdown above 350bpm, then you can select those measures as in steps 11 and 12, but then click Tracks > Add Label At Selection, and enter a label for this portion. You’ll see a new label track containing the new labelled region, which can then be used to quickly select this portion for playback. You’ll probably have to first unlock the play region set in step 13, so instead you might want to have a label for the whole loop too.
If you’re happy with the final result and want to keep it for another session, click File > Save Project from the menu or hit Control+S.

That’s it! It may be a bit more involved than stomping on a couple of pedals, but it’s simpler than the steps above make it look, and it is a hell of a lot more flexible, doesn’t include the stress of having to stomp precisely when you start and finish playing, and doesn’t cost several hundred dollars either (yes, I’m writing this for an American audience, in case you hadn’t already noticed by the spelling and vocabulary above …) The only downside is that you can’t do all the steps seamlessly for a live performance in the way a looper pedal lets you.

Hope that was useful. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments!

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harmonicas, and a reharmonisation of “Foreign Lander” by Tim O’Brien

Adam — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:38:58 +0000

How do three music addicts survive when attempting to travel for 25 days without a musical instrument? Answer: they cheat. I caved in on day 3 and bought a harmonica in Kuala Lumpur:

Despite being sold as a “chromatic” harmonica, it could only manage a rough approximation to three octaves of C major. Also, the holes are in a different place for the top octave, which meant every time I attempted the “do re mi” major scale, I accidentally finished with “… fa sol la ti MI” followed swiftly by a profanity, and consequent howls of laughter from Corinna. It cost very little and sounded progressively worse the more I practiced it, although I only place the blame partially on the harmonica for that. In case you don’t believe me, here’s the proof:

http://blog.adamspiers.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/terrible-harmonica-scale.mp3

(Now seems a good time to mention that if you haven’t already seen Shane singing 5 octaves on the piano, go and watch it immediately.)

Eli followed suit shortly after, although he managed to buy a harmonica which was not only roughly in tune with mine, but even stayed in tune with itself! He also proved to be a quicker and more dedicated student than myself. Nevertheless, by the time we reached Xmas day in Bangkok, we were able to give reasonably credible renditions of the harmonica duet version of Jingle Bells to our unsuspecting families over Skype.

Corinna sensibly eschewed^* such a crude instrument in favour, sorry, favor of something much sweeter – her voice. She also steered us very gently away from the harmonicas towards singing too, although with my range being comparable to Shane’s, and Eli’s “occasionally unstable” falsetto, I’m not sure that was quite as sensible.

Anyway, I digress. We learnt Tim O’Brien’s beautiful song “Foreign Lander”, and figured out some harmony and a bass line, which by the time of the final performance with banjo in Changi airport actually sounded pretty good! However my jazz tendencies mean that I sometimes get the urge to take something simple and beautiful and do evil corrupt things to it. So when I got back to London I reharmonised it as follows:

http://blog.adamspiers.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Foreign-Lander-reharmonisation.mp3

(If you know how to play the piano properly, please ignore the fact that I don’t …)

[*] One of the many running themes of the trip was “words you write/understand but never say” – for me ‘eschewed’ falls into this category. ‘Sidewalk’ used to too, but after 25 days with two Americans, I found it magically popping out of my mouth. Eli came up with ‘idyllic’, Corinna with ‘laviscious’ and ‘ephemeral’, and there were several others I will need help remembering …

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Rhythms of the City playing the London Marathon

Adam — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:09:00 +0000

After some hardcore training, am looking forward to watching the marathon tomorrow from the sidelines… not quite from the comfort of a sofa though as I’ll be playing with my band along the route just after the 14 mile marker (which is also a bit after mile 21). Good luck to all my friends doing it!

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kids are pretty cool

Adam — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:25:00 +0000

If you want a shining example of how to get kids to enjoy making music, look no further than Pete Churchill and the Merton Music Foundation. Last night I played in the Music is for Life concert at the Royal Albert Hall with about 1500 kids (some aged over 30) and it was a complete riot. Well, I guess anything involving that many kids is going to be a riot, but this one was very organised and massive amounts of fun. Great music too, coming from Pete whose composition career is so successful that (in his own words) it’s taken him as far and wide as Australia and Woking.

Unexpected side effect: the cravings to play jazz more often are getting too hard to ignore. If you see me starving on the sidewalk in a few years’ time with a big “will play bop for food” sign then you’ll know how it happened.

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Jazz cello

Adam — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:14:00 +0000

Doing a gig with Pete Churchill and some mates from my band in the Royal Albert Hall on Monday – haven’t played jazz cello in a while so really looking forward to it. No improvisation but I’ve heard Pete’s writing is really great so should be fun.

Also following hot on the heels of a mad mid-carnival gig, the next monthly installment of Guanabara goodness from my band is on April 4th – come check it out!

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