Out of bits of maritime Brighton, I just made a Jouhikko. It’s a centuries old Finnish folk instrument that makes quite a rough, haunting, woody sound.

This is what it can sound like:

 

This got chiselled into the body; an off-cut of a big piece of the walkway off of the old Brighton pier:

 

This was hollowed out with hammer & chisel:

 

A piece of cedar was used for the soundboard (& another tiny piece for bracing):

 

This bit of nondescript hardwood; perhaps beech,

 

was carved and whittled into a tailpiece:

This is a super-exciting bit of wood – a piece of sea-post, that had been lodged in the beach for decades. The iodine and salt in the sea permeated into the wood and left a blue, crystal-like finish. This bit was used for tuning pegs:

The strings (& eventually the bow hair) were made out black Mongolian stallion hair:

 

***

All these parts were mixed together with some wood-stain and glue, oh and a bought maple bridge & some fine-tuners, and this was had:

 

 

It will be used for some recording when I’ve worked out how to play it. & I’ll make a bow out of something equally loaded with Brighton relevance – antlers are the traditional material – tis a great shame there aren’t urban-seaside deer. Yes, on my next recording venture it’ll be played lots.

Thanks to the Brighton Woodstore for giving me the wood for the main body & tuners, and to Tim from Aguilera Guitars for linking me up with the top.

Tints by Nick Baxter

Available to download for however much you want; free to bankruptcy

Credits:

Nick Baxter – Violin, Vocals, Guitars, Keys, Synth, Organ, Upright Piano, Bass, Melodeon, Sitar, Percussion, Xaphoon, Penny Whistle, Spoons, Kazoo, Bass Recorder, Saxophone, Programming, Sampling, Arrangements, Field Recording, Photography, Artwork, Cover Design,  Engineering, Mixing, Producer, Composer, Mastering

Ania Zydron - Violin & Vocals on Yellow Smiles, Modeling

James Stockman – Kit, Mix Assist

Max Walker – Mix Assist

 Thanks to Ania Zydron, James Stockman, Max Walker, Diana Ribichini & Cameron Devlin

Recorded in The Highlands & Brighton, 2011

…

Download from Bandcamp

Since January this year, pretty much every day I’ve been doing ear training, trying to acquire perfect pitch. The David Lucas Burge course is the best known, and as it’s a pretty esoteric pursuit it’s hard to compare methods, I did no weighing up – I picked his.

Eleven months of fifteen minutes-a-day of intense listening have come and gone, and some vague, unwieldy, cumbersome note colour-discrimination skill is slowly emerging, ever so slowly. It takes consistent practise and Siddhartha-like patience to listen to something you can’t even hear in those early days.

As the months went on I realised the learning process is a fluid one – there is no one best way to train your ear – there are good exercises and techniques, but nothing concrete. So it is worth listening to what Mr Burge says to unravel the theory behind the teachings, to go more off-piste so you can create your own training “regime”. Saying that – I still haven’t finished listening to all the course.

I’m still in this ear-gym every day, but here’s some advice for anyone starting out with all this (I’ve no idea if it’s good advice, but then I don’t know if many people who teach this would either):

- Try to use the same keyboard/piano patch/trumpet everyday – it helps your memory attach the artefacts of the instrument to the tone.

- Something I’ve just started doing is attaching the first not of a melody to each of the 12 tones. They have to be ones that you know well, and probably being written for your instrument of choice helps, but it’s not too important.

 

A – Minor Swing (Django)

Bb – Nocturne No.9  (Chopin)

B – Beginning of Turkish March (Mozart)

C – Piano Sonata No 15 in C (Allegro) (Mozart)

C# – Another section, in the middle of Turkish March (Mozart)

D – The Entertainer (Joplin)

Eb – Voodoo Child (Hendrix)

E – Fur Elise (Beethoven)

F – Miss Misery (Elliott Smith)

F# – Ode To Joy (Beethoven)

G – Waltz #2 (Elliott Smith)

Ab – Midnight Sonata (Beethoven)

 

But yes, try to pick melodies you like. There would be nothing worse that hearing an off-cut of orphan tune repeat in you head day after day because you didn’t search out your own. It does really help with tone memory – I started doing this a couple of days ago, and I’ve improved more in those two than in the past thirty-two.

(Come to think of it, this may be a technique covered later on in the course, I doubt it though. If this is repetitious I apologise not.)

- & Expect to have days and weeks of head-crippling frustration with seemingly no improvement, often. These will pass, and come back again. Just let it happen, it’s all helping the ear. I think.

Something I haven’t used yet, but have made a basic Max/MSP patch for, is an automated random note player. This patch uses Max and Logic to allow me to still practise when I’ve not got a keyboard; which will be so good for when I’m tottering around the globe. In addition, it allows you to train your ear unhindered by the fact that your muscles half know what the tones you play are – something that’ll be really important when you get good at note-guessing.

 

Here’s my Max patch.

Right-click download.

 

If you need a hand to get Max and Logic talking, there are some tutorials here, and it’ll work with other DAWs, but you’ll have to hunt for help with that.

Enjoy.

 

All these sounds, once upon a time, were trapped in the bellows of a Melodeon.. besides a little bit of electro-tweaking.

 

A rehearsal of song we played at a festival this year. This was the only recording that we had of this, and it’s straight onto a laptop – this is why it sounds junky.. It’s about organ donation.. Ania Zydron on violin & James Stockman on drums.

Album-a-comin’