Day Three

I don't have very much stuff for today.

Brian Del Signore from the Houston Symphony Orchestra came in to the percussion departmental and did a little lecture on digital recording and its uses in the practice room. It was pretty cool to see how you can use modern technology to improve your technique and accuracy and the like. But a lot of it seemed kinda neurotic and it's certainly not something I would do every day.

Brian used a program called Audacity to record his playing, then analyze it by slowing it down and listening to what he recorded and by looking at the sound waves to see if he was playing strokes accurately and evenly. Audacity is pretty easy to figure out and you should look into it, at least download it: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

To be honest, I'm kinda scared to see if i'm terribly inaccurate or need a lot of work. But, in this case, what you don't know can indeed hurt you.

In my jazz records class the other day we listened to a composer/arranger named Don Ellis and the band he put together. His band was 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, 5 saxes (they all doubled on everything), 3 basses, a piano, 2 drumset players, a percussionist, and a sitar player. Certainly not your run-of-the-mill jazz band. Don didn't like normal things very much; he wrote all of his songs in compound meters, like 9/8 or 7/8 or something crazy like that, and he really liked quarter tones, which are kind of disgusting if you aren't very familiar with them. I've only heard two instruments built to play quarter tones, one was a quarter tone marimba I heard at PASIC, and the other was Don Ellis' trumpet (in the solo) in this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrsNOSewwAM

Don't mind the album cover.

That's about it for today. I miss home. But it's fun here :)
M