robrohr.org : music

These curtains are soothing if you are red-green colorblind...

robrohr — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:57:00 GMT

I just got back from a week of fiddling up in the Great White North, or more accurately, the Great Sandy Nord. I attended for the first time the first annual Camp Violon Trad Quebec, where the likes of Andre Brunet, Stephanie Lepine, Martine Billette and Eric Beaudry crammed notes into our skulls by the shovelful. Because there were so many tunes to learn, there was absolutely no time to have any fun.

The individuals in this photo, despite appearances are NOT having a grand old time at a Mardi Gras evening on Tuesday. This is simply a display of the tremendous acting skills of the students at this camp. From left to right, you will find the following serious individuals pretending to be having a heck-uv-a time.

- Carol D. - English teacher and schoolmarm at a private school in southern Vermont
- Joan F. - Law enforcement officer at an institute of higher education in central Illinois
- Donna M. - Research Librarian for a large municipal library in Canada
- Doug L. - High school science teacher in central Vermont
- Rob R. (no relation) - Computer programmer for a large state university in northwestern Vermont

Though the preparatory materials indicated that there would be a Mardi Gras evening, I would like to point out that I came completely unprepared, not knowing what such would entail. I suspected I would sit in the corner, ready to be entertained by the outlandish outfits and antics of the less repressed. Then I walked through the lounge near the entrance to my sleeping quarters. A chorus of angels began singing one of those songs from the Little Mermaid. A silver spear of light pierced the windows, and through my tears of joy, I saw... the curtains. Sheer beauty, I tell you. Other than the color choice, the pattern and the drape. At that moment, I knew I would come to the party as Carmen Miranda (Really? No idea? Check her out on youtube). We had the fruit technology and duct tape in the kitchen, we had the appropriate swathes of material. How could I possibly go wrong? Oh yeah. No frikkin' time. So a few safety pins from the basket on the sink in the (ehem, women's) rest room, an excursion up the wall to liberate a few yards of material, and there you have it: a colourblind Scotsman. I was asked what was holding up my kilt, but I believe the appropriate question is, "Whet's hauldin' her doon, aye?"

I was kilt clad throughout dinner and the subsequent improv show (similar to who's line is it anyway, only with fiddles and a language barrier). The next morning, the only indication of these curtains had gone for a bit of a road trip was a few wrinkles where I had been "settin' ma' wee hiney on the carrick*." You can see some of the curtain hanging loops below my left fist. By midnight, these curtains were back on the rod where they belonged, and only this photo to remind us of the rollicking good times that occurred on Tuesday evening at the first ever Camp Violon Trad Quebec.

* Yes, I know that Carrick is constituency represented in the Irish House of Commons between 1614 and 1800, and thus this statement makes no sense, but I was in the middle of an improv and a carrick sounds like something a fake Scotsman might sit upon, especially if he has a certain red-green color differentiation issues.

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Szekeres, 2008

I'm still here...

robrohr — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:29:51 GMT

I've had a whirlwind year and haven't been sharing unnecessary or inappropriate information about the minutia of my life with total strangers, so I thought it was time to grant the internets a glimpse at my deepest, most private insights. Fortunately for you all, I'm not that much of a sadist to inflict that upon you.

Instead I'll give you a short recap of the last year.

Attended the Dance Flurry in Saratoga last January. Awesome experience, with bands like Raz de Maree (Tidal Wave) and Nightingale. The music was great, the contradancing was great, the jam sessions were good too. This was my first opportunity to try out the new lumber. Very exciting.
Another semester of successful, but punishing classes in the Computer Science curriculum. Got A's in both Neural Computation and Wireless Sensor Networks. Glee! Job + Classwork = Grueling. Grueling + Time = Success. Success leads to a celebration dinner and a full tummy. So I guess I'm effectively shutting myself off from the world for four months at a time in order to get a pile of sushi (seriously, folks, try the Tempura battered Sweet Potato sushi rolls at Sakura in Burlington or Williston). Yum!
I finished up my first year as Staff Council representative for the School of Business Administration at the University of Vermont. Because of the massive reorganization of the Staff Council, the Bylaws had to be gutted, and as a Rules and Elections committee member, we had some serious work to do, which was ultimately passed. Sorry folks, no photos of this grim business.
Attended the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA) in Mansfield, MA in April. Again, tons of contradancing and jamming opportunities. Got to play with the folks from Raz de Maree in a kicking Quebecois jam session. Seriously cool.
Started attending a local Irish Session/Seisun about a mile from my house at the Lincoln Inn in Essex. It's mostly mid-speed stuff with some really great people attending. The every-other-week schedule conflicted massively with my vacation & business trip schedule for June and July, so I wasn't able to attend a single session those months, but I should return next week.
First week of June, I went to TechEd (my tenth time there). Ton's of good info as always. The jam session was quite good, though not nearly as frequent as I would have liked. I tried to organize an impromptu Irish session midweek, but there was not sufficient response in time to do so. The regular session in the area (Orlando) was the following week during the IT-Pro conference.
Third week of June, I went to Northeast Heritage Music Camp (NHMC) in Johnson, VT. This was my second time at this camp, as I first attended last year. This year I brought a real fiddle, and the experience was so much better than the phenomenal experience I had the year before. Absolutely stunningly talented faculty, each one so generous with their time & experience. Worth every penny. The Quebecois instructor, Daniel Lemieux, was sadly unable to attend because of a shoulder injury, but Donna Hebert proved to be a capable replacement that introduced me to the music of Louis Beaudoin, from my hometown. Who knew? Dorm living, but you get your own room. Plenty of food, plenty of class options, plenty of jamming, plenty of sleep deprivation. Almost overslept & missed my ride home.
First week of July, my niece and nephew came to town to visit for a week. We took trips to the library for books and strawberry shortcake, went exploring in the gully beneath the hydro dam, biked along the shores of Lake Champlain, saw fireworks from the top of one of the taller buildings in Burlington, and ended with a trip to see Circus Smirkus, a touring circus whose talent is made up of teenagers. They were awesome. The circus performers too.
After the week was up, Margot, Maggie, Robert and I headed over to New Hampshire to go camping with a large fraction of my family. We stopped on the way to visit my Grandmother, who at 91 years of age, was missing her 1st year of camp in years due to a bronchial infection. She was so glad to see us, almost as glad as we were to see her. At camp, there was much swimming, eating, hiking, and catching up with all the parents/sisters/nieces/nephews. It's always a good time, except the parts where everyone is cranky. A good dunk in the lake usually solves that.
This past week I went to Quebec to take part in Camp Violon Trad Quebec (the home page with links to the French and English versions throws a suspicious popup) in Rawdon, about an hour north of Montreal, PQ. However incredible NHMC has been (see above) these last two years, this camp was even better. A little smaller in scope, a little more rustic in accommodations, but even more personal and it would be tough to beat the talent and teaching ability of the faculty. If you are a Quebecois Trad music junky like me, there is no question. There is nothing like this available elsewhere in this concentration, aside from moving to Joliette or St.-Côme and getting adopted by one of these fantastic musicians. At the end of the week, the campers performed the tunes they had learned...
...on the main stage of the Festival Memoire & Racines at Joliette, PQ. The festival was incredible amount of fun. Wall to wall music, dancing, camaraderie, and all-night-jams. I got to teach the tricky bits of St.-Côme Reel #4 to Pascal Gemme of Genticorum. Oh, bliss. Luckily, I had sufficient practice dealing with sleep deprivation the previous week and at NHMC that I was able to survive on only 5 hours sleep combined on Friday & Saturday nights. Returned home on Sunday a functional zombie, but infected with surely illegal levels of Canadian Bliss (TM). If I have to choose only camp/festival to attend next year, it will be this one. I will of course apply a wedgie to the individual that makes me choose between NHMC and CVTQ, but will have to choose north of the border.

Don't make me use my mad wedgie skillz.

Shopping for lumber...

robrohr — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 02:53:39 GMT

The saga so far:

Had violin growing up. Decent quality. Crack in top plate under tailpiece, glued but not well. Serviceable tone, but low volume.
Started playing again about two years ago, and about a year after I picked up the fiddle again, the repaired cracked stopped being repaired and any note on the A-string would buzz mercilessly. Cost to repair this acoustic instrument? Much more than a replacement instrument of similar value and known tone/volume with no guarantee as to sound quality once the repair is complete.
Solution? Get another instrument. Bought an electric fiddle from Bridge Instruments in the UK, which had good tone, but again, low volume when not amplified, and a bit tinny in the top end (also when playing acoustically).
Went to jam sessions and music camps and had problems hearing myself when playing in groups. Major bummer.

So here I am, one year after spending a medium-sized pile of cash on an electric fiddle to replace the instrument I grew up playing. It's a very nice instrument, but there are times when it's just not right to pull out an amplified instrument. So I had my eye out for an acoustic fiddle with decent tone that wouldn't break the bank.

This past September, I wandered into the local folk instrument shop (Vermont Folk Instruments, Burlington, VT) to see what they had in consignment fiddles. It turns out that they had three new and one consignment instrument hanging on the wall. I tried the two new models (one was a duplicate), both factory-made student models fresh out of the shipping container. The "expensive" model came with case and bow for $225. I didn't have high expectations, and found that I had overestimated the quality of the sound that I was able to produce. I don't usually use the word "dreadful" as that makes me sound like I'm 90 years old and talking about various body-modification techniques in vogue with the youngsters today, but I felt it was fairly applicable to the tone produced by these beasts.

Then I took the consignment fiddle off the wall. I tuned it, and started noodling. The sound was surprisingly full and rich, considering the price tag. The price had already been dropped by $100 from the seller's original request. There was a 2-inch long gouge in the top, running in an arc from the fine-tuners towards the bow hand side. Strictly cosmetic. The ribs in the lower bout of this instrument (see Wikipedia - Violin construction and mechanics for terminology) was made of two pieces of wood, joined where tailpiece enters. In inspecting the join between the two pieces, I noticed about a millimeter gap. Since I had already had issues with a bad repair on an instrument giving way on me, I was not ready to part with the asking price if I weren't sure of the structural stability of a replacement fiddle. The last thing I need is a third instrument that I can't use.

I expressed my concerns to the shopkeeper (lovely plumage, but it's stone dead), he shrugged his shoulders, couldn't tell me anything about the viability of the join. So I put it back on the shelf and walked out.

Margot has told me, and I agree, that pricey purchases should be set back on the shelf, and you go home and think about it for a week (or a month) and if it still seems like a good idea after subjecting the purchase to cold calculating reason, then you go back and buy it.

So I let it sit for a month, then two. Just before Thanksgiving, I was meeting Margot downtown for our daily carpool, and I thought I'd stop by the folk shop to see if the fiddle was still there, and if not, if any other consignment instruments were there. The telltale gouge in the top face greeted me cheerfully from the row of fiddles on the wall. I checked the price. Still no movement from September, but the instrument was still there. I played it a little more, then talked with an instrument tech about my concerns about the lower bout. Once assured that that join isn't structural (there's a block behind the join that connect the upper and lower plates and acts as the seat for the endpin), I made an offer on the instrument that was about 20% lower than the listed price.

After Thanksgiving, not having heard back about my offer, I visited the store, the seller of the instrument was called, a tiny bit of haggling ensued, and I left with a new (to me) fiddle. It ain't the prettiest, but I think it's gorgeous. I brought it to my Gram's for Christmas, and I'll bring it to my folk's for New Year's.

Pictures/audio samples to follow.

Less art, more detail.

robrohr — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 03:20:31 GMT

My photo from my previous post introducing the new fiddle didn't have the proper light to show some of the finer details of the fiddle in question, so I'm including a couple of snaps here from the Bridge Instruments website to show the instrument off a little better.

There is a battery clipped to the back that engages the internal electronics whenever a 1/4 inch cable is plugged into the bottom. There are two controls on the front for volume and tone. The hollow body resonates quite well, and the fiddle is nearly as loud (unamplified) as an acoustic violin. The tone is quite good, though the high end is a little harsh. The brightness is smoothed out under amplification though. Once I get a few tunes sussed out, I'll try to record them and post MP3s for our listeners at home.

Fiddlesticks!

robrohr — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 03:56:00 GMT

I am pleased to report that I have a new fiddle.

I am, however, sad to announce that I needed to go out and get a new fiddle.

The image shows the new wee sleekit beastie in repose. The new fiddle is a four-stringed Aquilla model by Bridge Instruments in the UK. Yes, it's black, and oddly shaped. The body is made of a carbon fiber composite with kevlar added to the front plate. Unlike most electric fiddles, this has a hollow body resonating cavity, so it is nearly as loud as a traditional acoustic wooden instrument. It has a pickup in the bridge as well as a jack on the back for routing the sound to an amplifier.

What happened to the old fiddle?
I've been playing violin since I was in 3rd grade, and when I got old (large) enough to need a full sized instrument, I found out that my grandparents had an old violin in their attic. The violin had been my Dad's grandfather's instrument, and had passed to my grandfather who didn't know how to play. It was old, grimy, had broken strings and a snapped bridge and a pressboard case that was coming apart. I had no idea how it would sound, but it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. My folks brought me and my "new" violin to Blodgett's in Springfield, MA, to have the violin rehabilitated and brought back to playing form. A few weeks later we returned to the shop and I got to squeak a few notes out on it. For the most part, it was in pretty good condition, but a crack beneath the tailpiece had been clumsily glued in a previous repair, and as such would never be able to sound as loud as an instrument with an unbroken top plate. The tone was pretty good, at least as good as this young violin student could produce, and worlds better than the 3/4 size rental student violin could produce. That instrument is the instrument I've played since that day.

Aren't you that guy that wouldn't practice if he could help it?
I had played classical violin pretty constantly up through college, taking a brief hiatus, then joining my Uncle Jim on Sunday afternoons at the Schenectedy Hibernian Club to play some Irish music. When I started working for a living, the fiddle started making fewer and fewer appearances. With my move to Vermont, I would be lucky to play the thing once a year. When Margot and I started dating, she introduced me to her favorite bands, Great Big Sea and La Bottine Souriante, as well as some other great groups who have phenomenal fiddling and danceability as a common bond. It didn't take me long to get thoroughly hooked on the contradance music, and we went to various contradance/folk festivals in the area (Falcon Ridge, the Dance Flurry, NEFFA) as well as local dances, and I got the itch back to start up my fiddling. After attending a couple of old-style kitchen parties where all are encouraged to bring instruments and join in the folk-style fun, I knew I was hooked and had to get back to playing. The fiddle was dusted off, and I started to play again. I went to (Contradance) Band Camp in Tunbridge, and started looking forward to opportunities to play and learn.

Back in January, about a month or so before the Dance Flurry, I pulled the fiddle out, hoping to get my chops into some sort of shape where I could play for a few days without hurting myself. It was then that I noticed a harsh buzzing when I played notes on the A-string. New strings didn't solve the problem, nor did adjusting the bridge or any other tricks I know. Looking under the tailpiece, it appeared that the glued crack had worked itself unglued. A trip to the fine folks at the Burlington Violin Shop brought to light a host of other issues that, when combined, brought the repair bill for this old fiddle to the level of the cost of a brand new (significantly better) instrument. Harrumph.

So why not another traditional wooden acoustic instrument?
Although it is not cost effective to repair my old instrument, I am not abandoning this violin forever. Someday, when I have purely disposable resources, I'll probably commission a repair of this violin. It means too much to me for it to become a sad old instrument that never gets played again. Four years ago, at my second Falcon Ridge folk festival, Bridge Instruments had a tent in the vendor village showing off their instruments. They had a couple of violins (4-string, 5-string), a cello, and some amplifiers that were perfectly matched to their instruments. I played around with with their 4-string model, off amp and on, and I got a serious case of the covets.

At that point, I was appreciating but not playing the folk music, so there was no real case for buying a fiddle when I had a perfectly good violin gathering dust at home, but I told myself, "self, someday, this beautiful instrument will be yours." Well, my violin, while not dead, had a serious case of the illin's, and after some Margot assisted soul searching, I placed the order. It didn't arrive in time for the Dance Flurry, so the old wooden instrument got one more chance in the limelight.

Another podcast test...

robrohr — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 21:13:00 GMT

Trying a new method of ~~inserting~~ embedding to see what happens in different browsers...

Open source single button player from musicplayer.sourceforge.net.

I am looking for a flash-based audio player that I can use to embed audio in posts that will be usable cross-browser. No luck yet finding anything that is not obnoxious, unusable, or ugly. Hmmm.

The audio above is a capture from the Wednesday night traditional Irish Music session at the Radio Bean Coffeehouse in Burlington, VT.

If I had a hamster...

robrohr — Mon, 30 May 2005 17:04:00 GMT

...I'd hamster in the morning.
I'd hamster in the evening all over this land.
I'd hamster out danger...
I'd hamster out a warning...
I'd hamster out love between my hamster and my (other) hamster...
...Aaaaaaa-allll over this land.

Along the lines of my earlier Wacky New England Pronunciations post, I've decided that if I had a hamster, I would name her Hamcester.

TechEd Jam Sessions

robrohr — Thu, 20 May 2004 14:30:00 GMT

I've been playing in the TechEd Jam Sessions since my first Tech Ed in Dallas 5 years ago. If you haven't been, and are thinking of going up on stage, do it. The whole setup is well done, and there are plenty of instruments to go around. If you want to play, you simply go up onto stage, grab a free instrument or tap somebody on the shoulder.

The good:

Bevvys and snax.
Any Rolling Stones song
Anything Motown (Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye)
Mustang Sally (every night)
Roxanne (occasionally)
The musical instruments that are given away each night.

The bad:

Any one chord song: Electric Avenue leaps to mind.
Anything written after 1985
Anything where a piano, rhodes or hammond b-3 sounds extraneous

The ugly:

Communicating what the chord sequence is over the wall of sound.
Getting everyone to agree that a song is over.

If you're playing, bring earplugs. I mean it. Tech Ed is already surreal enough without having to wander the halls of the convention center feeling like there are two waffles duct-taped to the side of your head. There are some serious quality musicians among the 10,000 who are to descend on San Diego next week. Even if you don't want to play, go and listen. And don't bring earplugs.

Upcoming Concerts

robrohr — Fri, 29 Jun 2001 14:36:00 GMT

The VSO Chorus is putting on a summer concert July 28th [ed: Don't get excited folks. This post is recovered from 2001], at Hunter Park in Manchester, VT. The program is as follows:

Randall Thompson - Allelujah
Aaron Copland - Old American Songs
Samuel Barber - Agnus Dei
Scott Joplin - Ragtime Dance & Pineapple Rag
Aaron Copland - Appalachian Spring
George Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue

Anybody wanting any tickets, let me know and I'll be happy to get them for you.

Figuring out the blog thingy

robrohr — Tue, 26 Jun 2001 19:27:00 GMT

Hrmph. I'm still figuring this thing out. One of these days I'll read the felicitous manual (RTFM) and I know everything will be OK.

I'm off to choir rehearsal. The VSO Chorus is doing several Joplin rags, Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, made famous as the theme to the movie Platoon. More info on that concert later.