In the zodiac of my life, there are instrument obsessions that define certain time spans, so since last November this has definitely been the year of the fiddle. Which surprised me because I never had much interest in violins until I accidentally succeeded in repairing the old one that my aunt had (and didn't enjoy much) as a little girl back in the 1930s.
After playing it rather too enthusiastically at the folk weekend (in April) I've begun to notice some joint pains in the fingers of the left hand, so I'm not putting in massive amounts of practice but I do make sure to play a few folk tunes and a bit of Mozart (K525 or K304) every day, progressing very slowly.
Family reunion: All three instruments have been in the family for more than half a century: Heinrich the cello, Blue the guitar and Christa the violin.
PS Previous instruments on the zodiac were:
tenor sax 8/21-10/22 (the ergonomically designed instrument that works even with a frozen shoulder, also suited to keep people at a distance during plague times)
Heinrich the cello has now left the premises, and I am keeping up the practice habit with Jenny, the new cello on the block:
I am keeping up a revision rota of Bach movements, which haven't improved much since I reached peak Bach in the summer of 2021, but I still enjoy playing them, and I also need the revision to make sure I don't forget them. Here's the second minuet in G, liberated from the grip of the first minuet:
I am beginning to realise that the things I feel as raw and energetic when I play them may come across as scratchy and crude on the video. Oh well. For comparison, my recording of the same minuet with old Heinrich starts here.
Apart from keeping up with Bach, I am also learning the thumb position(s), which turns out to be much easier since I learned the essential fiddle playing. And I am trying to do something about my dismal sight reading. Long term plan: set up the world's worst string quartet.
In other cultural news, I am beginning to realise that there is a lot about Bach in the French TV series "Astrid: Murder in Paris", whose eponymous character has autism. I am learning a lot about both Bach and autism, even though I fear that it may reinforce the perception that enjoying Bach may be a symptom of autism. Will have to do a review of sorts when I'm through with the first season.
Oh and there was also a folky flashmob in the Weston Library last weekend, on the occasion of the Playford exhibition now open.
In the sixth month of the great violin adventure, I've spent a lot of time playing folk at this year's Folk Weekend Oxford and also at the first bandstand session of the season, and not quite so much time playing Eine kleine Nachtmusik (K525) as I had planned, although we did play that at Cowley Orchestra this week, which was a nice reminder. I'll get back to that.
Christa the violin making her debut appearance at the bandstand on May 1st.
Meanwhile, as we were jamming random show tunes at the tail end of the bandstand session, it occurred to me that Those were the days might make a nice fiddle tune. Trying it out I realised I really love indulging in the dynamics and tempo changes and going a bit wild with it. It even works an octave down - lots of scope to play around.
Although I've messed around with it for a week, this isn't quite presentable yet. So in lieu of a progress report, here's a video of a Scandi tune I played at the bandstand and recorded this weekend: Äppelbo Gånglåt
The last time I visited my aunt at Tulette (Drome, France), we were talking about the young cellist in my family, and it suddenly occurred to her that she once had a violin, growing up in Aachen in the 1930s, never got on with it, but the instrument was still buried in her attic in Tulette.
When her house was cleared out after she died, my cousin found this violin and was surprised as he hadn’t heard the story of his mother’s failure to learn the instrument back in Aachen. In June I visited my cousin and retrieved said violin with a view to bring it back to life. It looked like this:
i.e. soundpost, bridge, chinrest, and three strings missing, no bow, a bit scratched, but otherwise ok. In the photo it sports an improvised bridge I made from half a bamboo ring. I kind of like the dark look with the light borders and I don’t mind the scratches. So I took it to a luthier for an appraisal and was quoted £250 (plus strings) to get it into shape, with the perspective that it might be worth up to £500 in perfect condition. Not a really good instrument but “good enough for folk” as we like to say in folk circles, semi-ironically.
While I was pondering whether or not to do this, I discovered at Oxfam an old book on The Making of Stringed Instruments for £ 4 (George Buchanan, 1989). As it happens, it contains a very useful page on the part I thought I couldn’t do, namely putting the soundpost inside the instrument. I cut the post from a random bit of wood I had lying around. Turns out with a bit of wire bent to make a holder, a tool I made from a broken spoke, and four or five attempts, I was able to fit it in. One crucial bit of information from the book was that one can easily unplug the peg that holds the tailpiece, and thus get a hole through which one can actually see the placement of the soundpost very nicely.
I bought a bridge online for £ 2.50, and the book was again very helpful on how to shape it correctly. I had a set of violin strings sitting around which I put on (I kept the historic E string though, see how long it lasts!), and now it’s beginning to look like a proper violin:
(in the battered historic case which is lovely but not very practical for sessions, it doesn't offer much protection and doesn't have shoulder straps)
And it may be me having a Pygmalion moment here, but I do like the sound of it. Will practice a little to be able to record a video that’s not too much out of tune. UPDATE: Here's my attempt at playing Bear dance and Hunt the squirrel on day 7 of trying to play the fiddle.
Meanwhile I spotted a Stentor student fiddle at Gumtree sold for £ 25 from an address where I cycle past every week, so I picked that up on my way – it came with two bows, and I’ll probably use the case and the chinrest for the old fiddle. It also had two packs of rosin, one new and one maybe used three times.
Oh, and with hindsight, looking at the old photos taken in my grandmother’s flat at Idar-Oberstein, I recognise the violin case sitting on top of the piano (eg here and here). Better than the attic, and I do wonder whether it was ever used in those years (until 1961).
Along with Heinrich the cello, Frieda the piano, and Blue the guitar, this is the fourth instrument we have that’s been in the family for more than half a century (and I’m not even counting my school recorder, which isn’t a very good one). In this sense, this should have been episode 3 in the much-neglected all instruments series, but it comes in at number 22. Oh, and maybe I should list my house as a shelter for neglected instruments.
Update 2.12.2022 After I figured out where the gears and the brakes are on this thing, I began to realise that the historic E string didn't sound as good as the new strings, so I replaced that one as well. And with the full set of new (Dominant) strings, the instrument is really sounding quite lovely. Oh, and I'm creating a violin tag, as I feel I will obsess about this instrument some more.
On this leap day I am hoping to make a leap forward on the cello, studying the bourree I&II from Bach's 3rd cello suite.
The young cellist took her copy of the suites with her, but I discovered an edition at a charity shop earlier this month so now I have my own copy. And I've played JSB's only work for unaccompanied flute, the partita in A minor, a year ago, so it feels like a logical step up to tackle the cello suites. (Come to think of it, I've even played this very pair of bourrees on the flute a few years ago, but in an edition transposed to A, which I wouldn't really recommend.)
I expect the suites will keep me busy for a while. At three movements per year, this is going to take 12 years ...
Oh and here is Steven Isserlis who recorded the bourrees for his 60th birthday:
Going through my collection of Bach CDs, I discovered I have two recordings of guitar adaptations of the third suite, one by Pepe Romero and one by John Williams. In fact it does translate quite nicely to the guitar.
Update 30.3. - just discovered a helpful video with performance notes by Inbal Segev, who seems to have done videos about most if not all of the movements of the suites. Oh and her performance of the bourrees is here. And I need to buy her CD.
So, well, a year ago I started this series thinking with just under 50 instruments and 52 weeks to a year, I should get through in a year or so. In the event, I got 20 done and the total number of instruments in the house went up by a dozen, so give me another four years and I may have caught up.
Anyhow, we're still stuck in the 00s, which is when the young musician was at primary school and learned to play a plastic ocarina called poly-oc (TM). I think the school handed out both the instruments and the instruction book, as I don't recall buying either. They were produced from 1988-2004 according to this website, so we just caught the tail end of them.
It irritates me that I don't really understand the physics of the ocarina - so wouldn't be able without the fingering table to tell you which combination of open holes might produce which note. (The Ocarina Workshop website says the location of the holes doesn't matter, and they are all different sizes, so is it just the combined size of the open holes that determines the pitch?)
Still, the book has a little diagram for each note, so even I can play a tune with that help. So for the video I tried Au clair de la lune.
In the early 00s, still, the young musician got a tin whistle starter kit as a present from her cello teacher, including a tin whistle in D with James Galway's signature on it and a 16-page brochure with Galway's method. I'm a little bit allergic to the pompous "the man with the golden flute" image that has been created around Galway, so I find it refreshing that he also bothered with cheaper instruments like the tin whistle at some point.
The book has the address of Rose-Morris & Co. - that's still the name of a shop in London, but I think back in the days they were also instrument makers, so they may or may not have made the whistle. The company history is here with all sorts of exciting instruments, but I find no reference to whistles.
For the video I've attempted to play the Muiñeira Freixido, a traditional tune from the repertoire of our Galician session, which fits exactly within the bottom octave of the whistle:
I enjoy playing whistles every once in a while, although I am not all too keen on the sound of this one. I'm sure better ones will cross my path. I often have this one in my bag when I go out to play, just in case somebody needs a whistle.
The Cantigas de Santa Maria - 420 songs in mediaeval Galician (aka Galician-Portuguese) collected by Alfonso X. in the 13th century - are an important foundation of Galician culture, and one or two of them have been played (as instrumental tunes) at our Galician sessions as well. However, our harper who plays them from memory, had learned them without numbers or titles, so they were almost impossible to find.
I recently attended a seminar on the cantigas (the relevant paper is here), where I learned lots of things about their structures and storytelling. Also about the fundamentals - for instance, the images of musicians, like the one above, appear only in one of the four known manuscripts. Two others include illustrations relating to the stories of miracles told in nine out of every ten cantigas.
The seminar inspired me to look at the mystery of our harper's cantiga again and I discovered that the lovely database Cantigas de Santa Maria for singers has a forward arrow on the pages displaying the modern notation for each cantiga. Until now I had assumed that I had to access each one separately with several clicks each time, but in fact I can just flick through them. Which I did, and starting at number one, I found that the cantiga we play most often is actually number seven. Quick and easy - not sure if I'd have had the stamina to find it if it had been number 407.
So it's called
Santa Maria amar devemos
and here is a lovely version with karaoke text lines, so you can sing along (and unlike some other versions I found, the melody sticks very close to the version we play):
In other CSM news, I just acquired a big book of solo pieces for alto recorder (Altblockflötensolobuch by Barbara Hintermeier and Birgit Baude, Schott 2014), and that also contains two of the cantigas, namely
In terms of recordings, there are lots of them on YouTube, obviously. This channel has so many, it may well be all of them, but they are in no particular order and mixed with videos of other early music, so it's hard to tell. The ones I checked usually had the lyrics displayed in some form.
This video: Fiesta en el corte de Alfonso el Sabio combines recordings of some 14 cantigas by different artists with a large number of the musicians miniatures from the manuscript.
I have a CD by Ensemble Alcatraz, called Vision and Miracles (1988) which includes CSM 103, 333, 117, 34, and 42 along with an instrumental suite using several cantigas and some other medieval pieces.
The Dufay Collective has recorded a CD full of cantigas, which is called Miracles.
Estampie have recorded a few. No. 120 Quantos me creveren (the numbers ending in 0 are songs of praise as opposed to stories of miracles) is included in their "Best Of" CD (2007) and a few more are on their album Signum (2004) including Non e gran cousa (26), Non devemos (27) and Quen na virgen (this could be 186, 256, or possibly 59, 103, or 276 - I don't have this CD).
La Capella Reial de Catalunya have recorded a dozen cantigas with Hesperion XX and Jordi Savall, available on CD as "Cantigas de Santa Maria - strela do dia". I'm a bit confused as Amazon seems to think it dates from 2017, but since the millennium the ensemble has been known as Hesperion XXI, so I suspect it may be a rerelease of a 1990s recording. Oh, and somebody posted it on Youtube in 2013.
Some time back in the early 00s, I visited the PMT shop on Cowley Road, with a view to buy an electronic keyboard for the young musicians, but was left more confused than I had been before (I did buy a keyboard eventually but not on that day and not in this shop, will get back to that further down the line). So while I was wondering about touch-sensitive keys and pre-programmed accompaniments, I spotted an array of brightly coloured tambourines, and bought the yellow one as a displacement activity. I remember the shop assistant was amused by the plot twist.
It's from a US company called RhythmTech, and the range is called True Colors - looks like they still make them in 5 different colours and you can still buy the yellow one eg from Amazon (although I think it was a lot cheaper back then). Apparently the company's founder invented the crescent shape tambourine in an effort to have the centre of gravity of the instrument closer to the wrist and make playing less tiring, see the company's about page.
Although I haven't played it much (and certainly not enough to feel the pressing need for an energy-saving crescent shaped one), the tambourine has enjoyed its moments in the spotlight, as I brought it to the Misa Campesina, where the conductor used it a few times in the rehearsals and in the performance.
For the video I just gave it a quick shake - these things are really quite loud ...
... no not for xylophone, we've had that already, and I only have one (not counting silly toy versions). X is for xaphoon, and here's my xaphoon story:
In July 2002, I was heading to Paris for a microbiology conference, via Germany to deposit various kids with various grandparents. At the start of the journey, however, I put my back out moving luggage around on trains, and the extended travels over three days didn't help, so I arrived in Paris not being able to sit. Instead of attending the conference, I spent the first few days dividing my time between walking around (a bit) and lying flat on my back (a lot) on the nice slope along the side of the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg).
Arriving at my lying down place one day I was puzzled to hear somebody playing a saxophone very loud and clear but not seeing any saxophone. Following my ears while wondering what was wrong with my eyes I found a guy who was selling this new invention, the pocket sax, aka Xaphoon, out of his bag and demonstrating it in the street. Another customer attracted by the sound tried it and also produced a very convincing sax sound from this recorder-size instrument. So I bought one - I think it cost me 25 euros, and nowadays Hobgoblin sells them for £109, so it was a good investment. Although in my hands it doesn't really sound like a saxophone. But then again, in my hands a saxophone doesn't sound like one either.
Looking up the Wikipedia entry, I found out it really was quite a new invention when I bought it. The instrument molded from ABS resin was only made from the spring of 2000. Previously, the inventor, Brian Wittman, had made bamboo xaphoons at his home in Hawaii.
I do like it but never really got the hang of playing it properly. I'm facing two problems, firstly I don't really like the pressure of a reed on my lower lip, which limits each practice session to five minutes, and secondly, while the right hand is straight recorder fingering (German system, so very simple), the left hand fingering is weird. Unlike a recorder, the xaphoon wants four fingers on the left hand put down for G, and lifting fingers off one at a time you then get A Bb (!) and C, and then the thumb comes off before the index finger for D and E. Which is probably to do with the fact that the thumb hole is located at the height where recorders have the first finger hole and vice versa. So very confusing if you're used to recorders.
Anyhow. As I haven't had much practice, this video is really just a demonstration of what the xaphoon sounds like when it is played badly. Enjoy.
I was meaning to progress with this series faster than the number of instruments under my roof increases, but I am losing this race (more than 40 instruments behind at the moment). Anyhow, after that slightly challenging set of panpipes here's another find from the lovely Tumi shop which I am still missing (it's been gone for more than a decade):
It is still listed at Tumi online as rainstick medium, but sadly sold out.
It wasn't terribly popular with the children, first because it is a bit short for a rainstick and then because we also had a big one made from transparent plastics where you could watch the beads percolating as well as listen to their sound, which was more attractive as a toy. (In fact I still have that one, too, but as it is clearly a toy and also a bit unwieldy as a percussion instrument, I haven't put it on my list of musical instruments.)
However, the medium rainstick is in the elite group of instruments that get to go out regularly, as it lives in the box of random percussion instruments that I take to Galician sessions. And I do remember seeing people using it at the sessions, so all's well that ends well.
Here's a demonstration of the sound (note that it sounds a lot better when it touches the wooden shelf which also supports the camera):
Approaching the millennium, we're now firmly in the realm of instruments bought for the children with various flimsy excuses. This one was a present for the young flautist in the family, but never found much use. Trying to record a half-decent video with it, I realised why - it isn't all that easy to get a proper sound out of it. Even though I spend a fair amount of time each day producing sounds by blowing across a similar-sized hole on a flute, this set of panpipes seems to want a different kind of embouchure or angle or I don't know what. I'm only playing the bottom row anyway, as the access to the top row seems to be limited by my chin colliding with the pipes of the bottom row. So this instrument seems to be trouble all round, but it is very decorative dangling from the shelves.
(The background texture in this photo is another instrument to be discussed later in the series ... )
It doesn't have any marks re origin or maker, and I can't remember where I bought it. May have been from Tumi, who had a lovely Latin American / Fairtrade shop in Little Clarendon Street in the 90s. Nowadays I believe the company still exists but only trades online. Oooh, good guess, here are the pipes, still: Zampona 11/12, although sadly sold out at the moment.
So, anyhow, here's my rather embarrassing series of attempts to play some notes on it:
I do like the sound though, on the rare occasions when I manage to produce it.
Next up is another harmonica - we've had this one since the early noughties, but I don't quite remember how it came into the family. I'm quite sure I didn't buy it, but may have been a present the children received from their grandparents.
The writing on it says Bontempi Classic - Made in China, so that was all I knew about it. Wikipedia tells me that Bontempi is actually an Italian company founded in 1937 and famous for cheap instruments and musical toys. They still have a harmonica that looks exactly like ours.
Looking at it now for this series, to figure out what it can do, I realised it has an amazing range, covering a C major scale over 3 octaves and a bit from a low C to a squeaky E (plus, weirdly, the G below the beginning of the scale). That's more than I can do on my flute, although I believe proper flautists can also reach the fourth octave E with extended techniques. Unfortunately, the arrangement of notes obtained from inward vs. outward airflow appears to be a bit illogical, or at least different from what I am used to with my lovely Hohner Echo harmonica, so whenever I try to play something on this one, the attempt ends in confusion. So in the video I just demonstrate the range. I do wonder what you would want the range for ... (maybe two musicians getting along really well could play a duet cheek by jowl?)
PS This is the third harmonica in this series and you'll be relieved to learn that it also the last one - I only have these three and have no plans to buy any more.
ok, I'm not a tenor, but this recorder is one. I bought it in 2001 to play very simple flute duets with the young flautist in the family, but two years later I upgraded to a cheap flute, so this tenor never got to play that many duets.
It is a fairly standard Yamaha plastic thing with Baroque fingering (as opposed to the German fingering which I learned at school. There is an element in the sound of these plastic recorders that I don't like - later on in the series I'll come to recorders that I am much more excited about but I guess this one is ok, considering that it's a lot cheaper than the cheapest flute. I haven't taken it to any sessions so far, but I guess I should take it out every once in a while.
The Japanese company Yamaha, as I learned from Wikipedia, was founded in 1887 as a piano and reed organ manufacturing business and is now the world's largest maker of musical instruments. The eponymous motor cycles company is a spin-out from the corporation.
For the video I've played a C major scale over 2 octaves (only learned up to the E at school but have expanded my recorder technique a bit recently) and O son do ar by Luar na lubre, a tune that I often play but not on this instrument.
This lovely pair of bongos is an example of an instrument that I really like but don't take out of the house because it's quite heavy (for what it does).
We bought this for the children back in the 1990s, when there was still the Russell Acott music shop (It moved from the High Stree to Botley business park in 1998 and closed in 2011, after 200 years). There's a tiny tear in one of the drumskins but otherwise they have kept surprisingly well for a quarter of a century. Amazingly, all 8 rubber feet are still in place.
Wikipedia tells me that bongos originated in Cuba, but I have no idea where this particular pair was made, there seems to be no indication of a brand of any kind.
Just some random drum noises to give an impression of the sound (and my non-existent percussion skills):
After the instruments that already accompanied my misspent youth, we're proceeding in the chronological order to those acquired for the benefit of our children. The first of which is a lovely xylophone dating from 1992. But you can still get essentially the same model from the maker Sonor, which is another company from East Germany (Weißenfels an der Saale ) that moved westwards to Aue in Westphalia after 1945 (history is here).
The instrument counts as an alto and covers the C major scale from c1 to a2, and we have a Bb and both F# sticks for key changes. It has miraculously survived a sequence of three toddlers climbing over it and ripping off the sound bars, so I can recommend it to any young family.
In the video I've had a go at O du lieber Augustin - a tune we played at a session just this week, and upon looking it up I learned that the original Viennese song is about a bagpiper in Vienna during the Plague, who was thrown into a mass grave by mistake and survived thanks to playing his bagpipes - quite a story. Although the song is standard nursery rhyme fare in Germany, I had never heard the story behind it. I am told the English folk tradition links the tune to the words (strangely rhyming with the Augustin lyrics): You can't put your muck in our dustbin ...
And the second tune is Ganivelle, which we play at the French session.
After taking care of that old piano, we're now returning to the established principle of this series, introducing instruments by order of appearance.
Every once in a while there is one that I never quite got the hang of - even if I've had it for decades. Like the banjo, the Jew's harp is one I find ok for making ploinky noises, but it doesn't really work for me as an instrument. This just as a warning before you click the video.
Here goes - if you can do any better, feel free to tell me what I'm doing wrong:
It appears that at some distant point in the 20th century, I fancied playing the banjo, and being very lazy, I didn't want to learn new fingerings, so I mentioned that there are banjos with guitar tuning, and sure enough I got a guitar banjo.
There are certainly times when I enjoy making that sharp ploinky sound, but I never quite liked it enough to put any effort into improving. The steel strings are very unpleasant under the fingers, the shape is awkward, the whole thing is too heavy, and strumming guitar chords on it sounds dreadful.
Also, while the drum head is a US brand (Remo), it pointedly distances itself from the rest of the instrument with the inscription "banjo head only" under the brand name. I assume they did this because the rest is cheaply made Korean stuff (Arirang), which is now becoming obvious as the plastic knobs of the machine heads have a tendency to break when you try to tune.
If all of that doesn't put you off banjos forever, here's my attempt at playing John Ryan's polka:
One day though I'll take the thing to a session just to shock people. First I'll actually have to practise a tune though, that's the problem.
I should also mention that a photo of this banjo played a pivotal role at the very beginning of the whole folk craziness going on in my family, so I'll give the old Arirang some credit for that.
After five instruments made in Germany, here comes one from Japan and a very special one too. I visited the Museum of musical automata (Deutsches Musikautomatenmuseum) at Bruchsal, Germany, last summer and discovered they have not one but two specimens of the Casio VL-1 in their showcases. It counts as an automaton because you can program music on it, but its bigger claim to faim is that it was the first ever commercially available digital synthesizer. I've had it for nearly 40 years and didn't realise it was so important. Essentially I thought I had a calculator that could play tunes and make funny noises.
Own photo (I chose a close-up this time, cutting off the speaker and the calculator screen on the left, which aren't very interesting. For a pic of the whole instrument (not mine, but looking exactly identical), see Wikipedia).
Anybody old enough to remember tne new wave of German pop in the 1980s (Nena et al.) may have heard it in Da Da Da by Trio. Failing that, Wikipedia lists lots of other tracks on which the instrument was used. Versions disagree on its age by the way: the German Wiki says it was produced 1981-84, the English edition says it was released in June 1979. I definitely had mine no later than 1981. (Also, dear Wikipedia, why the past tense in the description how it works, mine works perfectly fine to this day!)
Its piano-esque keyboard covers 2.5 octaves, but the range can be moved up or down an octave, so that makes 4.5. Set sounds include approximations of piano, flute, violin, guitar, and a "fantasy" instrument. With flute and piano you can guess what it's aiming to be, but for the violin and guitar sound it's less obvious. But most importantly, what makes it a synth is the ADSR mode where you put an 8-digit number into the memory of the calculator, which determines the shape of the tone. One major limitation is that it is monophonic, playing only one note at the time, although you can play that note over a programmed rhythm.
For my video, I have defined my own, sharp synth sound to have a go at Popcorn (ADSR parameters: 71105500), and I've used the "flute" sound to play the song "Une jeune fillette" from the soundtrack of the early music movie Tous les matins du monde. I've also demonstrated the other set sounds and some of the rhythms, and let the machine play its demo track. (I'm using the pencils to press the keys so you can see what's going on, otherwise my hands would obscure much of the instrument!)
I've had my Hohner Piccolo harp for longer than I can remember, could be up to half a century, but I never quite got the hang of it. The spacing between the channels is a bit too narrow for my big mouth, so I tend to get more notes than I want to play. (Also, you need to breathe in for some of the notes, which can make playing a bit unpleasant, as you end up with the metal taste in your mouth.)
But the web assures me that it is a proper instrument and there are people out there who can make proper music with it, such as this guy who wrote a review of it on his harmonica website. He says it's only available in C, but mine is in G. The design, however, hasn't changed in all those years.
One of the things I may have attempted to play way back when is Neil Young's Heart of Gold. Looking that up on YouTube, I found an ancient video of Neil Young playing live in 1971, which is hilarious for two reasons. First he apologises for all those new songs that nobody knows, of which Heart of Gold was another example, which is ironic because it became a classic about three minutes later. And then, after a few minutes spent finding the harmonica in the right key, he says, "This one's in G, if anybody wants to blow along with me." Don't mind if I do, so here's my warm-up:
further down the line there will be bigger harmonicas, big enough for me to play an actual tune on them.
I'm a chemist turned biochemist turned science writer, covering everything from nano to astro via bio. Also trying to make sense of my life in writing about family history. Playing wrong notes on a variety of instruments. Current craze: repairing violins and learning to play them too.
