two bass recorders

Just two days after I posted about the recorder family, a long-awaited email came in telling me that the two recorders I had ordered back in September were now ready for delivery. As I love my Triebert alto, I had ordered the Triebert bass as a birthday treat and the garklein to complete the size range at the smaller end. And in February, as I was losing faith in that delivery ever arriving, I found the Thomann bass for € 70 at a fleamarket in Germany.

So now I have two bass recorders to compare, and the funny thing is they are externally identical (apart from the two-colour scheme in the Thomann while the Triebert is all matt black), clearly molded from the same cast (or whatever the process is to make plastic recorders) but a few details reveal that the Triebert may be getting a better quality control treatment.

• The keys are very flimsy and noisy on the Thomann, which Sarah Jeffery also criticised in her review, and blamed on the plastic material. Funny thing is, the keys on the Triebert are the same plastic in the same shape, and they are much firmer to the touch and consequently don't make that horrid noise when they're released. Peering underneath I notice a subtle difference in the metal spring: straight for the Thomann, kinked in the Triebert. So at some point I will take the Thomann keys apart and see if it helps if I make the springs more kinky.
• The joints are fitting perfectly in the Triebert. In the Thomann, the first joint from bottom is a bit tight, the second a bit loose, an the one near the kink (which can stay connected for packing up but is needed to access all places for cleaning) was so tight that I first believed it was glued together and didn't dare to force it open. Only after I saw that the Triebert came apart effortlessly at this joint did I manage to do the same with the Thomann.

Both are really easy to play and sound nice and breezy. You could use them for meditation like a didgeridoo just blowing the bottom F.

As Sarah has explained in her video, the tuning around B and Bb doesn't work with the standard fingering printed on the sheet that comes with the instrument (but funnily enough doesn't even mention the existence of bass recorders, it is marked for sopranino through to tenor!), but this can be compensated with clever fingering (eg no little finger for the Bb). Both come with identical accessories, only that each company had its brand name printed on the bag. Which I find hilarious as it shows each screaming "we made this" when clearly they didn't. I also note that both instruments came with a cleaning rod that is the size used for tenor recorders and concert flutes (it has the mark that you need for adjusting the cork on the flute). A slightly longer stick would be handy for the bass. Another DIY project I guess.

Oh and I could in principle assemble a vast number of hybrid instruments from the different parts, although for the aesthetic I do prefer the all black style of the Triebert.

So in summary, online shop prices are a factor 2.6 apart (£ 105 vs £ 275) and what you get for the higher price is a slightly better quality, but maybe not 2.6 times better? Note that the Yamaha YRB302II Bass Recorder is available at an intermediate price between these two, but by the looks of the photos online I guess it may also come from the same factory as these two?

And here's the updated family portrait, now including all recorders (except one ancient school soprano that has gone missing years ago but must be in the house somewhere):

Basses: Thomann, Triebert; tenor: Yamaha; altos: Triebert, Moeck; sopranos: Moeck, Schneider; sopranino: Yamaha; garklein: Triebert - the tenor came from the Allegro shop many years ago, Triebert bass and garklein from the Early Music Shop, all others from flea markets. All have baroque fingering, except my old school recorder and the Moeck alto in German fingering.

PS When I took the Thomann bass to a session earlier this month, a folkie friend told me she currently has three bass recorders to sell - these things are like London buses ...

PPS I've now added the all instruments tags to this entry - think I'm giving up on the formal structure of that series (which portrayed the oldest 21 instruments of our household in chronological order until Covid came along) and will now add instruments if and when I feel inspired to write about them. More exciting to write about the new arrivals than about the yamaha keyboard I bought twenty years ago. I've now also added the tag to the entries about Jenny the cello and two of the rescue fiddles I adopted.

instrument families revisited

When I discussed instrument families in August 2021, I used a wikipedia pic of recorders from sopranino to bass. As it happens, I now have all five sizes myself, so I guess it's time to revisit the issue with a new photo:

Bass: Thomann; tenor: Yamaha; alto: Triebert; soprano: Moeck; sopranino: Yamaha - the tenor came from the Allegro shop many years ago, all others from flea markets. All have baroque fingering, in addition I also have my old school recorder and a Moeck alto in German fingering.

I also may need to revise my preferences. I have warmed to the tenor recorder since the last blog entry and now use it for certain tunes at sessions, and I love my new bass recorder, so the trend is towards bigger instruments in that family (does anybody have a sub-bass to sell?). In the strings department by contrast, I have taken to to the violin and now also have a viola and a double bass in the room, so I'm spoilt for choice. Oh, and I've also found a low whistle, so families are growing all around thanks to fleamarkets, charity shops and gumtree.

play time

Every picture tells a story, season 3, picture 2:

After Ruth and the children on the mountain, here comes Richard with the same children playing games. This picture of domestic bliss may be a game of Skat. It says W. 1957 on the back, so I'll take that as Christmas (Weihnachten) 1957, which also explains the ties.

A few years earlier, Richard had tried to encourage his daughter to learn the recorder, but I am told that this didn't last long. This picture dates from Christmas 1952:

Both photos must have been taken in the family's flat in Idar-Oberstein, Hauptstraße 318 (I found the building on a recent visit, will do a separate post on that some time).

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 3 so far:

1. family holiday
2. play time

The Mastodon thread for season 3 starts here.

You can find Season 2 entries in this thread on Mastodon (complete now!) or via the list at the bottom of the last entry of the season (and also at the bottom of the first entry of this season).

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

goldilocks instruments

Discussed alto flutes and other size variations at a session earlier today and it struck me that I have a very clear preference in several instrument groups, but they don't line up. Basically, I like to make deep sounds, but there are limits to the amount of suffering I am willing to take for that, such as straining my arm to lift a bass flute, or spreading my fingers more than a comfortable width to play low recorders. So the balance works out as follows:

* strings: cello (obviously)

* flutes: concert flute (I just don't feel the few extra notes added at the bottom are worth the suffering with heavier flutes).

* recorders: alto (a discovery I only made a few years ago, when I saw an alto recorder at a fleamarket and bought it on the spot - basically, it feels exactly right, presumably because it scales to the adult hands exactly like the soprano recorder to primary school kid hands).

* saxophones: tenor (haven't tried any of the other sizes, but the tenor feels so right, I can't imagine any of the others being a better fit).

Based on this, I should try low whistles, which I haven't done yet. And while I never cared much for trumpets, I am curious about tubas, euphoniums and such like.

Different sizes of recorders, from bass to sopranino. Image source: Wikipedia

PSA: this is blogpost no. 2000, and also a reminder to myself that I will resume the all our instruments series once the plague years are definitely over.

what shall I play?

I hear youtube turned 15 this month, and although I haven't been using it excessively, the list of my "liked videos" is approaching 1000 items, so it's no longer a way of quickly finding something that I earmarked a while ago. So I had to create some playlists, most importantly for the repertoire / inspiration videos concerning the various instruments I am attempting to play.

I started with a playlist for my classical flute repertoire pieces I've been playing over the last few years. See the flute tag on this blog for further info on the pieces, eg which editions I used. Then I added a more modest list for cello, then I got carried away and also started one for alto recorder and one for singing. These two still need some work.

On the folk front, the Oxford Slow Session, where I learned many folk tunes that I play on any or all of the instruments mentioned above, now also has a playlist with 64 tunes in alphabetical order.


PS Compiling these playlists and generally obsessing about music I played a lot more classical music videos on youtube than before - the immediate effect seems to be that in the suggestions youtube allegedly tailors to my interests, I now find videos from the Sun, Sky news and the torygraph, many of which feature Nigel Garbage or Bojo. I don't quite see the connection ...

tarka flute

All our instruments series, episode 9


Here's another recorder-type instrument that I've had since the 1980s at least, but I never even knew a thing about it (we didn't have wikipedia back then!). Based on the decoration style I assumed it was Mesoamerican, but I now found out it is a Tarka and they are believed to originate in Bolivia.



You can see immediately that the six holes are at equal distances and of equal size, so there is no way I could play notes of a Western type melody or scale, but it does allow some nice contrasting sounds. I am told in Bolivia it is used in carnival festivities. But as carnival has been and gone, I improvised some more subdued sounds on it:



Hey, I actually like the video. I should do improvised sounds more often in this series, rather than trying a set piece and making lots of mistakes.

a question of fingering

All our instruments series, episode 3

We're now arriving at the earliest surviving instrument from my childhood (not sure what happened to the poor old toy saxophone?), namely my school recorder.

I learned to play it in primary school and still have the booklet with the tunes, and the dates of the lessons written in. Apparently it was a peripatetic teacher who scribbled the date of the next lesson into the book.

The recorder bears the trademark Schneider, so I think it was made by the company of Werner Schneider in Markneukirchen, Saxony, whose sons now trade as Gebr. Schneider. The tradition of making musical instruments in the Musikwinkel (musical corner) of the country was added to Germany's list of immaterial cultural heritage in 2014. Unlike the Hopf family, makers of my guitar, who also come from that area but moved to Taunusstein in 1948, the Schneider recorders stayed there.

Today it looks like this:



You may notice that the holes for the right hand look different from UK school recorders (and, indeed, from the grown-up recorders that proper musicians use). In fact, hole sizes are adapted to the so-called German fingering system (as opposed to the English / Baroque fingering). Although I was aware that there are two types of fingerings listed in the finger charts, it only dawned on me recently that the one I learned is a simplification. Thanks to the changes in hole sizes, I can play a scale from the lowest note (C in this case) by lifting off one finger at a time, without any gaps. By contrast, the English system requires a more complex fingering for the fourth step of the scale (F in this case).

Musicians including Hans Martin Linde have criticised the German simplification on the grounds that it makes some of the "black key" notes needed in more remote keys impossible to play in tune. I guess the tunes you learn at school carefully avoid the notes that don't work well, so I never spotted any problems until I heard about this. I can also work with the English system (several recorders with that are going to turn up later in the series).

For some weird reason, on the German system recorder I particularly like the sound of the Bb, so in the video, after a quick scale to demonstrate the fingering, I am playing a song from my primary school recorder book in F, with lots of Bb (Der Mond ist aufgegangen), followed by an attempt to remember Brahms' famous lullaby:

the dancers will fall over

As in 2017, most of the excitement and progress this year was to be had on the musical front. The ships of global and UK politics may be sinking fast, but the orchestra keeps playing.

Speaking of which, the orchestra where I play wrong notes on the cello hasn’t kicked me out yet, and I still crawl through the flute repertoire at a snail’s pace. And I continue to run the administrative side of the Galician Session Oxford, a role which I unexpectedly inherited in the summer of 2017. As some of the more experienced participants are leaving or have already left town, I will increasingly also be in charge of the musical leadership. Scary thought, I may have to put in some extra practice.

After six years and six months, the session lost its long-established home at the James Street Tavern at the end of November. We had one very lovely session at the Port Mahon in St. Clement’s, but are still waiting to hear if this will become a permanent solution.

Along with the Galician, the French and Scandinavian sessions also had to move in December. On the plus side, the move to a venue with a better dance floor attracted the attention of the local dance crowd which used each of the sessions to celebrate a “bal minuscule”. Videos of each of the miniature bals are here.

If I’m still a bit panicky about playing for dancers, it must be because I heard my children’s instrument teachers saying many times: “If you do this, the dancers will fall over.” I can’t quite remember what terrible mistake it was that led to this reaction, or maybe there were different kinds, and I’m sure I’m prone to make every conceivable rhythmic mistake, but luckily, so far, no dancer has fallen over.

Another opportunity to learn about playing for dancers was the very interesting workshop held in October by the ensemble Rigodons et Traditions from Grenoble who exchange visits with Oxford Fiddle Group every few years. Under their very professional leadership we even played for a whole village hall full of dancers. Imagine doing the wrong thing and 100+ people falling over. Now that would look very impressive.

Other new challenges this year included the arrival of a new but vintage (made in GDR) tenor sax, which is surprisingly easy in the fingerings – just a turbo charged flute with the exhaust sawn off, if you excuse a motor metaphor. I find it very satisfying in terms of energy efficiency as well – little effort gives a huge sound. Concern for my lips and the neighbours severely limits the practice times, however, so it will be a while before I can toot my horn in public.



Also new in the collection is an alto recorder – again very easy under the fingers, and I guess the transposition is something one gets used to. In cello terms, everything sounds one string down, so you have a C where you expect the G, and a G where you’d normally have a D. Just give me a few years and I'll get my head round that.

Other opportunities to play wrong notes in public included the first run of the “unusual instruments” class at the Oxford Music Festival (with our highly unusual home-built hammered dulcimer), my second theremin workshop and my second Misa Campesina, a few jam sessions with local band Mad Flamenco, as well as the amazing Folk Weekend Oxford. In July, the visit of the despicable Mr Drumpf to Blenheim Palace offered a welcome opportunity to improve my bugle skills, especially the fortissimo. Subtlety and nuance weren’t really required on that occasion. Previously I had tried the bugle at the London WNBR but cycling and tooting simultaneously doesn’t quite work yet.

So here's to more noise in 2019 ...

PS I forgot to mention: the Guardian asked readers what they do to escape / bypass / fight capitalism, so I sang the praise of folk sessions as free entertainment, pretty far down on this page.