Micro Headstock Tuner

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Tuners! Sometimes I wonder if there are different standard A=440.
They hardly ever agree, and the guitar string sounds a note that seems to fluctuate in pitch depending on the volume and tone.
I normally wait until the initial excited string has settled when using a tuner.

I have around half a dozen different makes, and up until now I have been using the Snark QTSN2 Clip-On Chromatic All Instrument Tuner. Unfortunately it has broken on a couple of occasions because of the rather delicate slender stalk holding the tuner on the clip. It is  not too forgiving of inaccurate tuning. (some tuners seem far too tolerant) and the nice col

 

 

 
Lately I have been using the  D’Addario NS Micro Headstock Tuner. our display also means that you can see how much you are out of tune to the nearest cent. It also has tuning by microphone or vibration.

Its main advantage is that it is unobtrusive, and very in tune. There is also a choice of reference pitch A from 420-440, so that this could be used on early music instruments.
The display lights up in different colours, and provided  you understand what the colours mean, tuning is very fast and accurate. Here is a review in The Gadgeteer.

I far prefer to not use an electronic tuner at all, but when playing in a group of more than two, they are  the quickest way to be in tune together (provided the tuner is in tune itself, and also very accurate, and that you understand what the display means!)

How many of you use an electronic tuner as opposed to a pitchfork and your ear?

Could Google Glass replace stands and sheet music?

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Cynthia Turner, a conductor and a professor at Cornell University, is advocating Google Glass as a way of improving the conducting experience. “It could be a game changer for anyone who needs two hands to do something,”
For those of you new to Google Glass – it is a head-mounted device with a 640 x 360 display, a 5-megapixel camera capable of recording video and audio. It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in, 12GB of usable on-board storage, and can be charged over Micro USB. It is also already causing controversy before its launch because of privacy concerns in public places.
Cynthia Turner paints an image of musicians all wearing Google’s headsets, no stands or scores cluttering their chamber, the composer’s point of view broadcast on a screen above them, and intermittent notes of text appearing on screen to explain to patrons what’s happening in a given musical movement.
Our own Vida Quartet are already using iPads with page turning bluetooth units instead of sheet music. Is this the future of music performance?
Of course, many musicians are used to memorising what they play, but i t isn’t usually the case with an orchestra.
What do you think about this deviation from tradition?
Read more about it here in The Verge

Explorations in Sound – Wu Man talks about the Pipa Concerto of Zhao Jiping

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This month, Musical America’s 2013 Instrumentalist of the Year – Wu Man ??– gives the world premiere performances of a new pipa concerto by Chinese composer Zhao Jiping, accompanied by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House.

In this video, Wu Man talks about the new composition and demonstrates the exotic sounds of the pipa.

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In Tune – Sean Rafferty and Xuefei Yang 1st November 4.30pm

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Before her Wigmore recital on Sunday 3rd November, and imminently before her first shed event, Xuefei Yang will be on BBC radio’s In Tune, which seems to have had a lot of guitarists in recently.
Does this signal a guitaristic renaissance, or is it like the UK economic “recovery”?

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Lipatti’s Final Essay

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“…wanting to restore to music its historical framework is like dressing an adult in an adolescent’s clothes. This might have a certain charm in the context of a historical reconstruction, yet is of no interest to those other than lovers of dead leaves or the collectors of old pipes”

 

“Music has to live under our fingers, under our eyes, in our hearts and in our brains with all that we, the living, can offer it.”

 

Dinu Lipatti was a consummate artist whose playing was sublime.
As usual, the critics are limited by their own shortsightedness and  inadequacies. This essay explains why it is important to play music in our time even if it not of our time, and how striving for  authenticity can strangle creativity in performance.

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The Vihuela da Mano and Spanish Guitar by Jose Romanillos

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Paul Fischer's Vihuela ca.1977

Paul Fischer’s Vihuela ca.1977


Paul Fischer made me a vihuela in 1977 and we had to go to great lengths to find a suitable model, as there were not many extant from the period (the 1530s). We ended up using paintings and drawings of the time, and Paul produced an elegant instrument of sycamore, spruce and satinwood. It was much like the viola da mano, which was played by Francesco da Milano and that was actually my preferred repertoire at the time.

If this book had been available then, it would have been a useful guide to the accuracy of our guesses and also some of the personalities who were responsible for this forerunner of the modern guitar. Jose Romanillos, is of course, well known for his collaboration with Julian Bream, but is also a scholar of the history of guitar making and has written a book on Antonio Torres as well as this exhaustively researched volume.

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