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I use the Peak folding stand and think it is a good combination of portable, useful, stable, and durable. It has a large flat desk that is removable and folds and very solid legs. It is pretty wide at the base, but the legs are fairly long as well, so the space under them is fairly substantial and gives you some flexibility for positioning. I keep the end of one leg on the other side of the D pedal with room to move the pedal easily.
I can maybe get my folding K&M stand a tad closer, but prefer the Peak for performances because it gives a much safer surface for sheet music.
I thought the post about the runway model being hired was funny but also somewhat illustrative. I’d disagree and say that they cared quite a bit about quality, but they decided to purchase a slightly different service, in this case a runway model who plays an instrument, a rare and lucrative niche for the blessed few who can fill it. People sometimes want music and they sometimes want entertainment, and it can be useful to know the difference, especially if you’re trying to sell one thing but they want to buy the other.
I have a Venus concert grand that is over 30 years old and has held up very well structurally. It has a very good tone. The upper octaves have a nice ring to them, which is probably helped by the fact that I use nylon strings in the 2d octave and above, and I can play well with aggressive or soft attacks in the high range. The tension is a bit lighter than other pedal harps I’ve played, which I find very good for fast arpeggios, trills, and harmonics. Like many harps that play easily, it can be overplayed in the middle register if you try to force it. I can rip away in the bass and higher ranges, however, and produce a sweet, resonant tone in the middle range without straining. Upper octave right hand space is pretty good. Not as good as a Camac, but better than many harps and you can actually play up there.
I don’t think there is enough room for an action chain that would accommodate the extra discs. They’d have to make the harp bigger with a longer neck. And that would create empty space people would want to fill up with strings even if they couldn’t have discs, and then we’d have 50 string harps with no action on the bottom and top.
Good point. In the US, the larger vehicles are popular among the outdoors lovers who pack equipment for camping and biking. The V70s went out a few years ago and hopefully a lot of the CX70 parts work for them. The newer Outback (I think this body came about in 2011) got great reviews in the latest Harp Column magazine car reviews and it would have an easier repair situation. The Prius V is similarly roomy and the hybrids have excellent reliability and repair costs.
Volvo now makes the XC70 instead of the V70. As Emma noted it’s pretty much the same car, but with some changes to handle a bit better on rough roads or snow (XC = “cross country”).
The only thing I dampen is a fingertip if I have a fast page turn. I muffle. Maybe they’re inspired by pianos and the damper pedal.
As Saul said, it improves with practice and you’ll be able to take more in. As our brains gain familiarity with new information they begin to recognize patterns and group it into larger pieces. While we’re first learning music we read a clef, find the notes by counting the lines and spaces, and so on, later we can glance at it and instantly recognize entire groups of notes. We don’t just see “C, E, and G”, but as Elizabeth said, we eventually see a C major chord and don’t need to consciously identify each note. And eventually after reading two clefs, we mentally join them and see the bigger patterns that run between them, and perhaps between measures as well. After reading and playing enough, we can glance at the music, grab a couple measures into short term memory, and play it pretty accurately depending how familiar we are with the music and how closely to adheres to the patterns we’re most familiar with.
I use Petite Pigs. They’re egg-shaped picks made of layers of felt glued together. Depending how you hold them you can make a bright, really loud sound, good for cutting through with a fff glissando, or you can make a more natural finger sound.
I don’t think I still have a copy. I’ll dig around tonight. At one point it was on sale for download at SheetmusicPlus (and maybe elsewhere), though I could never get their electronic copies to open on either my PC or my Mac.
I wonder if the minister was doing a tribute to “The Princess Bride”. The wedding scene is rather famous among Gen Xers if you’re not familiar with it.
The best I can say from when I play flute is that they’re playing in tune, whatever that is. Apart from perhaps early music specialists trying to recreate period performance practices, there isn’t a conscious thought of deliberately playing sharper than X frequency. However, wind instruments are generally built around certain scales as far as tube length and bore and hole spacing and size, so that influences what they can do and the tools with which to do it.
People usually adjust their instruments to a fixed pitch, which can come from one of the instruments in the ensemble, sometimes a nearby piano, or a tuner or fork etc. As we play, it’s a constant listening act, which is one reason the pitch drifts, in addition to changes as the players figuratively warm up and the instruments literally warm up. Generally, the higher pitch instruments try to “listen down” in the ensemble in a tutti section, since we’re trying to build an ensemble sound. If I’m playing second, I’ll listen to the firsts if I’m usually matching an interval with them, so I’ll be more concerned about how my e-flat sounds against the first’s a-flat, or maybe I’m unison against another instrument and need to listen to them as well. Ideally, the players are aware of the piece as a whole and where they need to listen at a given moment.
In addition, players to practice with intonation as one of their goals. Our school band room had a big strobe tuner and we were encouraged to practice playing in tune on it, so this would influence the players’ internal ears and general habits as far as embouchre and air. I assume this would have been set to an equal temperament, partly so that tubas, horns, trumpets, and piccolos could all use it with satisfactory results when everybody plays together.
There are some other things having to do with wind instruments and harmonics, things like brass fanfares, that are a big can of worms and outside of my expertise as well as most people’s interest.
This article on orchestral tuning for piccolo players is a very good read on some of the tuning issues in ensembles.
@http://powellflutes.com/academy/stephanie-mortimore/articles/taming-beast%E2%80%94revolutionize-your-piccolo-intonation
I also improved greatly when I started playing the harp in a community symphonic wind ensemble where I’d been playing the flute. Since the repertoire gets chosen by somebody else, it’s a great chance to be forced outside your comfort zone and stretch. I probably wasn’t “ready” the first time a major, fairly hard harp part came my way, but it put me in a much better position the second time.
Lever harp will be very hit or miss with an orchestra, probably more misses.
Right now, a lot of potential opportunities for playing could be in casual settings with a few other musicians where you select pieces together. If it’s your kind of thing, you might look for churches that have a small group of instrumentalists who play occasionally. More contemporary churches or small churches with casual services would be more likely to have such a thing. I play once a month or so at a church I don’t even attend because of the musical fit (if I had strong objections to their beliefs I wouldn’t, but they’re pretty nice and forgive a wrong note here or there).
Something else you might consider working on with your teacher is reading chord symbols. Much of the music that small groups can play isn’t written for that exact group, but instead they play off of music that shows only the melody and maybe a bass line, plus symbols for the harmony, called fake books or lead sheets. They’re very common in jazz but many gigging musicians use them for pop standards, and you can buy a book of hundreds of songs (most are songs) for probably $20 to $30. A lot of these pieces can be played on a lever harp and you do not need to be technically advanced to play from them. Since they don’t specify the notes, beyond the general harmony, you can play within your own limits, and the harp can add touches of color that enhance the music while others do the heavy lifting of playing solos. I wouldn’t be surprised if many teachers don’t teach it, but Ray Pool also has some good introductory fake books for learning. It opens up a lot, I mean tons, of repertoire without having to shop for an arrangement for the specific combination of instruments.
