Tuesday, December 17, 2002

I took a flute lesson from Guido Fazio at House of Woodwinds last week, to get an alternative view on how this instrument is supposed to be played. The single most useful thing he told me about the flute embouchure (how you hold your mouth) is to visualize yourself sucking on a thin straw. That puts your mouth in the right formation, then you blow with the same mouth position. Since that lesson, I've also been experimenting with my sax embouchure, hoping one day to wean myself of my wax & gauze crutch that I've been using for a while to help play without feeling any pain. I managed to do a couple of rehearsals last week without using the crutch, but had performances Friday and Saturday night which I absolutely needed to be able to play comfortably. The sax and flute embouchures are similar, except for one important difference: you need to support the reed without letting any air leak out of the mouth, but without biting the lower lip with the bottom teeth. This is the source of my frustration, how to keep from biting my bottom lip, while supporting the reed enough to get a pleasing sound. Ironically, the sax tone is much better the more you allow the reed to vibrate, but it also feels much more out of control. 11:55:43 AM

Tuesday, December 3, 2002

I recently posted a blurb about TuneXML in which I referred to a transcription of a tune in TuneXML format. It turns out that if you look at this with IE 5 on the Mac, you'll get a parse error. It parses and displays just fine in Chimera 0.6. The problems seems to stem from the inclusion of a Byte-Order-Mark (BOM) character at the beginning of the XML file, which is what you're supposed to include so that a UNICODE file is perfectly portable. This character seems to mess up IE 5.2.2. 8:16:32 AM

Sunday, December 1, 2002

I've been thinking a lot about representing music in XML. There is a good survey of this topic here. MusicXML seems to be fairly dominant, and is getting commercial support behind it. Although, it isn't terribly easy to read and is quite verbose, it looks like a good interchange format, which is certainly a good use of XML. Still, it is overkill for how I want to use XML to represent music. My application is representing Jazz tunes, which consist of chords, melody, and sometimes lyrics. I would like to develop a library of arrangements of Jazz tunes in XML format. Here's an example of the tune All The Things You Are encoded in what I'll call "TuneXML" format. 10:44:45 AM

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Long hiatus from blogging. Just didn't have much new to report... I went to the Sacramento Jazz festival this weekend, and spent the whole time in the Old Town venues. Instead of driving, we took Amtrak from Martinez to Sacramento, and got a different perspective from driving. I like how trains travel along historical right of ways, and that the freeway isn't always visible. Trains have lost much of their importance and Amtrak isn't a cheaper way to travel. They gouged me with $32 round trip tickets. But it is a relaxing way to travel, and just as fast as driving. I wish this country could get its act together on having better public transportation. European countries are so interconnected by trains and our states are interconnected by highways. 8:57:41 AM

Tuesday, March 5, 2002

My flute playing is coming along. I spent an hour practicing the other day, and was able to hit low D and C fairly reliably. Working on the next higher octave now. 8:06:46 PM

Saturday, February 9, 2002

Well, the new Led Airegin web site is now live, thanks to the power of the Radio content management system (CMS). 7:35:36 AM

Wednesday, February 6, 2002

I've decided to learn how to double on the flute. I've always loved the sound and the fingering is fairly similar to the saxophone. I picked up a Gemeinhardt student model flute a week ago, and I'm having lots of fun. The flute doesn't have an octave key, so controlling which octave you're playing is all a matter of throat control. I find it easier to hit the low notes when I haven't warmed up, and my throat's relaxed. Once I've got basic note production down, this is going to be a blast. 12:01:09 PM

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