In the meantime, a few notes (pun not intended, gross) on instruments. While I definitely need continued practice on the cello, the cello itself needed to meet me halfway and get some surgery. I had the fingerboard re-planed and the bridge altered, and it is now much easier to play, more responsive, and has a clearer tone. I will need to get a lighter bow and strings (and practice a lot) before making final-final recordings of anything, but it's a start. I'm really looking forward to the cello being an integral part of the score.
Secondly (and probably most exciting), I now have a drum! A DRUM.
I spent way too much time looking up different kinds of drums and listening to/watching people play them on YouTube*, trying to figure out what kind I should get. I wanted something that could make a versatile range of sounds and could easily be played in a sort of non-traditional way so as to create a sound unique to the Yondering Lands.
At first I thought I might be able to get away with a small djembe. They're affordable, easily found, relatively easy to play, and the small ones lack a lot of the idiomatic timbre that they're known for. I wanted to get out and play some of them myself to see for sure, and ended up visiting three different drum shops in town (including one that is basically a workshop where they make African drums of many kinds, and was amazing to visit. If you ever have some time to spare near Inglewood, check out Motherland Music). I tried a lot of djembes, but nothing seemed quite right and I eventually gave up on that idea. Also on my list were floor toms (not versatile enough and way too expensive), children's toy percussion**, and frame drums. Basically anything that looked interesting I tried, but those are the ideas I went in with.
At the shops I learned two important things: 1. I like Meinl brand drum heads. Every time I came to a timbre that was close to what I wanted, it said Meinl on it. Convenient. And 2. I was pretty sure I wanted some kind of bodhran or frame drum, but none of the shops had more than one or two in stock and what they had was kindof beat up. With that in mind I went back online and found two styles of bodhran from Meinl and ordered them both so I could try them out at home.
THE DRUMS (the drums, the drums, the drums...***)
The one on the right is an "Irish" bodhran, the one on the left is "Celtic". Don't ask me how those distinctions are supposed to work, but that's what they call them in their product listings. Anyway, the Irish bodhran has dampening material around the edges which give it a nice, clear tone but not a lot of boom. The Celtic one, on the other hand, actually feels more pitched somehow despite having a lot more noise in the tone, and has a lot of resonance and ring-out if you don't dampen it at all. It is tuneable to some degree, and I'll play with that. In the end, even though I liked the tone of the Irish drum better, I decided to keep the Celtic one as it has much more versatility, and with some effort, I can make it sound pretty similar to the Irish one. I played around a soft mallet, and tipper, and just my hands. I covered the tipper in a few different materials to get different sounds and I am pretty pleased with the results. I think I have something that will fit in very well with the Yondering Lands' sonic universe.
As an added surprise, it turns out that the kind of looseness you need to cultivate in your wrist to play with a tipper is the same kind of looseness you need for bowing, so there's a transferable skill I wasn't expecting to have. The biggest challenge is going to be recording - turns out that a drum could actually be... a lot quieter than a viola. Who knew?
*while researching, I found this amazing gem
**WHY ARE THEY ALL IN BOXES, WHY CAN'T I HIT THEM IN THE STORE? I REFUSE TO BUY SOMETHING I CAN'T HIT
***Go listen to The Ting Tings, they are awesome
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