Interesting Horn

[aqualung]

I know of some straight wooden "saxophone-like" instruments (with upside-down single-reed mouthpieces) that (though I do not know what they are called) are just about the length of an alto sax.

Taragato

[Donn]

Or tarogato, believe that's the way I've seen it spelled.

Just caught the video - nice - seems to start in the middle of the tune, though! We play it in my band. We get a lot of mileage out of the first part - people sing along, etc., would never have guessed. And we have an alto sax solo right in the same spot, but as bloke alluded to, this guy gets closer to the Balkan style in places.

It takes a while to get that harmonic structure, but more superficially, even the strident sound doesn't seem to come naturally to our horn players. The reeds aren't screechy enough, brasses aren't blatty enough - we use trombones instead of baritones, but sadly they do not blat much anyway. Which you might think would be for the better, but actually in my opinion it thickens up the mix so together we're more cacophonous. Tuba player in another local band does really well, in my opinion, with the tuba version of that: big solid contrabass low end out of his big Holton sousaphone, but a dry-ish sound with an edge, comes through loud and clear but at the same time there's plenty of room for bones etc. to play over him.

[Paul Tkachenko]

Hey everyone, I just won this one on eBay ...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... 0586363462" target="_blank

Pretty decent price.

Which means I'm going to be selling my Soviet horn.

Who wants it? (Probably should list it in the 'for sale' bit ...)