Playing in unusual places

MaryAnn · Post by **MaryAnn** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 11:40 am

Now the place to play is in a CAVE. A while back I took a tour of a local large commercial cave, and near the end of the tour the guide played a tape in one of the large rooms. It was really resonant and just plain gorgeous. That would be a place to play! Not blasstissimo music but perfect chords with a small brass group.

MA

elimia · Post by **elimia** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 8:14 pm

How about an urban cave? The Allegheny Brass Band (not to be confused with the River City Brass Band) played in the Carnegie Museum Hall of Architecture for a Christmas music show. This is one of those rooms with marble floors and a 50+ high celing. Man, that was like a 5 second reverb in there. Really cool. The low brass sounded like butter in there.

If I can make nice sounds in a small bedroom with a drop ceiling, I bet I could be rockin' like Dokken in a cave!

Chuck(G) · Post by **Chuck(G)** » Tue Mar 29, 2005 8:48 pm

elimia wrote:How about an urban cave? !

Seems like a fair number of folks do this already by playing in the subway.

Of course, one could always try out the sewers...

Dan Schultz · Post by **Dan Schultz** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 12:42 am

Ever play in a church built of nothing but stone? ...About the same thing as playing in a cave.

corbasse · Post by **corbasse** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 3:59 am

Played in lots of weird places (various boats, steam trains, factory halls, the battlements of a castle) , and a few big cathedrals (they're a nightmare to play in if you want to keep things together), and yes, for a few minutes in one smallish cave in Czechia

I've been in a few other big caves where I wished I brought my instrument though...

tubatooter1940 · Post by **tubatooter1940** » Wed Mar 30, 2005 11:33 pm

We motored our rented sailboat up to Fingal's Cave in Scotland in a dead
calm.Almost sailed into the entrance.Nothing was moving but hundreds of Japanese tourists crawling al over the island.What a fantastic structure.It
looks manmade.Would love to play any accoustic instrument in there.

fpoon · Post by **fpoon** » Thu Mar 31, 2005 1:23 am

A loading dock at my school is like cave, in the fact thats its stone underneath, and then brick on every side except up (concrete?) and out (so people can "enjoy" you practicing). Only works about half the year cause of winter, and you gotta time it right so you don't freak out truck drivers coming in...

tubeast · Post by **tubeast** » Thu Mar 31, 2005 6:01 am

My most unusual place so far was playing on the top of the "Ulmer MÃ¼nster" tower (cathedral in Ulm, Germany, best known to be the one with the tallest tower in the world, 161 m.
It was like a pilgrimage climing the narrow (less than 1 yard wide, corkscrew-type) stairs of about 700 steps, carrying my MW46 in a gigbag. Those chorals I played up there were deeply felt, thatÂ´s for sure !
The cathedral itself is huge, smaller than the Colgne Dom, though. Unfortunately there was a service going on while I was there, I would have enjoyed playing Bach in the main hall.

MaryAnn · Post by **MaryAnn** » Thu Mar 31, 2005 1:40 pm

knuxie wrote:Every gymnasium I've known had good echo in it. Our marching band always recorded our annual tapes at Pan Am Center in Las Cruces, NM. Had to wait a while for the sound to quit dancing around. The band was 200 strong!

Ken F.

Was that a high school band in Las Cruces or at NMSU? I got my EE from there in 1988.

MA

JHardisk · Post by **JHardisk** » Thu Mar 31, 2005 3:34 pm

tubatooter1940 wrote:We motored our rented sailboat up to Fingal's Cave in Scotland in a dead
calm.Almost sailed into the entrance.Nothing was moving but hundreds of Japanese tourists crawling al over the island.What a fantastic structure.It
looks manmade.Would love to play any accoustic instrument in there.

I do hope you whipped out your band excerpt of Fingal's Cave and went to town on it! Imagine that double tounging!

davet · Post by **davet** » Thu Mar 31, 2005 8:03 pm

Somebody pick a date and I'll pick the cave in southern Indiana. Wild cave, right? None of that commercial stuff with lights, concrete walks, etc. We can stop at a spring afterwards for you to clean the mud out of your bells!

Actually, Marengo Cave has a room called theMusic Hall (or something like that) where dances and concerts have been held, mostly as a novelty.

Cave acoustics can really be weird, so tubas would be fun to experiment with if it weren't for the logistics. Easier than the Grand Canyon though!

Kevin Hendrick · Post by **Kevin Hendrick** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 2:14 am

TubaTinker wrote:Ever play in a church built of nothing but stone? ...About the same thing as playing in a cave.

Had the good fortune of playing in the cathedral in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, in 1977. I was in the Kalamazoo Junior Symphony Orchestra, and we were on a three-week tour of Europe. Here's a link to a web page describing the church:

http://www.geerts.com/dordrecht/dordrec ... dings1.htm

We played a mix of fast and slow pieces -- the one that worked best was by Alan Hovhaness, "Mysterious Mountain" I think. All the slow stuff rang like a bell ... it was glorious! The fast stuff was ... well ... mud, frankly (knew there had to be a down-side to all this, right?). A wonderful experience -- highly recommended!

tubeast · Post by **tubeast** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 5:32 am

I attended a concert of Melton tuba quartet on a brass choir festival in Oberhausen, Germany about ten years ago.
It took place in a medium sized church of circular shape.
It was a shameful choice of location / repertoire combination.

They played pieces like Washington Post March and some virtuoso Mozart tunes and the likes. All you could tell was that they were quite in tune, Â´cause all you heard for an hour or so was WAAH BAAH WOOOH DOOOH chords. Especially extended 16th runs in all four parts as common in fugues were hilarious in producing giant organ clusters.
The ONE piece that worked, and very nicely so, was ArcadeltÂ´s Ave Maria.
Hans

ThomasDodd · Post by **ThomasDodd** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 11:37 am

bloke wrote:If you stand next to the Music Building about halfway down the "back" steps going down (invisible in this picture) and blast a super-short super-loud tuba sound (all-valves-down helps) at one of the tall, narrow windows on the end of the Theatre Building (as indicated with the drawn-in directional arrow) the resulting sound is a

Dare I ask, what ever possessed you to do such a thing?

I would have though you had out grown such childish behavior.

Steve Oberheu · Post by **Steve Oberheu** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 4:01 pm

As far as the oddest places I've played in...

One would be the inside of the old Bibliotheque (now a museum) at the Riponne in Lausanne, Switzerland. There's a large ascending staircase that splits to the four walls, leaving a large, open space overhead. Being a museum, there are stuffed wild animals, bones, insects, rocks and things everywhere. I played there with five other tuba students from the Lausanne conservatory.

The concert consisted of solo upright bass and tenor sax; jazz saxophone quintet; choir; vocal soloists; jazz trumpet/clarinet/actor guy; percussion; tuba sextet; and these weird instruments....trumpet bodies played with saxophone mouthpieces, and the tubes from each valve extended different directions with plastic funnels at the end of them. And get this....everything was played totally in the dark, only with a projector and a couple of lightshow-type things here and there. The audience sat on the steps in the middle of the room while the music came from below and above them, they saw none of the musicians until the concert was over. Sure, it sounds really bizarre (and it was!), but was really quite cool.

elimia wrote: I bet I could be rockin' like Dokken in a cave!

Wow.....never thought I'd hear that phrase again! That was one of the best hard rock bands ever! "Back for the Attack" easily is one of my favorite hard rock albums.

Steve Oberheu · Post by **Steve Oberheu** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 4:08 pm

Oh....for my honorable mentions....

My wife played with the Winnipeg Symphony in a hockey rink in northern Manitoba.

One of the horn players here in Winnipeg made a trip to Borneo last summer. Had pictures of him playing horn for a couple of orangutans.

Gotta give recognition to a friend of mine who played in a hot tub at a tailgate party at Virginia Tech.

In my punk rock days, I played a show in an indoor skate park in North Carolina. A big, open room with lots of ramps and even an empty pool for kids to skate in. We set up at the foot of one of the ramps, lots of kids skating everywhere during the show. Good times!

tmmcas1 · Post by **tmmcas1** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 4:09 pm

That concert was the bomb Steve!! I played that gig too. I wish I could take that show on the road. Man....good times.

Tom

Steve Oberheu · Post by **Steve Oberheu** » Fri Apr 01, 2005 4:19 pm

tmmcas1 wrote:That concert was the bomb Steve!! I played that gig too. I wish I could take that show on the road. Man....good times.

"NU-NUS!!!!!!!"

Not to mention all the free wine!! Good times, indeed!!!

tubatooter1940 · Post by **tubatooter1940** » Sat Apr 16, 2005 9:34 pm

The old Crystal Ball Room at the Battle House Hotel in Mobile,Alabama, is the most acoustically perfect place I ever played.The ceiling was a series of arches that produced a live sound with no echo.
The Grand Hotel in Point Clear,Alabama has an outside dance floor at the "Point",with an old time band shell.Fun to play there.

Dylan King · Post by **Dylan King** » Sun Apr 17, 2005 5:35 pm

If you have Altiverb or Sound Designer plugins for your MAC, you can pretty much play anywhere you'd like from home.

One of the biggest challenges in the audio industry, creating a good sounding, natural appearing reverb doesnâ€™t come easy. Although applying high-end reverb previously meant using weighty, expensive hardware, youâ€™ll find the best reverb right in your Logic mixer. Describing it in a sober way, reverb means fitting a sound with spatial characteristics. But with the Logic reverbs, you crown them with a noble touch.

Space Designer
The real-time convolution process of Space Designer, Logic Pro 7â€™s high-end reverb plug-in, makes it possible to produce a reverb virtually indistinguishable from that of a real room or hall. Space Designerâ€™s real-time calculation process merges the input signal with a reverberation sample â€” the impulse response (IR) â€” taken from any acoustic space such as a room, hall or cathedral. The result sounds as if the input signal had actually been recorded directly in the sampled room. The reverb can be further shaped via Space Designerâ€™s comprehensive parameter set. Space Designer ships with a library of over 1,000 impulse responses. These include real rooms and halls, as well as legendary classic and contemporary reverb units. You can also record your own impulse responses.

The ability to create and edit customized convolution reverbs sets Space Designer apart. In addition to sampled reverbs, Space Designer features a unique method for the creation of high-quality synthetic reverbs, through the use of specially designed envelopes. Youâ€™ll find the resulting reverbs dense and smooth, perfect for complementing your mix without needing to massively boost effect levels.

Regardless of whether you use IR samples or create your own synthetic reverbs, the sound can be quickly customized with Space Designerâ€™s innovative volume, filter, and density envelopes. Model smooth envelope shapes onscreen with ease. Youâ€™ll also find the 6- or 12-dB low pass, band pass or high pass filters equally suited for fine-tuning your reverb sound or for creating experimental sound effects. As with all Logic Pro 7 plug-ins, Space Designer supports sample rates up to 192 kHz. The intuitive hands-on graphical user interface, the ability to create stunningly realistic reverbs using IR samples and the unique reverb synthesis facilities make Space Designer a highly professional tool perfect for any sound design or music production situation.

TubeNet

Playing in unusual places

Playing in unusual places

Echoes from the past ...

Most messed up concert in my life