instruments

My main instruments are the vibraphone and the dulcimer. I also use a laptop for electroacoustic/electronic work; and various small percussion and whistles.

The vibes

There are two.

The Baby

I now have a Saito VS220-DC. It's called the Baby. As of this writing [11 Jul 2009] it's about six months old from when it was made. It's well-made and solid, with a full bottom-to-middle register and a keening top-register.

It has gorgeous overtones and effective nodal points that can be used in all sorts of ways, even at the higher-middle range. IT HAS CASES [although the case for the frame could have done with some wheels - it's too heavy to carry].

The motor can be run with eight AA batteries, making it a perfect gigging machine for outdoors if you use the motor. Which I do now. I love it. Quite wholeheartedly.

Let me take the opportunity to also say that the discussions with Toru Saito and his team in Japan, and Pustjens Percussion in the Netherlands, were a pleasure from start to finish. I would recommend both to any tuned percussionist if they wanted to buy something.

The Beast [retired]

I bought my first instrument - the forty-year-old Premier OS701 [non-graduated bars, red felt: 751s have green felt. Weird, eh?] that people used to see me wheeling about - from Capelle Music in Southend on Sea, who ripped me off completely.

I had very gratefully received a grant from the Prince's Trust to buy an instrument: I'd gone for a Bergerault. Capelle said they'd get one, then started fobbing me off with excuses like "oh, Bergerault has gone on holiday because France has won the European Championship; so they haven't delivered it yet." and [I'll never forget this] "Van Morrison's vibes player's got your set of keys." The Premier was the stand-in.

I phoned Bergerault directly [as my French in those days was fluent] and they told me they'd stopped dealing with him as he never paid his invoices. Then after writing to him threatening a small claim and Trading Standards [now there was a waste of time], the shop mysteriously disappeared. Gerard Bart and his "business" extracted about a grand from me for which I got my hoary ramshackle Beast [that's its name: it has other, ruder ones].

In several ways, it's misbegotten: I took the motor off as it kept sparking and trying, physically aiming, to electrocute me [and I've almost been electrocuted before, it's not pleasant I can tell you. Don't ask]. Because Premier used leaf springs instead of coils for the dampening mechanism, I had to bind various bits of metal and gaffer tape to it when the plates snap [as they certainly do]. At one point, when Walt and I were roaming about the East Midlands doing <dialectic> it was held together by twenty-five metres of string. Most of the rotating vanes have been knocked out. Premier actually fixed it up for me once, but that will never happen again [especially since they craftily sold off the Wigston factory so they could make things cheaply in China - I remember Dale, who fixed my instrument - thanks]. It rattled and shook. But I do love it. To an extent.

The Beast's last gig was with the trio, in March. It now sits folded in a corner of my rehearsal space, telling the Baby stories and legends, all with a warning that the work is about to begin... and it will not be pretty.

The dulcimer

My dulcimer was bought from a family friend about six years ago. It's a 12 course dulcimer with a big sound-box, so it's quite heavy. It was supposed to be an instrument I could learn for pleasure, but as it's easier to transport than the vibes, I once took it to an improv gig and people really liked what I did with it. I'm not as good on it as I'd like to be, but when I do get to play it I enjoy it immensely, especially when I couple it with the laptop.

Other stuff

I own a Yamaha PSR-280 keyboard. It's what I write music on, and I've had it for years. I'm not a pianist, so I don't need anything good - just something that'll make the right sound at the right time. I have an ocarina and a beak flute from Pakistan, an orchestral triangle, some nuts and bolts and a home-made shaker [pot with lid + dried beans]. Arun gave me a swarmandal at the beginning of 2009, which is lovely. The pianist Steve Clifford gave me a drum-kit a few years ago. I used to have an alto saxophone and clarinet, and have played the flute too. But not very well.

The computers

The desktop is now a lovely donated Dell thingy [thank you, Ruth and Martin!] with 1.6GHz of RAM and two 80GB hard-drives.

Oh, my old laptop died.

It was the Fujitsu Lifebook B110, and it ran Windows 98 and ran on 64MB of RAM. I loved it because it was raw and wild, unpredictable. When things went wrong on that lap-top, you knew you had to think of something. I crave that kind of excitement.

But then it just wouldn't power up any more, pretty much a week after taking a long, cold look at the Beast and assessing its future.

I then acquired [legally, of course] a reconditioned Fujitsu S6010. It was bigger than my old laptop. And cleverer. But unfortunately, nowhere near as tough. A bus ride damaged my hard-drive, which made switch over to solid state drives: and finally, just before Christmas 2009, the power connector went. So I'm now working on a super-fast Dell Latitude D400, and am extremely happy.

Both desktop and laptop run openSUSE Linux. Since audio for Linux is, um, okay if you're prepared to put in about two months of your life a year, it isn't a decision for everyone.

But to be honest, using Linux should be a good decision for everyone. The main problem is that some sectors of the Linux community are not very good at explaining things so that people can use the system. It's almost as if they thrive on being incomprehensible, which gives them the chance to say "we're misunderstood". Tragic.

The other problem is that producing something for free gives the producer a chance to say "well you didn't pay for it so don't complain so much," which in one sense is true, but in an ideological sense [that is to say, the altruistic concept of providing technological power to all regardless of economic status] is just a bit off-kilter. Still, there are some good things that come out of it, so I'm definitely a supporter. If only they'd concentrate more on Macintosh compatibility, rather than Windows... and were friendlier...

Anyway, using a Linux system has taught me to think about what I put on my computer. The result on the laptop is an extremely good system that only cost me a maximum of six hours of time, and £50 for Lime [because, no matter what anyone tells you, most notation editors for Linux just aren't very good]. This, for something that

Needless to say, I'm very happy with this arrangement, especially since I'm poor and don't like saving money [yes, that's right. I like spending; hence why I'm poor]. I could talk about this all day - so I've put some nerdy pics up on my Opera weblog.

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