Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Monthly Archives: November 2014
How to be talented
What musical talent isn’t Musical talent used to be a mystery, and to many still is. Some people even want to believe that it is God-given. Not a very empowering view, unless you think prayer will change your lot. And … Continue reading
Blow your horn, not your savings
The Honeycomb: useless brainfood? The Honeycomb, known by some as the Harmonic Table, maps notes on a hexagonal grid along three axes: fifths, major thirds and minor thirds. That’s nice, but what do you want to do with it? Well, … Continue reading
Honeycomium. WTF. A truly analog experience.
What singers don’t know about howling mikes Have you ever noticed in Karaoke bars when a singer takes the microphone and it starts howling, the ones that don’t know try to cover the mike with their hand and the feedback … Continue reading
Getting towards a tipping point
Paul von Jankó was a man ahead of his time. His ideas fell on stony ground and he ended up spending the last 17 years of his life laboring on a Turkish tobacco farm. Perhaps to get away from his … Continue reading
How to convert your panpipe to wholetone tuning
So your Gran bought you this beautiful Romanian nai for Christmas and the first thing you want to do is convert it to wholetone tuning so you can play all your favorite Charlie Parker tunes on it – in all … Continue reading
Posted in Intuitive Instruments
Tagged dajoeri, how to tune panpipes, nai, Romanian nai, Romanian panpipe, tuning panpipes, tuutflutes, wholetone panpipes
2 Comments
Learning one halfstep at a time
If you want to know what quartertones sound like, get your class of kids to sing the Beatles song When I’m 64. The second line is supposed to sound like this: And what you will generally get, when you average … Continue reading
Posted in Interval Training
Tagged Chromatic scale, deep purple, Halfsteps, Herbie Hancock, Semitones
Leave a comment
How tots discover they don’t like “music”
Early learning materials conceived to initiate tots into the making of music suffer from conflicting design aims and manage to put quite a few little fellows off from the outset. It is often wrongly assumed that kids who don’t pursue … Continue reading
Visualizing the Seven Dwarfs + Cinderella
No I haven’t suddenly taken to designing embroidery patterns for Romanian shirts. I used this old toy I found in the basement to show you how the player of the double-wholetone-row xylophone or wholetone panpipe player visualizes Messiaen’s seven “modes … Continue reading
Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 