Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Category Archives: Mappings
MOVES to the rescue !
You would have thought that the bass guitar was one of the most logical and intuitive instruments around. It even beats the 6-string guitar because its tuning only uses fourths (=5 halfsteps), while the guitar slips in a stray major third … Continue reading
Posted in Mappings, Moves notation, Music Theory
Tagged bass guitar, chromatic patterns, diminished scale, Nicolas Slonimsky, Slonimsky
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Get your first scale free?
Remember all those collections they use to sell at the newsagents, offering you a free binder with the first instalment? As if you wouldn’t end up paying for it in the end! The idea was that once it was in … Continue reading
Affirmative Action for the Piano
One takeaway from my recent experience in a Montessori school was the evident glee with which the children attacked a pentatonic balafon brought in by one of the teachers, contrasting with their apparent lack of interest in the expensive chromatic … Continue reading
You get back what you put in
One of the dangers of transcribing music, often encountered by ethnomusicologists, is that of forgetting that what you write down and the music itself are two different things. Or as I keep saying, the map is not the territory. I … Continue reading
Six Seconds Make a Seventh
Six seconds make a seventh? Is time expanding? How do they do that? Simple! The same way as two thirds make a fifth! Two fifths make a ninth, but three of them make a thirteenth, which is also twelve seconds. … Continue reading
Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 