Paul Hirsh
jazz panpipe pioneer and designerRecent Comments
Tag Archives: diminished scale
Serious noodling
The whole point of having an intuitive instrument is to be able to follow the promptings of your Inner Ear without having to stop and think. Which scale is this? What note am I starting from? And much less: which … Continue reading
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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Adding colour to the diminished scale
It is easy to slip into the idea, from studying harmony textbooks, that the only way to form scale-tone chords is to make stacks building upward from each note of the scale, skipping every other note. Then depending on how … Continue reading
Posted in Moves notation, Music Theory
Tagged chord sequences, diminished scale, harmony, Olivier Messiaen, synaesthesia, Turangalila
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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
Olivier Messiaen’s seven dwarfs
One of the fun things about playing wholetone panpipes is the way they make short scales – not just the whole tone scale – ridiculously easy. Short scales are my name for a large family of interval arrays that includes … Continue reading
Let’s Build a Wall!
In my young day they didn’t have jazz courses. You had to blunder about picking up tips, trying stuff out and bluffing where necessary. So when I play with the young players here in France what sticks out to my … Continue reading
Intervallic Awareness for Improvisers 