Open Source: It's the future

Ok, I'm not going to start preaching about the whole concept of open source here, but I just want to say that I am beginning to admire its concept. In the good old days of Kazaa and Napster, and I'm talking about the good old days, when you could download, say, the entire $9,000 Adobe Font Folio for free while exponentially doubling your music library in a single night, you could find anything and everything you wanted. But then it got ugly and people started getting their nasty viruses all over the place, and then, yeah, the music industry got their lawyers all mixed up in it, and then it was just all gone. We could blog for hours about this. The point is, is that sharing as we know it is over and done with, and now there is a new kind of sharing, and that's called open source. For a taiko-related story about the greatness of open source, go here and read about what ON Ensemble are doing.

What I just wanted to say, was that open source is coming up with some fabulous innovations. And today, the fabulous innovation du jour is Audacity. Audacity is a free audio editing software program. The reason why I think it's just the greatest thing ever to happen ever, is that I was using, ahem, let's just say, a borrowed version of an unnamed audio editing software program. This borrowed version of the software has bugs and inconsistencies and didn't come with all the add-ons which would make it useful to me. But Audacity has everything an amateur like me needs to get going with turning my minidisc recordings into works of art. It has online help, tutorials and documentation, and the ability to run on almost any operating system--that's right mac and pc and linux! And did I mention? It's FREE! If you have any interest in this sort of geeky thing, then get Audacity.

Now I just need to figure out how to use it.

I did it! I did it!

I tied my own shime--and it sounds great!



Of course last Saturday was the day the digi-cam decided to go MIA. I actually wanted to take pics so I could get a look at the before shots in case I got stuck and needed to figure out what it looked like before I made a mess of things. Oh well.

First off I need to say that I wouldn't have even dreamed of buying my own shime, much less tying/tightening it if it weren't for Kris Bergstrom's excellent TIASOU method instructions. They used to be online at tiasou.org, but have mysteriously vanished off the face of the internet. I personally wouldn't have attempted this just by the written directions alone. Not that they're bad directions, but I'm one of those people who needs to see and do (under strict adult supervision) before I venture off and try to do things on my own--well something as seemingly complicated as tying my own shime anyway. So I took his workshop at the Taiko Conference, and with that experience under my belt I decided to just dive in and do one of the scariest things I could do to the drum: take all the rope off and put it back together again.

Before I started, I did something geeky, which was to make recordings of both sides of the drum so I could have an audible "snapshot" of my progress. I figured if the drum sounded higher than when I started, then I would count it as a success. I'm not sure how tight Asano tied the shime when they sold it to me, but I assumed it wasn't really super tight.

Anyhow. The TIASOU method suggests specific lacing directions and my drum was laced in the opposite direction, and since I wanted to follow the TIASOU's suggestions, the first thing I had to do was completely take all the rope off. It was both scary and liberating to have the drum in 3 pieces on the living room floor. I got to see the beautiful inside of the drum and Asano's markings on the drum heads. That's not something you get to see every day. Plus it smells fabulous in there. Ahh, wood.

"Stage 1" of the tightening process begins with getting the rope on the drum, removing the slack, and making sure the heads are centered on the body of the drum. Easy enough if you just follow the diagrams. Plus my drum heads are perfectly suited to the size of my drum body, eliminating most of the worry of off-centering the heads--that's what 400 years of craftsmanship will get you! Tightening the rope with my hands alone was one thing, but when I had to apply the agebatchi, that was something else. An Agebatchi is similar to an ax-handle, and it looks like what your Odaiko bachi would look like if you stuck the tip of it on the train tracks. Flat. You take the flat side and use it to pry up the rope to create the tension that pulls the heads together to make that beautiful shime sound.

Now, I know that Kris' philosophy with the TIASOU method is to create a painless, efficient and even aesthetically pleasing process of shime tightening, but if you saw me on the living room floor Saturday you would say that I looked the complete opposite of that. I know I was making mistakes, and I even started over a couple times--sometimes because I thought I was doing something wrong, or could do it better, or both. I even lost all of the precious tension I created because of a sloppy temporary knot, and I felt like those kids you see who get ice cream cones and lick the ice cream part off and start crying when they realize they're holding the cone but the ice cream is in a puddle at their feet. Live and learn. After several attempts, I finally figured out how to handle the agebatchi better and how to hold the tension effectively, but you should have seen the sweat pouring off of me. I don't even sweat that much when I run! I think part of it was just being a little nervous. I also got some serious rug burn on my knees and actually wore two holes in my knees--nothing a little Neosporin and a band-aid can't fix.

"Stage 2" tightening was way funner than Stage 1. In Stage 2, you bind the zig zag laces of the drum in pairs, and for this part you get to actually stand on top of the drum while pulling the rope. Kris put a lot of emphasis on how to do the pull safely and effectively, and I tried to follow his instructions as close as I could. Stage 2 is when your shime really gets tight, and I think I did a pretty decent job. After binding all the pairs together and tying off the rope, I did my geeky testing again, and it sounded way different than before. Now my baby has nice high pitch--higher than what the shimes at the dojo sound like right now.

So you're supposed to tighten the shime only for when you play it, and release the tension when you're done. Most people don't do that. But Kris was talking about how the heads can only sound good for a certain amount of time before they wear out, and he even loses sleep if he has to tighten the heads the night before a gig he wouldn't otherwise have time to tighten the shime for beforehand. I don't know if I would necessarily have the time to tighten the shime between the time I get home from work and have to go to class. But I think I would like to get to that point. He says it can be done in 20 minutes. I took 4 hours. But that included restarting and thinking and do-overs and whipping the ends of the rope (I tied twine around the ends of the rope so the rope doesn't unravel). Maybe I could tighten on Thursdays and play on Fridays and Mondays and release after class on Mondays? I should try that.

Anyhow. This whole shime-tightening thing was a good experience, and I would recommend it to anyone who plays a shime. I feel more connected to mine after this! Now I just need to whip those other shime into shape . . .

Songs in 6

You know, when I was looking for this image, I could have sworn it was called "I Saw the Figure 9 in Gold." And then I was going to be clever and flip the image upside-down. Du-oh! I spent about half an hour searching my bookshelves and the internet just trying to remember the name of this freakin' painting, and more time trying to find a picture of it, so it's going to stay in this post. You'll just have to pretend it's a 6, because that would have been so artistic and deep and meaningful. I guess my memory is going. Did I mention I celebrated my 30th birthday a few days ago? Yeah. Old.

Now, what was I going to blog about?

So we've been working on a song in 6. What does that mean? Well, it means that it's in 6 time. And what does that mean? There are six quarter beats in a bar. What's a bar? How do you know there are only 6 beats? How do you know they're quarter beats if there are 6 of them? Wouldn't that make them 1/6 beats?Are you seeing what I'm getting at? I have no musical background, and here we are working on a song in 6. I could live in blissful ignorance, playing my way through this song in 6, never knowing that I was playing a song in 6, if only if it weren't for the solo section. Once you start trying to put a solo on a 6 time backbeat, then you definetely know something is wrong when your regular little riffs and ratamacues or whatever just aren't working anymore. People who are more musically inclined than me kept saying that they were trying to figure out where the 1 was, and of course I had no idea what they were talking about. It starts to make sense that you need to know where the beginning of the 6 beat bar begins when you're waving your arms around like you're finished with a line in your solo only to discover that there is something profoundly wrong with everyone else still grooving in the backbeat. It's very peculiar and hard to describe. I guess you can say everyone is counting out loud from 1-6 but you are only counting to 4 and starting all over. Things don't match up.

I asked my teacher if she could tell me what song there is out there in 6 so I could try to listen to it and maybe get a feel for what 6 time sounds like. She said African music is in 6. And I was thinking, Ok, that narrows it down a bit. But then she said she'd bring me in something I could listen to, and true to her word, she did. It's a cd of djembe music and she let me know which songs were in 6. Wow. Djembe music is fast. Djembe players are like superstar shime players--on speed. But it was good to hear and know a song that was in 6. Only problem was, was that the notes are played so fast, I couldn't really hear what was going on. So what I did was that I played the songs at half speed (it's a little trick Windows Media player is capable of. I hate that player, but I think it redeemed itself with that innovation). Djembe songs at half speed are COOL! You have to tweak the sound settings to try to fix the distortion you get from playing a song at half speed, but it's so worth it. I guess in that kind of music you have someone playing a base beat on a deeper sounding drum and it's amazing to hear the complexity of what they are playing--rhythms and patterns at different pitches all going on at the same time. I was blown away. It could totally be translated into taiko music. You should try it. Now I just need to hear something that will inspire another fabulous taiko solo--a solo in 6--and I'll be all set. For now, I'm all ears.

I need to learn how to tie my own laces

Seriously. I have great plans to unlace and retighten my shime this weekend. I took the TIASOU class from Kris Berstrom, I've got his fabulous handouts, and I'm semi-confident.

Actually, I'm terrified. We're talking about my baby here. But if I never try, then I'll never be able to get good at it. And if I never mess up, then I'll never know how to undo the mess I made. So I guess you can say that we should hope for mistakes! But really. I'd also like to be able to tighten the dojo's shimes because I was looking at them last night and they seemed a little floppy. One of them looks like they used that cheap rope they give you at home depot to tie down lumber to your car--that white rope that is actually kind of stretchy. It wouldn't even hold enough tension to keep my shime stand opened at a specific width, so you can imagine what the shime sounds like. So there's that larger goal to kind of keep in mind when I'm doing this. But also what makes me feel a little better is that Janet said she knew how to tie them, so if something really really horrible happens, I have someone who I can shamefully beg and plead to bail me out if I clamshell the heads. I really hope it doesn't come down to that.

So that's the plan, stan. Wish me luck.

How to make a shime stand for under $50

This past weekend I made a stand for the shime. It was WAY easier to make than I thought it would be. I found the instructions on how to make the stand on the internet. I find everything on the internet. These instructions were clear and unintimidating. They included a list of everything you need and even included a couple of diagrams. I completed this project in an afternoon, in between cleaning the house and watching Whale Rider on KQED. You could spend hours and hours sanding it if that's your thing. Or you can make plans to sand later, like I will, maybe, someday.

I went to Home Depot for the materials, and wound up spending a little under fifty bucks for it all. A shime stand for under fifty bucks is not bad. I already had a saw (for making bachi!) and a power drill, and those were all the tools I needed, unless you call sandpaper a tool, in which case you would need some of that too. I could have spent less money if I had: a) not bought 10 feet of extra wood, which I only got because I wouldn't put it past myself to accidentally cut some important piece in half--with a handsaw. Yep. It would take me 5 minutes to cut and another 10 to realize that du-oh!, I wasn't supposed to cut the main part in half! (not that I did. Not this time anyway) b) I had measured the bolts I bought so that I bought two 2" bolts instead of one 2" bolt and one 3" bolt. That was just dumb. I even had a tape measure on me and everything. c) Home Depot only sells drywall screws by the pound. I had to get a pound of screws when I only needed 16. If you make this stand and want 16 drywall screws, let me know and I'll send em to you for FREE!

Anyhow. Making the stand was all about cutting the wood accurately and screwing everything into its correct place. The instructions make it really easy for you. My only additional suggestion would be to drill a pilot hole ahead of time where you want the screws to go. I learned this by watching the New Yankee Workshop on PBS. That guy is a genius with wood, and he has all the carpentry tools ever created. I know nothing about wood working but I love to watch the show because he'll start off by showing you some old antique sideboard, and then he'll go step by step cutting and drilling and dovetailing away and half an hour later he'll have completely re-created the whole thing. Amazing. But anyway, for a pilot hole you just find a drill bit a little smaller than the diameter of your screw and drill down. That way when you're actually drilling the screw into the wood, the wood is less likely to split. In which case you're screwed. Ha! Ha! Ha! Get it? Screwed? Ha! Ha! Ha! No seriously. We have a shime stand at the dojo that's practically worthless because it's all split from people trying to repair the thing only to split the wood. Now a whole leg will have to be replaced and that's out of the realm of my carpentry skills. The New Yankee guy could fix it easy.

The stand turned out beautiful, don't you think? Or as beautiful as a person who only has a saw and a drill gun could make. Maybe I'll stain it, or maybe just paint it black. But that requires me to get dirty and spill stuff that doesn't come out of the carpet. Did I mention that I built this shime on the living room floor? So easy. You should try it yourself.



The only problem I'm having with it right now is that I need to do a little tweaking to get it just right. As it is now, I have to open the stand wide in order to get the shime to sit at the right height. But this means that it's barely sitting on the stand and it seems a little more precarious than I would like. I may have to move the cross bars or cut off part of the legs. It's kind of complicated because when you change one thing, something else changes. The rope on the bottom controls how wide the top opens, but also the height. Do you see how this could get complicated? If I adjusted the rope so that the top opened only just wide enough so the drum fits good, will cutting off the legs change something else? I dunno. And then there's angles to deal with too. I'd like the legs to stand flat on the ground. Right now they're kind of poking down at an angle. Ack. That's more thinking than I want to do. Less thinking, more playing. That's what I say.