zbd1960

22 minutes ago, Dad3353 said:

 

We did all of that; there are templates for most of it on line, and it all worked well for several years. There was no, or very little, cost involved. How do your local football or tennis clubs work..? It should be similar, I'd have thought.

I think this is where the issues lie. A football club etc is a club or society and it will have members who pay a subscription. They will have some sort of constitution/governing document which will means they are an 'unincorporated society' in legal terms run by a committee. A band is not a club/society but a group of people with a common business interest, which is not the same thing. They aren't going to be able to submit a governing document and list who's the chair/secretary/treasurer etc.

They'd have to register as some sort of business structure. 

1 hour ago, Dad3353 said:

 

Not sure about the UK, but, in France, it's easy enough for a local Association (table tennis, footie team, Am-Dram society etc...) to have a bank account. It needs only three designated members (President, Secretary, Treasurer...) and have meetings with Members. Our band (Kiemsa...) used this for the whole of its existence, with official 'meetings' every three years, to vote in the statuary roles, above. It works very well, for very little, or no, cost, and has advantages when contacting other Administrations, such as Town Halls and the like. 

Unfortunately, the UK's approach to the AML and KYC legislation (anti-money laundering and 'know your customer') has been to over react and make it draconian. You are unlikely to get a club/associations account without evidence of a governing document, designated officers, and an extract from committee minutes authorising the setting up of the bank account.  

It was first orchestra rehearsal last night with this term's conductor in charge (we use post-grad conducting students for conductors). We looked at first and last movement of Tchaikovsky symphony #3 - I was on cello.  

There are a lot of notes...

Other than having a member use one of their accounts to handle it all, there are a couple of ways of doing this, but one of them probably doesn't suit your set-up. 

A small business account is the obvious route. The challenge here is that it's not free and to some extent charges will be based on turnover.

The other option, which probably is not a valid one here is if you were set-up as a small society/club, most banks have some sort of 'clubs and charities' account, which below a certain level of activity will offer free banking. If you were running some sort of local 'come and play' thing then that might be a viable option. Downside is you'd have to set up as a club with a constitution etc - which is why I say it's not really an option for you. I mention it as it might suit some people for some types of set up. 

8 hours ago, Piers_Williamson said:

 

Yes, I was singing 1st bass aka baritone. 

My first full-blown choral gig for a few years - I've depped in a few concerts, but I've not been part of a group for a while. Saturday's venue was Carlisle Cathedral with a fully pro orchestra plus the cathedral organ for Elgar's Music Makers.

Orchestra was brass: tuba, 3 trombones, 3 trumpets, 4 horns; woodwind: usual pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons plus bass clarinet and contrabassoon; strings including 2 double basses; harp; percussion: timps plus assorted things like bass drum.

Audience was more-or-less a sell out. 

This week has seen orchestra rehearsals resume, so it's out with the cello. One of the works is Tchaikovsky symphony #3. This will be my first Tchaikovsky symphony. 

OK here's an example of the cello part, sight reading this was entertaining...

I'd agree that main thing type of mute does (use them on cello as well) is to change the character of the sound.

I may be able to make this as it's about 50 miles away - it might clash with another commitment, need to check. If I can attend, I'll bring the ACG and Manton

3 hours ago, itu said:

Dear @zbd1960,

 

Please keep these coming. Very interesting stuff, including lots of nice side notes. I like your no nonsense type of approach: the century, or style does not matter, only music matters.

 

One question I do have: how do you put the gamba frets to the neck? How is it possible to tighten them?

Thank you @itu

What you do with the frets, except the first (one nearest the nut), is tie them further up the neck i.e. nearer to the nut than where they need to be placed. This means they need stretching to be put into place. The challenge is the first fret. You need to use pliers or similar to pull the ends of the fret gut as tight as you can. 

The cello had an outing last night - so the gig was a bit different to most here... orchestra in a church in Carlisle with two operatic soloist. And yes, orchestras have similar issues with sound as bands, even though we're unamplified. Our issues is that church acoustics are almost always awful, overly resonant and leads to mushy sound, particularly in the bass department.... where have I heard that before?

Decent audience. Only one on the very tricky opera arias had significant 'moments' 

It was gig time last night - concert of operatic music. Instrumental items included Wagners prleude to Act 3 of Lohengrin, suite from Carmen by Bizet, the waltz and polonaise from Eugène Onegin by Tchaikovsky, ballet suite from Faust by Gounod. Two soloists singing various items including the Flower Duet (think BA adverts...).

Someone caught me at it... 

12 hours ago, dodge_bass said:

You’re right about the chromatic alterations but nothing in this sequence suggest a change of key so best to not approach it like that when you think about it because you lose sight of the bigger picture - I.E it’s just a slightly cheeky chord sequence in the key of G major. 
 

Chord iii is pretty common actually; perhaps less common is chord three as dominant chord rather than a minor chord. Chord IV going to IV minor is a very common alteration popularised by the Beatles - it’s just a more interesting way of getting back to the I chord (G in this instance).
 

So really its ultimate just a I - IV chord sequence (very common!) with a little variation to make it a bit more interesting to the listener. 

I wear a 'traditional' / 'classical' harmony hat - I'm not that familiar with what goes on in other genres. I agree it's essentially a IV/I cadential sequence. No key change is inferred as there are for example no pivot chords or attempts to create a new tonic etc.  

Chord III is one of the lesser used chords. What's also odd is the heavy chromatic alterations involved in this sequence. You start in G (1 sharp), then B (5 sharps), C, then finally Cmin (3 flats)

There is an article in the Guardian online today about 'like farms' in Vietnam. It was under photography as somehow a photographer got to visit some of these. This is where companies buy 'likes' etc to boost their online profile. 

I have limited experience in this space... but I had to do some of this as part of my course work. In Adobe Premiere Pro you can separate the audio and video and put whatever audio track you like to the video. So you could import the two independent of each other and then synchronise them if you wish to do that. 

You cna make a 'page' non-active so no one will see it

An increasing number of YT videos have the voiceover given by AI. It's obvious. Worse are the ones - I've particularly noticed this with equipment review videos - where the text is obviously AI generated as well as being 'spoken' by AI. These videos are awful since all they do is pick up the advertising fluff from the manufacturer's web site and regurgitate it. You then get people saying 'great review, thanks' etc. Those responses seem to come from people with English as a second language so possibly they don't pick up on it being 'fake' the way a native speaker would.  

In this version, the first could be D with a 7th added but missing the 5th. The second is just a major third and you can't say much more about it than that. The third one is ambiguous. It could be a chord of D with a major 7th, but it's missing the third so you can't tell if it's major or minor. Or, it could be a chord of A with an added 11th in some sort of inversion... but I think that's stretching it as there's no 5th, 7th, or 9th...   

In terms of age profile / demographics at these things. It's kind of inevitable and it's the same whether it's guitars/basses, photography, astronomy, hi-fi... go to any event for any of those (and I've been to events for all of them) snd most people are aged 50+. There are many reasons for this - and it has changed over the decades I've been doing these things. Older people are generally in a better financial position, so are able to go and buy stuff at these events. They also have more time. Income levels are another issue. A mix of incomes not increasing and incomes being squeezed tends to hit younger people harder.   

I resisted going to this... mainly because I'm going to the photography show at the NEC in a fortnight and that may well get expensive. Last time it cost me £600 for an A3 printer...

Having solely been a classical guy in my teens in the 70s, I missed most of these things. I had a potter around YT to listen to various items and found them interesting. I do find it interesting how musicianship and skill was commonplace back then. The level of sophistication with the writing and the arrangements/orchestration.  

We know he's a rocker/biker since in Exodus we have: the Triumph of the Lord was heard throughout the land...

Whilst metal strings are significantly more robust than gut strings, they are prone to the same issues, albeit much less so. 

When you tighten a string, there is some stretching. That stretching is not uniform - some places it will stretch more than in others and this creates a very slight variation in thickness/density of the string along its length. If you repeat the process, it will increase the effect - the places where it has stretched already, will stretch some more, creating places on the string where it's thinner. These thinner places become potential places of failure as the thinning will lead to micro-fractures and metal fatigue. At some point, the micro-fractures increase and the string fails.

This is also why you should avoid kinking the string.

Gut strings are very fragile compared to metal strings - I can tell you from experience that the slightest kink or bend in a string becomes a point of failure very quickly.  

If you want to avoid issues like RSI, tendinitis/tennis elbow etc then getting this right is important. Whilst people are different, the general guidance is having it further south to join the cool kids is not a good idea. Advice I received from tutors when starting out was it should be in the same place whether standing or sitting. As a cellist I can tell you getting posture, fingering, and bow grip wrong can give you serious problems