SCA: Battlemoor!

[kellan_the_tabby]

[ My face. I look distressed. Behind me is the back of the van, which has a fair amount of stuff in it. but you can still see out the back. ]

YES Battlemoor was like two months ago, WHAT OF IT.

Anyway I admit I was kinda concerned when we left, on account of I could see out the back & when you’re heading for War that means you forgot stuff. Which was kinda true, I didn’t bring the booth, but I MEANT to not bring the booth, so.

Also I didn’t take many pictures, but more because my phone ran out of battery than anything else, welp.

There was a Storm of Great Ferocity and Note (hail version):

[ Grass, mostly green, some brown. There’s a whole lotta hail in it; the closer stuff looks to be a quarter to a half inch. Further away it drifts into piles a couple inches deep. ]

Sitting in camp, watching everyone attending court stuff themselves into the tent with the royalty, is pretty amusing, especially when you’re in a nice not-crowded tent across the street. Not that we could hear anything, but we couldn’t anyway.

I took three classes! Or possibly four, I am not sure! I learned how to make a Norse bone flute! Check it out, it looks awesome.

[ A bone flute, maybe eight inches long; it has five finger holes, then another hole further up (apparently that’s called the window). There’s an X carved into the bone above the finger holes. ]

I need to explain that I didn’t do ANY of the work that’s visible in that picture; the teacher had already cleaned the bones, cut them to length, & bored all the holes. All we had to do was stuff some beeswax into the end you blow in, to make the right shape for sound to happen.

I spent THREE HOURS messing with the beeswax. I got either no sound at all, or occasional, really breathy high-pitched whistles, which then immediately went away when I poked at the beeswax again, or even looked at it funny.

[ The flute, seen from the end. There’s a wodge of beeswax shoved into the hole; it’s mostly at the bottom of the hole, but there’s a bit up the sides. ]

… you may note that I didn’t say I MADE a beeswax flute. That’s because I didn’t. After messing with it for THREE HOURS, the teacher took pity on me & the other three people who hadn’t either gotten a nice tone or given up, & handed us perfectly functional bone flutes.

Wouldn’t even take money for materials. Bless that guy.

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Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Impressive hail.

Flutes are harder than they look, because the sound is created by air tumbling around the inside surface, so every little bobble can change the sound.

I've done several rounds of PVC drum making workshops, because the first was enough to show me how to do it, and I taught other folks. Extremely forgiving media, although we do pay the provider to cut the pipes to length for us -- the original workshop had hacksaws.

Re: Thoughts

[kellan_the_tabby]

There's a group of teenagers down in Gallup that do a lot of drumming with pvc & pickle barrels -- most of the pvc is _tuned_, they sound SO good. I went up after I saw em at a First Friday & totally fangirled at em. I've got video somewhere ...

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

You can get quite a nice range of notes from a PVC drum. It works like a doumbek, so each drum has an edge and a middle note. We usually use 4-inch or 6-inch wide pipes, and 3-foot or 4-foot lengths, giving a range of 4/3, 4/4, 6/3, and 6/4. We also have one that is much wider, maybe 18 inches or so, and only about 2 feet long. So when you put those together in a drum jam, the diversity of sounds works really well.

[danabren]

Yikes on the hail.

Yay on the class, and extra yay for the teacher.

[kellan_the_tabby]

tbh there's enough hail here we've all kinda gotten used to it. better than tornadoes, anyways.

[thewayne]

Very cool!

A bought a black bamboo shakuhachi at the renaissance festival in Phoenix ages ago, I can't get crap for sound out of that thing. :-) But it is purty.

[kellan_the_tabby]

SWEET. I bet I could play it. Like, poorly, but.

[thewayne]

ROFL!  There's an instrument maker in SE AZ that hand-craft all sorts of cool stuff and sell them at the AZ Ren Fest, and give basic instruction on them at the festival.  But the black bamboo was quite unique, I couldn't resist it.

[kellan_the_tabby]

I've seen black bamboo flutes, even got to play one, & they're just. Striking.