August 04, 2004
how do you spell didgeridoo?
My friend, Geoff, came over the other night to do some didgeridoo recording. I actually don't know how it came to be that he plays didgeridoo (if you read this, G, please let us all know!), but as soon as I found out, I knew that I needed to record him.
Now this is a freakin' cool instrument. Basically, it is just a hollowed out fairly narrow tree trunk with a beeswak 'mouthpiece' that you play similarly to brass instruments (tuba in particular). Geoff tells me that the first ones used by the aborigines were hollowed out by wood boring bugs, so all that had to be done to turn it into an instrument was trimming to length and dipping it in beeswax. Nowadays, some are wood and some are made out of distressed PVC. You don't play notes, or at least not more than one note, so I didn't have Geoff play any interesting melodies (but we did get some cool rhythmic motifs going). Now that I write this, I wonder if you could make a didgeridoo that could play multiple notes a la the trombone. This seems possible. Maybe I will try. Maybe it already exists.
What I really love about this instrument is the texture and variability of the sound. It is so distinct and so individually analog; in some ways totally evil and other ways kind of friendly in its goofiness. I imagine that the way this texture is established is because of the rough interior surface. Those bugs tended not to leave things too tidy. I guess the sound waves are modified and interrupted by these variations yielding a more guttural and organic sound than the pure sine wave sounds that come out of more traditional and well-polished wind instruments.
I am looking forward to using this new sound in a song. We'll see what happens.
well, since you asked me to comment...
i have a variety of CDs of real didg players tearing shit up. you can tell they are truly masters. and i have a recording of a "didg-bone", which is two PVC pipes inside each other. as you are playing, your extend the outer pipe (a la a trombone) and the sound goes deeper and deeper, and sounds really eerie.
i started playing sophomore year of college when a friend came over with a PVC pipe (among other pipes) and was trying to play. he kinda sucked at it, and i went out and got one. we had a linoleum floored kitchen, so when i would practice, the entire room would shake. That was the best room ever to play in. After a while, I got better and better and could go longer and longer. I eventually took lessons from a Bay Area maestro (Steven Kent) and learned some more tricks. Pretty amazing to offer a didgeridoo class and have 20 or so people show up. Even in wacky San Francisco. I brought the didg with me for my year abroad in germany and we'd play it in the woods, on top of old castle ruins around a fire. pretty cool stuff. once i graduated, and no longer had a linoleum floor kitchen, i sort of stopped playing. Off and on for the last 6 years or so, and let's hope it's like riding a bicycle.
Posted by: geoff at August 5, 2004 08:29 AMaha, the didg-bone! I like tromberidoo better, but it sounds like a cool instrument. Can you actually play a melody, or is it more like sliding around between notes?
I'd love to borrow some of those recordings of master didg players sometime; must be pretty amazing. That circular breathing thing isn't easy, I'm sure.
I'm sure that K wouldn't mind if you put linoleum on the floor, walls and ceiling of a room in your place, would she? I mean, it's in the name of artistic expression, which she certainly approves of, right?!?!?
