Most musicians massively underuse their mouths, and the ones
that use their mouths underuse their fingers. This is very
weird and I don’t understand it.
The most common instruments I see are probably piano, guitar, drums,
and violin. Add in mandolin, bass, accordion, cello, viola, and
banjo, and they all have one thing in common: your mouth is completely
idle.
Then there are instruments that do use the mouth, but these don’t use
anywhere near the full capacity of your fingers. A trumpet, baritone,
or tuba has just three buttons and a mini slide, and the other hand
just sits there. The trombone and harmonica just need to be moved
back and forth. The flute, clarinet, sax, and oboe do at least use
both your hands, but using all ten fingers to select a single note is
terrible. Recorder, tin whistle, and bagpipes are even worse: not
only do they require all your fingers, but your mouth isn’t doing very
much.
This does make sense historically: while your mouth is incredibly
versatile, there aren’t obvious ways to combine it with a guitar,
drum, or violin. And the easiest ways to build a wind instrument all
require a lot of fingers so you can spread them out along a tube. But
we’ve had serious electric and electronic instruments for decades: why
is it still uncommon to see people using their mouth’s incredible
ability to modulate sound? Some people sing and play at the same
time, which is great, but probably less than half of musicians?
Breath controllers, which sense breath pressure and make it available
as one input to a synthesizer, have been around for decades, and are
old enough to have been assigned CC-2 in MIDI. Lots of people have
tried them, with some impressive results, and there’s no risk of being
tied to a vendor since they’re so simple. But even though they would
allow anyone playing keyboard to add a new dimension to their playing,
musicians are sufficiently uninterested that Yamaha discontinued their
BC line in 2011. The electronic instruments that have taken off live
are mostly just keyboard and maybe drums. There are so many
fantastically creative people in the music industry, but in the 80s
innovation here seems to have stopped. Why aren’t people coming up
with creative new ways of modulating the sound as you make it?
Since then I’ve been using the breath controller more live, and have
started playing with a talk
box too. Which has the same mystery: anyone can attach a talk box
to any electric or electronic instrument, and get far more control
over their tone and dynamics. But they mostly don’t. It
can’t just be that having a tube coming out of your mouth just looks
too weird since people play wind instruments. With how innovative
people are in other aspects of music it feels really weird to me to
see so little exploration here. Why?
(There’s also an instrument in this category that could have been
built any time in the last ~500y: talkbox bagpipes. While the
mouth-blown pipes are probably most familiar, all the mouth is doing is
putting air into a bag. Bellows pipes replace this with an
arm-operated pump. This opens up an opportunity to point the drones
into your mouth so you can manipulate the sound of your accompaniment,
turning the drones from a continuous, well, drone, into something
lively and danceable. Or, at least, it should. As far as I know no one
has built these, and my attempts to convince my bagpipe-maker cousin to
work on this haven’t been successful.)
Musicians and Mouths
Link post
Most musicians massively underuse their mouths, and the ones that use their mouths underuse their fingers. This is very weird and I don’t understand it.
The most common instruments I see are probably piano, guitar, drums, and violin. Add in mandolin, bass, accordion, cello, viola, and banjo, and they all have one thing in common: your mouth is completely idle.
Then there are instruments that do use the mouth, but these don’t use anywhere near the full capacity of your fingers. A trumpet, baritone, or tuba has just three buttons and a mini slide, and the other hand just sits there. The trombone and harmonica just need to be moved back and forth. The flute, clarinet, sax, and oboe do at least use both your hands, but using all ten fingers to select a single note is terrible. Recorder, tin whistle, and bagpipes are even worse: not only do they require all your fingers, but your mouth isn’t doing very much.
This does make sense historically: while your mouth is incredibly versatile, there aren’t obvious ways to combine it with a guitar, drum, or violin. And the easiest ways to build a wind instrument all require a lot of fingers so you can spread them out along a tube. But we’ve had serious electric and electronic instruments for decades: why is it still uncommon to see people using their mouth’s incredible ability to modulate sound? Some people sing and play at the same time, which is great, but probably less than half of musicians?
I wrote about this a bit in 2019 in Where are the new Instruments?:
Since then I’ve been using the breath controller more live, and have started playing with a talk box too. Which has the same mystery: anyone can attach a talk box to any electric or electronic instrument, and get far more control over their tone and dynamics. But they mostly don’t. It can’t just be that having a tube coming out of your mouth just looks too weird since people play wind instruments. With how innovative people are in other aspects of music it feels really weird to me to see so little exploration here. Why?
(There’s also an instrument in this category that could have been built any time in the last ~500y: talkbox bagpipes. While the mouth-blown pipes are probably most familiar, all the mouth is doing is putting air into a bag. Bellows pipes replace this with an arm-operated pump. This opens up an opportunity to point the drones into your mouth so you can manipulate the sound of your accompaniment, turning the drones from a continuous, well, drone, into something lively and danceable. Or, at least, it should. As far as I know no one has built these, and my attempts to convince my bagpipe-maker cousin to work on this haven’t been successful.)
Comment via: facebook, mastodon