Cool Instruments!

[jb]

I'm not understanding your problem with this device. A colorful plastic computer that makes a wide range of strange, cool sounds: that's practically the definition of half of all children's toys on the market today. This one just makes more, and young users will intuitively learn pretty complex concepts like carrier frequencies, band-pass filters, and the difference between frequency and amplitude. The won't explicitly learn the terms, just gain an intuitive sense of the concepts which will make learning any college-level time series analysis much, much easier.

I'm challenged to find the right thing for my kids. My 5 year old and I built a little buzzer from those wires-and-capacitor kits and he just loves it. Sort of a conductivity theremin, where when he squeezes the wires between his fingers the pitch goes all crazy.

Then we have this crazy plastic electric double neck guitar thing with samples and beats. Noisy as all hell but he's putting patterns together (finally passing his 3 year old brother's jams).

But most music toys are so crappy, they fall apart after a few months. On the other hand...young boys really beat the shit out of things. I don't want to invest in anything worth much more than $40 for fear of it being wasted in a day.

Aside from the time I do spend with them and my cherished studio equipment, I am always looking for recommendations for decent, cheap-ish kids toys/instruments from other people who have experience. And I'll post mine as well.

Get a couple Orff instruments. However, they're not for unsupervised play, 'cause they're not indestructible.

Orff instruments are basically small marimbas, xylophones, and vibes-without-the-vibes (they call them "metallophones") that have a limited range... like an octave and a half maybe. And some of them are just one diatonic scale. But the thing about these instruments that's special is that you can remove the bars individually, to create a situation where no matter what a kid hits, it will be part of the chord pattern. And by removing nearby bars, you can eliminate mishits and stuff. So the kids learn a specific piece of information, without other things distracting them. There's a whole method around it.

(And yes, Orff instruments were invented by Karl Orff, who wrote "Carmina Burana" among other things, including an f-ing difficult sightsinging textbook)

http://www.giardinelli.com/srs7/content ... rc=AXMW3EL

[erik]

5) Eric will debate anything and then later claim he didn't say it.

Yes, anytime someone asks me to defend a point that I don't believe in, I will point out that I didn't make that claim and will not defend it. I would expect the same of most people who are interested in having an honest discussion.

Show me where I said something, then denied having said it.

[mico saudad]

Dan-O are you calling Erik a flip-flopper? Because erik once said to me:

If anyone ever calls me a flip-flopper I will give $4000 to abecedarian

Yehaw! I'm in the money.
(Of course I bet erik will deny he ever said that too, even though he obviously did say it because it's in quotes right here...)

[erik]

dammit, I'm so totally busted

*writes check that will bounce*

[erik]

Look at this!

http://www.oddmusic.com/gallery/index.html

[roymond]

Look at this!

http://www.oddmusic.com/gallery/index.html

Sweet mother of Jesus! I love the 5 string bass, "with 33 extra strings"

[john m]

1) Don't badmouth the French

I'm only speaking for that which I represent, but the point could also be extended to, you know, all nationalities.

[Albatross]

http://www.oddmusic.com/gallery/index.html

A MIDI-capable beer bottle organ??? You've gotta be SHITTING me!

That's the coolest thing ever.

[blue]

me and erik had a very long conversation about this unit up there. near as i can tell, it's a control surface, like the minikorg or any midi keyboard with lots of knobs, and it hooks into a computer, which is probably running some kinda loop-based thing.

so my thing is, it's probably really fun to play with, but it's nothing anyone with a computer, a mic, and some softsynths couldn't put together in half an hour, and it's not teaching what i'd call music. in fact, without some sort of curriculum around it, it's not much different from handing your kids a drum machine.

the fact that they find it interesting isn't relevenant to whether or not it's teaching them music. and sure, you can call anything music, but, to me, there's a certain bar below which you're just fucking around with sound, and that bar is somewhere around learning some kind of formalized tonal communication system.

it's like, yeah, you can learn that wanging around the red knob drops the frequency of that resonant filter, but unless that's the moral extent of what you're wanting to communicate as music, it falls short of education.

kids are interested in just about anything you put in front of them, especially for the length of time that you're paying attention to them and encouraging them to mess with it.

so, who can argue that this is teaching music, rather than teaching maybe the fundamentals of sample manipulation?

and, in short, erik owes me $40,000.

[edit]

so it turns out the whole teaching music thing was a red herring - it teaches the fundamentals of sound synthesis, and does not claim to teach anything about music.

so.. buy your kids a moog. that's the lesson.

[Tonamel]

Compare it to learning cello. The best players started learning in or before grade school, and a beginner's instrument costs about $600.

In the interest of disseminating correct information:

[insert lots of truth here]

Some day, I will learn not to post when I'm in a rush to get to class. Today was not that day.

[jute gyte]

http://logosfoundation.org/instrum-god.html is really impressive.

[Dan-O from Five-O]

5) Eric will debate anything and then later claim he didn't say it.

Show me where I said something, then denied having said it.

Well there's...

Could you show me a link to a Casio or Yamaha synth that provides tutorials on how to use all aspects of it; connected to a computer, with filters, envelopes, pitch-shift, delay, EQ and reverb; with 4 loudspeakers and both switches and faders that accomodates up to 6 people and acts as a digital sampler (with memory banks and looping, stretching, pitch-shifting and reverse playing) and real-time mixer that costs less than the Cybersongosse?

And...

The synth you linked to doesn't even come close to having all the features of the Cybersongosse.

Or...

the fact that the thing is a bad-ass sampler and a mixer

Then you reversed your position or "flip/flopped" if you will when you said..

Yeah, but I didn't make any of those claims.

[erik]

Let's make this thread about cool instruments again. I'm sorry for my part in derailing it in that regard. Go here to see people talk about things that aren't cool instruments: http://songfight.net/forums/viewtopic.p ... ght=#25159

[erik]

Look at this!

http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/f ... artch.html#

[mico saudad]

I've totally got to bump this website:

http://www.oddmusic.com/gallery/index.html

Good find, guys. I spent an hour at this web site going through all the pictures and samples.

[roymond]

Look at this!

http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/f ... artch.html#

I saw the Harry Partch ensemble a number of times. They used to be based in Nyack, NY. The instruments are beautiful both aurally and visually. Those marimba are amazing.