chinese tam-tam

[Kostas]

hello,

I'm exploring a very interest sound in gold xp, "37 chinese tam-tam". The sounds that correspond to the midi keyboard F0, B0, and B1 are played by a bow (i assume from cello or contrabass), but since there are different sounds a different way of playing the bow should be applied. I want to use this instrument in a score and woud be helpful if somenone knows what I have to write as an instruction to the percussionist in order to achieve a sound near to the aforementioned ones. By the way, this year is the year of the pig!

Kostas Rekleitis

[jwd]

Hi,

I believe it as actually a wire brush (or brushes) that is used to get that bowed sound and is generally notated as such. There are probably other ways to achieve different sounds as well (other than mallets)...

There must be a few percussionists floating around the forum.

Jwd- :)

[Kostas]

thanks!
according to manual D0-B1 sounds are described as "bowed effects" but most probable as you say are brushes. A nice book that deals with modern music notation is by Kurt Stone and it has al lot of stuff about percussions (but not audio examples), anyway, I look around

Kostas

[Pietro]

I don't know the sounds from Gold XP, but I can tell, that in original Gold, there are no samples of gong or tamtam played with brushes. They are played with mallets or rubbed (fast & straight or slow & circularly) with a triangle beater.

- Piotr

[chest]

For what it's worth: I'm not a percussionist but have used bows on various conventional percussion instruments (and on empty food tins, cardboard boxes and other things that come to hand) in improvised music, and have scraped and rubbed various sized cymbols, gongs, etc with different tools. I've found some types of sound to be quite easy to repeat soon after you first made them, some to be easy to repeat in another session on another day, and some quite elusive even if you have a clear mental picture of the sound you want.

There are so many different sounds you can get from these things - especially the bigger ones - that I suspect the only way you'd get someone else to generate a specific sound that you have in mind is if you try to make that sound on several different tam-tams and then write down a detailed description of any technique that produces a consistent result with the different instruments - as well as trying to describe the sound itself (very difficult, I'd think). Also, you'd have to be able to get the same sound with a range of different forces applied in the bowing/scraping/rubbing, because it'll be hard to explain how much force to apply. And you'd have to be sure that different tools (eg different wire brushes) will all produce what you want.

I seem to recall that, for a particular piece, Stockhausen included some very specific instructions for where and how to apply what kind of excitation to various parts of a tam-tam(?) Perhaps you could look up the details of this or other uses of these techniques, with particular reference to how repeatable they are with different instruments and performers.

Sorry, that's a bit negative and doesn't address your specific query about the F0, B0, and B1 sounds. Perhaps there's a percussionist reader of this forum who could suggest a specific instructions for generating similar sounds?

Or are there any usable memories from the recording sessions?

[Kostas]

you're right, there are too many ways of playing instruments like gongs and tam-tam(s) and difficult to describe, one of the sounds however is like a voice of a "sampled whale" that tries to escape (free Willy!) :D a percussionist is going to explain to me all about soon.


Kostas

[Kostas]

after a little investigation and asking the right people I found out that the B0 (whale-like) sound of the chinese tam-tam is produced by a rubber ball (sticked in a safety pin), you just need to rub the ball in circular direction.Let's name the sound Willy Rubber :) the same technique can be applied in bass drum or timpani producing an elephant like sound! (a Dumbo sound?!)


Kostas