Hoping someone on here might be able to help me...

I'm on the lookout for any playing opportunities in the Buxton or Sheffield/Chesterfield areas. I came across the Sheffield branch of the SRP but their website doesn't seem to have updated for some time - does anyone know if they're still going? The Manchester Recorder Orchestra looks like fun but sadly I think will be too difficult travel-wise.

Any ideas gratefully accepted!

Thankx

Yes they (Sheffield SRP) are - but the secretary isn't very web-active! I was there in January and will be back there on 26th April for their Playing Day. They are a very friendly branch and would be delighted to see you!

W

Thanks, Willobie. I gave the secretary a call and am going along to their meeting next weekend! I haven't done any ensemble playing for <ages> so am really looking forward to it. Just need to de-rust my fingers now......

That's great! Any chance that you might make on the 26th April?

W

As a very occasional visitor to Sheffield SRP, I recommend you wrap up warmly!

I think that situation has improved now...

W

Global warming, innit?

Location of the thermostat helps...

W

Hello again fellow recorder players. I am doing well with the alto so far but have now come into posession of a tenor also. Presumably if I work through a descant beginner book that will be a good way to learn to play the right fingering on the tenor?

Yes, that will be absolutely fine.

The one thing I'd say you need to take care with a tenor is strain. Tenors are stretchy and tenors are heavy, and if you stretch too much and hold the thing for too long, it can hurt. So do your tenor playing on the "little and often" basis.

Two recorders so far - that's a flying start

Thanks for the tip. Fortunately I have hands like a gorilla after years of guitar playing, so my mouth muscles feel strain before my fingers do. As for two recorders so far...I have been eyeing up a sopranino...then of course I'll need a descant to complete the set. It's a bass I really want though. If anyone has an unloved one in need of a good home, please send me a message and we'll talk!

Erm, if you are eyeing up a sopranino, you'll need earplugs before you go for the descant

I'll keep my ears out for any murmur of a bass, but the spare one I have has got dead keywork and at the moment I can't get it fixed: it also is embarrassingly bad . My good one is very much Spoken For .

Aw thanks re: bass!
Edit: I have been told today my Dad has aquired a wooden bass recorder from a friend who inherited an unwanted one. I can have it. Lucky me! It will probably need a service.....if anyone can recommend somewhere I can post it for a service please message me (I'm in Guernsey so can't just pop up to London...)

I am beside myself with delight with my bass recorder. It's sound carries incredibly well, it can be heard through two closed doors but the sound itself is soft and wooden. Gorgeous. Now I need to spend some time re-wiring my brain to play from the bass clef.
I am hoping to join a small recorder group who have as yet never had a bass player so I doubt they have any music to include bass recorder yet. Can anyone recommend any online sources of free (easy!) four part recorder music?
thanks!

for bass recorder...

have you got something handy to help you internalise that bass clef first? I can recommend Mrs McGillivray's Welcome: it has English and Scots traditional tunes, plus some other material, and takes you through the range of the bass quite nicely.

After that - Werner Icking would be a good start. the homepage - here you can find links both to their own extensive supply of online free stuff, and to other places which have similar. Have fun .

Here are two more links to free recorder music
http://www.geocities.jp/loverecder/
http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Mondrup_Recorder_Collection

If you are feeling particularly masochistic, you will find online very old out of copyright facsimilies, e.g. at imslp.org.
For recorder, a number of these will be in the French violin clef. This is a treble clef moved down so G is on the bottom line, i.e. exactly like bass clef. So you can use it as bass music if you can get your eyes around the squiggly writing and get over the fact that there is an offset treble clef at the start

(My teacher tells me that French violin clef isn't confusing, 'it's just like bass clef'. Actually, this doesn't help me very much at all!!)

Hehe - I'm still saving up French violin clef for another day, Maizie...

I went to a concert last weekend, of Bach flute sonatas played by Rachel Brown, as I'd learned one from her programme, and am attempting to embark on learning another. She was playing from facsimile, and told us that the original music had been written in ink Bach'd made himself, from oak gall and suchlike, and that the ink was slowly but surely eating through the paper - especially not great as the music was written on both sides of the paper. Conservators have apparently sliced the paper through sideways so that they could insert a film to protect each side of the paper from being nibbled by the ink from the other side .

I'm now waiting for Rachel Brown's edition of some Quantz sonatas but transposed for treble to come out. She reckoned it was a better bet than trying to play them at flute pitch on a bigger recorder....

thankyou anacrusis, maizie and wendywoo! Plenty to keep me busy there.
My first recorder group meeting will be this saturday at Castle Cornet, a medieval castle on a rock off the end of Guernsey. I wonder whether we shall also all be wearing long pointy hats and drinking mead!!! Happy day!

An option that viol players use and I think it works for recorders is to play choral works such as Verdelot or Arcdelt as instrumental pieces

It works as long as whoever is playing treble is happy playing up an octave.

Hello!

Just to let fellow recorder players know I've added details of a Recorder Playing Day in East Surrey on 24th April 2012 to the events section....

Anyone going to the SRP festival in Guildford the weekend before?

I'll be at the SRP festival!

W

Makes up for me as a tenor viol player (plays off alto C3 clef) having to read either octave treble, or worse, treble at pitch....

Ooh - we'll try to come to one of your sessions - my friend and her teenage daughter are coming too - it's our first time.. we're so excited

Me too

Ooh - we need some sort of secret symbol to wear!

I had my first recorder group practice in 30 years yesterday. My new bass's first outing since I aquired it 2 weeks ago. Including me there are five of us, they play simple stuff but done well at a good pace. I'm a great believer in playing easy music to a high standard rather than being a bit out of control at the edge of ability, so was delighted with this. Simple four part music can sound very rich and complex if done well. They had been playing quite a bit of four part music minus the bass line, so when we played our first piece with my bass playing those gloriously chocolatey low notes they all in unison went "ooooooooh!" afterwards and said what a difference it made! They say they have not been playing together very long, so we could in time become really rather good. They have two gigs over the weekend at our local castle and I've been invited to play with them, after just one rehearsal because I can sightread well enough.
Hurrah!

That's great, katemorrisviolin, well done

Nice to hear. I'd like to do that sort of thing with the cello - chamber music group. I'm currently signing up to all opportunities I can find to play at workshops etc.

I'm hoping this will be the right place to post this

I've recently rekindled my interest in baroque/medieval music, from playing pieces in band and from watching a tv programme. I'd be really interested to know some good pieces, accompanied or not, that are for baroque recorder that I'd be able to play on the clarinet (transposing isn't an issue, it just isn't quick! ). It would be even better if the music was available free!

Thanks,
RAM

There is authentic baroque music for the chalumeau....

As well as the obvious recorder sonatas by say Handel or Teleman you have the whole repertoire of trio sonatas to go at (Handel, Teleman, Correlli...). If you want to try something older, get hold of Playford Dancing Master...

I'm getting somewhere with the bass recorder now, super fun it is. However I still feel like I've blown up too many balloons after playing for five minutes and have to stop and hold my breath between pieces to feel normal again. Will this get better as I gain experience or is it something bass recorder players just have to live with?

Perhaps you blow up balloons in a different way to me, then!

Flute players are reputed to have problems with hyper-ventilation, which seems to be your problem from your description, of breathing too deeply and too often. (Sensible double reed players have the opposite problem of not using all the breath and therefore of getting rid of stale air before we breath in again! )

I find the bass needs steady air flow rather than high pressure or very high volume. It does need more air than the smaller recorders, simply by virtue of the size of the beast, but it's also very easy to overblow. I find that I need to work out in advance where to breath and how deeply to breath to be able to get to the end of a long phrase, but I've never had physical problems of the sort you describe.

Hmm, been thinking about this for the last hour, you shouldn't be getting light-headed or breathless after playing a bass. I notice in your post when you first got the bass that you said it could be heard through two closed doors, are you try to play too loud?
Bass recorders do need more air than the smaller ones but not so much to make you dizzy. You also need to support the sound more than the smaller ones, could you compensating for lack of support by pushing more air through. Try playing with more abdominal support and an open throat, if your throat feels constricted the sound is thin and you use more air.
You will find that you need to take a lot more breaths with a bass, particularly when you're first starting. If you can't get to the end of a phrase, look for a place to sneak a breath, you'll gradually learn how to hold the breath back without passing out.
Do you know another bass player who can watch and listen to you play and give you advice?
Good luck

I think this does get better with time. I remember feeling like this in my early days of playing bass in a group. I don't think it was usually a problem if I was just pottering at home. I don't understand the physiology of it but I suppose the balloon analogy is a good one; I guess I was just taking really big breaths and then trying to squeeze out every last millilitre, and doing that repeatedly. I've no idea how or why it's got better. Maybe I've just got lazier about trying to get through phrases.....



I am a recorder player who loves baroque music and as I have a daughter who plays both recorder and clarinet I have often looked for baroque chalumeau music and wondered why I could find no trace. Can you point me in the right direction?

The "too many balloons" thing sounds very much like overbreathing to me too - essentially you are ending up having to hold your breath in order to build up a small amount of carbon dioxide in your lower lungs again - we all keep a bit down there, most of the time, but if we blow off too much of it, it causes dizziness, and in extreme cases pins-and-needles or even full-blown cramp. The difference in the amount of breath you need for bigger rather than smaller instruments isn't so much about the volume of the entire instrument, I think - it's about the volume you need to shift through the vibrating bit - windway, labium and maybe upper head - in order to get a standing wave going in the rest of the thing, so as has been said already, yes you do need more air for a big recorder than for a little 'un, but not that much more.
Practise the parts you're going to play on your own, not necessarily for the notes, but to try to work out where you need to breathe to go on feeling comfortable - and then mark in breaths. It's usually easier to do that sort of working out when not having also to try keeping yourself aligned with everyone else, but remember that it's different placing a breath in a longish passage if you haven't joined it onto the other passages either side, than it would be when playing the whole piece. I hope that makes sense...

The biggest supplier of early music in the UK is probably Brian Jordan in Cambridge. Brian sadly passed away, but the shop is still running. I'm sure if you ask there they will do their best to help.

Thanks folks for all your tips and advice, all extremely useful. Thanks to you I've just had a much more successful practice and thought more about how much breath I actually need. I had been over-blowing, wrongly thinking that's what I needed to do. I'm getting a better sound and volume on the lowest notes now too as a result of more careful and gentle blowing.
I really appreciate this forum for contact with other bass players/ As far as I know so far, I may be the only bass recorder player on Guernsey!

Could some kind person tell me how to swab out the head joint of a knick tenor? It is plastic so not as crucial as if it were nice wood, but force of habit means I want to do something.

I'm assuming it's all one piece? Only my knick bass is in two bits, so I disassemble the head from the knick, as it were, and then can use my usual swabstick. For an attached knick I guess I'd be using the bendy sort of mop thing so often provided with smaller recorders, with fluffy woollen bits trapped along two-ply wire stem, and because I don't like those mops, I'd also drape some cotton or silk over the top of that. It'd then be able to bend round the corner for swabbing purposes.

Alternatively, cover the windway carefully with a hand, and blow backwards rather firmly from the knick end and leave to dry....

Yes all in one piece - I got a cheap 2nd hand one and sawed the head joint in two and glued it back together crooked to see if I get on with it better than I have with tenors in the past.

Thanks for the ideas.

I'm hoping someone can recommend some new music for daughter to play for her own amusement post grade 8. No special requirements, except that she generally favours recorder music which is modern but not too weird (eg, currently, Bergmann Sonata and Staeps Intermezzo). Ideally hoping for something that might be a bit of a challenge so she can work on it for a while with her teacher, who is not all that familiar with modern recorder repertoire - hence my question here. Thanks!

Don't know if these are useful suggestions. We've recently bought Zanhnhausen Jahreszeichen Sommerklange. There's 4 of them by all accounts and 12 Sonaten Veracini.

Many thanks for these suggestions. I hadn't even heard of Zahnhausen, I'm afraid ! After some Googling I found snippets of Sommerklange here. It's not really my cup of tea, but it's true daughter might like it, and it certainly sounds like it would be a challenge.

Any further suggestions would be much appreciated. Something with a bit more tune than the Zahnhausen, perhaps (again). After all, I'll have to listen to it .

Maybe some Pete Rose? I played "Medieval Nights" for LTCL but found it technically not so scary as the other, very avant garde "Fragmente" by Shinohara, which has now, unbelievably in my view, been put on the ATCL list. (I suspect they never want to hear it again after my rendition of it, so have put it somewhere where it really is likely to outface players ).

I also played from Alan Davis' Cantus Avium et Volatus - the last one, Aquilae Chrysaetos, used to be set for grade 8 study by Trinity, has some rather high noises in it but I enjoyed that.

Markus Zahnhausen is himself a fine player as well as composer - I keep thinking I should have a look at his stuff but haven't got round to it.

Oh, and if Staeps is liked, what about some Gordon Jacob?

The other name that comes to mind is Matthias Maute: It's Summertime! is excellent.

Yes, we already have some Gordon Jacob - Suite , I think, but I do need to investigate what else there may be by both Staeps and Jacob.

Thanks anacrusis and andante-in-c for your suggestions. The names you mention are somewhat familiar but the pieces you list are unknown to us. I shall have fun investigating.

Jacob - both the 'Sonatina' and the 'Sonata' are very approachable

Staeps - has your daughter already done the 'Sonata in E flat'? This is (IMHO) a wonderful piece (one of my favourite 20th century recorder sonatas) and has been referred to as 'the recorder sonata that Hindemith didn't write' (very remiss of him, as he DID write one each for flute, oboe, cor anglais, clarinet & bassoon!) Or what about Staeps 'Virtuoso Suite' (unaccompanied)? (don't actually know this, tho' a couple of movements are set for Trinity gr.7 and the whole piece for LRSM!)

Reizenstein - Partita. Like Staeps, Reizenstein's style is very Hindemith-esque (passages full of rhythmic and harmonic tension and conflict, contrasting with - and ultimately leading to - moments of relaxation and resolution!) Fantastic!

BTW the above are all for Treble. Apologies if they're already 'known'!

Allegra

Excuse me, lovely and knowlegeable recorder players, is Recorder Magazine worth subscribing to, for someone like me relatively new to recorder with, sadly, virtually zero knowlege of the world of recorders and their repertoire?