I just finished reading: Drivers and the Myth of Tweeter Dome Materials by Alan. We have lots of sub demos but what about tweeter demos? Does anyone have a cd with a wicked triangle solo?

Rush 2112?

You could try Vivaldi's Piccolo Concerto in C. Not the most pleasing music, if you ask me, but it'll definitely use the tweeter.

Hi pm,

I just lose it when I hear a piccolo, even live in an orchestra or a marching band. It's a shrill, nasty-sounding little instrument, hard on anyone's ears, IMHO (apologies to piccolo players. . .). I find it useless to judge loudspeaker fidelity since the instrument always sounds harsh to my ears. Maybe my hearing is unusually sensitive in that part of the spectrum or something. .

As to good recordings of cymbals, the Sheffield Drum Record, which is or was available on CD (it was originally a direct-to-disc recording on vinyl from Sheffield Labs in the pre-CD era). It's certainly one of the best-recorded drum kits I've ever heard, and the cymbal sound is perfect.

In past years I've recommended jazz CDs by the French jazz pianist Jacques Loussier and his trio, but many of those are no longer in print. I have a lot of jazz recordings so I'm sure I'll think of several that are available: oh, just thought of one: Dave Brubeck's Time Out.

Cheers,
Alan

Next time I find myself in need of an Alan repellent, I know what to have handy.

I can't imaging such a time, mind you, but its' good to prepare for any eventuality...

I tried to learn how to play the flute a few years back, but I gave it up when it started hurting my ears. Too bad they don't come with a volume control. Playing an instrument and wearing hearing protection so you can't hear what you're playing just didn't make sense to me.

No drums or electric guitars for you!

I've always thought that Dire Strait's Brothers In Arms had prominent (if not over-emphasized) cymbals.

I find almost all recordings by the Police to be bright.

Cowbells, what we need are more....cowbells!!!!

What a classic SNL skit....

I am not sure I understood Alan in his post. Did he mean that he does not enjoy piccolos?

Yeah, Chris; Alan was surprisingly ambivalent, even wishy-washy, in describing his feelings about the piccolo.

There aren't any triangle concertos, and its use in classical music is intermittent. It can be mentioned though, that Liszt's use of it in his Piano Concerto No. 1 gave the influential critic Hanslick ammunition to denounce it as being a triangle concerto rather than a piano concerto.

I think we should send Alan a lot of piccolo music. I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.

I've got some home recordings of my flute music. I bet he'd love that even more.

vibraphones, xylophones, cymbals, cowbells, woodchimes, Loreena McKennett's "Elemental" CD for well recorded soaring female vocals. The end of Mahler's 2nd Symphony - big bells. Milt Jackson's "Ballad Artistry of Vibrations,"

"I just lose it when I hear a piccolo"

Ha, same here! ... I can stand a small piccolo passage here and there but when it’s overused it too drives me crazy.

I think a well recorded muted trumpet is also good for demo'ing tweeters.

Hi JaimeG,

I'm glad to see some solidarity in the anti-piccolo group!

The odd thing is that I don't feel the same way about hearing flute, either live or recorded. My brother played flute for some years and as a kid, I'd hear him practising. Never bothered me. The flute produces almost perfectly pure tones with very few overtones (harmonics).

This past summer, I saw an operetta performance in a small theater at Bard College, and the 10-piece "orchestra" included a flautist sitting barely 15 feet away. I marveled at how beautiful the instrument sounded live.

Fortunately there was no piccolo part in the musical score.

Alan

One of my first toy synths modeled the flute with a pure sine wave.

They did a little volume modulation with the attack and decay, but that's it.

During the Carboniferous, my synths had no presets and a few patch cords. You had to combine the wave forms, pitches, and a/s/d/r qualities on the spot with pod sliders. A performing nightmare for sure.

A lot of flashlight technique (w/ headphones)between songs was nec.

Although mine was a toy (a Casio SK-1) that I got in elementary school. It did have a full modeling synth feature built into it.

It was almost as bad a moving patch cables. You would enable the synth mode, and it would play a pure sine tone. Then you could use the first several keys to select the waveform you wished to use. The usual suspects were available, square, sine, triangle, sawtooth. Then the upper keys would pick the frequency of that component. Up to 4 waveforms could be combined. There was an envelope select button so you could modify the different parts of the ADSR. Then you'd press the Synth button again and could play your newly created "patch". When you turned keyboard off, you'd lose the work.

They were odd little beasts. I finally got rid of my ARP 2600 for a small ARP Odyssey. No more patches, but still slider-driven.

Nothing like a club packed with 800 people (and the rest of he band) stopping everything and looking at you in horror, because that huge, booming trumpet blast was a 1/4 tone off pitch.

But there were fun. And back then (70's) all monophonic. So sometimes, two were in order.

Have you ever checked out the software program Reason by Propellerhead? I never did end up making any real music with it, mostly because I got so into playing with all the modeling synths just making new sound.

Chris: I checked out of the rock band scene looong before music met computers. OK, so there were NO effen computers around at all----- well, UNIVAC...