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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.