Aspies For Freedom

I have an oud, but I don't know how to play it yet.

Mostly, I play keyboards, synthesizers and anything thats pro-audio software (e.g. software synths, samplers, drum machines etc.). I have also bought some instruments from abroad, such as a small djembre (african hand drum), maracas, guiro (shaped like a frog) a wooden flute and a tambourine.

In the past I have played pianos, keyboards, electric organs, drum sets, guitars (acoustic, electric and bass), the violin, glockenspiels, xylophones, tambourines, cowbells, agogos, triangles and many more hand percussion instruments.

Recorder. Descant, treble, tenor and sopranino. A440.

I feel so inadequate compared to all you musical polymaths.

Have you had any more luck playing your recorder with other musicians than I have? (see my threads on "Finding other musicians to play with" and summer schools)

in no particular order...items in parenthasis are on the top of my wishlist, the rest i own and play regularly...

ludwig 14,15,18,20,26 and tama 12,13,16,20 w/zildjian and pastie 2002, 17"caribean style slatted djembe, 13" ashiko, 14" angled cajon, agogos, cowbell, more cowbell, (vibes, marimba, bells, glock, chimes, timpani, steel drums, v-drums), spd20, washer/drier, 10,000k gallon tank, pots, pans, and anything else you can beat with a stick.

ob12, v-synth, prophet vs, motif, dx200, nord lead 3, jx305, darkstar, sh1, jv2080, xv3080, sp303, warp factory, sk1 x3,  kc500, motion labs leslie top (fizmo, motif ex7, triton rack, fantom xr, hartman neuron)

remix 16, sp1200mk3x2, pmc06pro, pmc07pro, mo-fx x2, killerEQ x2, serato, 26+ linear feet of plates, 10k+ tracks on drive/cd (cdj800, pmc37pro, repeater)

dual g4 qs, g5 imac, emac g4, LOGIC pro 7 with various plugin instruments, amt8, unitor8, onyx 1620, filter factory, mfc42, ef1, effectronII, ep4+, c414b tlII, mc012 x2, om3, om7, beta58 (m2000, ksp8, h3000, komplete, waves mercury, guad g5, tannoy eclipse, apogee ad16x/da16x, drum mics)

american special MAHOGANY strat, steinberger synapse transcale baritone and 5-string bass, fender bullet w/ emg89 and gk3a/gi20 midi, alvarez yari acoustic, takamine acoustic bass, pos clasical, pocket pod, bass pod xt live, (pod x3 live, echoplex, vg strat, les paul baritone, klein-berger, road king, urei 811c x2, bagend subs)

120 base accordian, possesed theater organ w/ builtin leslie, trumpet, trombone, bugle

im also an avid beatboxer.

looking foreward to tring tabla, marimba lumina, malletkat, ztar, guitaron, theremin, v-acordian and yamaha gx1

thats off the top of my head, im sure i forgot something...

after reading what i just wrote, i realize three things...
a) the tama kick is 22 not 20 and
b) holy crap! i need to start a museum!
c) my aspie interest just might be music!

Am I the only monoskilled musician here?

Try "The Introduction Thread" in "Time out", which has recently reawakened from a six-month slumber.

Where do you go to practise?
I ask this because my university's music centre did not permit bagpipes to be played in the practice rooms. That was St Andrews. If you're not allowed to practise Scotland's national instrument at Scotland's first university, where can you? Maybe the University of the Highlands & Islands...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHI_Millennium_Institute

When I was in Northumberland last September (the occasion of the photos of me on page 65 of "Post your pic") I met a lad playing bagpipes on the border ridge. The interesting thing is that Northumberland has its own version of bagpipes - Northumbrian smallpipes - but this boy (who was from Morpeth) was playing Scottish bagpipes. So that made him a Northumbrian Scottish bagpipe player, as opposed to a Northumbrian Northumbrian piper (like Kathryn Tickell), a Scottish Northumbrian piper (are there any?), or a Scottish Scottish piper...

Hey, I play recorder too! Check out my thread on "Finding other musicians to play with - does anyone else find it difficult?"
http://www.aspiesforfreedom.com/showthread.php?tid=5995

There was a piece about Northumbrian pipes in the summer issue of walk, the members' magazine of the Ramblers' Association...

Whistling along to the landscape's tune

Enraptured by the songs of a Northumbrian folk musician, Christopher Somerville rediscovers how a great local tune can make your walk heavenly.

Anyone looking for an illustration of the terms "enthusiasm" and "commitment" should see Alistair Anderson play concertina. Erect and neat, with the aquiline profile of a Cherokee, this master musician's whole lean frame quivers with electric energy. He plays with body and soul, sweeping the concertina up and down, swirling it round in circles as he steps in time like the dancer he is, shaking and cajoling a stream of Northumbrian hornpipes, reels and waltzes out of the instrument.

No surly folkie's scowls or weary mask of professional indifference for Anderson, who is reckoned one of the finest Northumbrian pipers and concertina players in the world. The music lives through this man. His face to the rafter, rapt, he paints a sound picture of heavenly hills, peat-brown burns and lonely farms under black Border skies. This is a kind of alchemy, a magical fusion of music and landscape that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

In these rolling Border hills the wild local music is thriving against the odds, largely thanks to dedicated enthusiasts like Anderson. It was a boyhood love of walking and climbing, and an interest in the birds and flowers of the Cheviots, that guided Anderson in the early 1960s out of the Newcastle ship-building district of Wallsend, into the open air of rural Northumberland.

Back then the county's long tradition of music and dance - especially the playing of its native instrument, the Northumbrian small-pipes - seemed in danger of dying out. The teenage Anderson found pipers, fiddlers, dancers and singers in the back rooms of pubs and at farmhouse kitchen tables. He listened and learned in the old-fashioned, pre-recording way, gradually building a repertoire of tunes whose titles seemed soaked in the very rocks and stones of the Cheviot landscape: "The Wild Hills o' Wannies", "Northumbrian Gathering", "Kielder Fells", "Shew's the Way to Wallington", "Rothbury Hills" ...

While Alistair Anderson has made a name for himself as a master musician - at first with his band The High Level Ranters, later as a solo artist - he has never forgotten where the tradition is rooted. The tours he put together with three elderly friends, all Northumbrian shepherds - Joe Hutton on pipes, Willy Taylor on fiddle and Will Atkinson playing mouth organ - celebrated those roots.

This was back-kitchen music on the concert stage, with Anderson and the three old-timers swapping and embellishing tunes and stories in front of their audiences as naturally as they would have done in the pub or at home. And even more importantly, Anderson has continued walking and exploring, dancing, composing and playing, and teaching and encouraging youngsters around the Cheviot country where he still lives.

Driving north with Alistair Anderson's "Steel Skies" pouring from the speakers - or, for that matter, the great pipes Kathryn Tickell and Billy Pigg, or Foster Charlton and Willy Taylor fiddling away - I hold a very specific landscape in my mind's eye: the long blue lines of the Cheviots, their rolling heights, the stark farms that huddle in their lee, the rough old tracks of Salter's Road and Gamel's Path that cross them, the way their coarse grass ripples in mile-long lines of alternate matt and sheen.

Music and the landscape it springs from seem intertwined: the wildness of Shetland reflected in its unbridled reels, the gentle pastorality of County Clare in the subtle undulations of its jigs and hornpipes, East Anglian clay in galumphing song and morris tunes. Whistle these airs as you walk the landscape that bred them. I recommend "Rothbury Hills" and a walk on Simonside, the windier the better. If that isn't a foretaste of heaven, it will do until one happens along.

For more about Alistair Anderson visit http://www.tradmusic.com/artistinfo.asp?artistID=3

For those of you living in England who are thinking of taking up a new instrument, here's a way to spread the cost of purchase:

"Take it away is an Arts Council initiative designed to help more people get involved in learning and playing music. The scheme allows individuals to apply for a loan of up to £2,000 for the purchase of any kind of musical instrument, and pay it back in nine monthly instalments, completely interest free."
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/takeitaway/

A similar scheme exists for buying artworks:
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ownart/

Apparently the ukelele has become the new instrument of choice for primary schoolchildren to learn before they move on to a "proper" instrument.