A Minor Journey dot com.

Hi folks,

Last Friday I posted a question to you all to see if anyone could tell the difference between the John Packer 081 oboe and a 10-year old Marigaux 901.

As most of you seem to have noticed after listening to this recording, the two oboes in question were played in the following order:

After a week I’m increasingly impressed with the 081. Yes, it’s no professional instrument but it isn’t meant to be. However, I did manage to successfully play several fun pieces on it including the Hummel Theme & Variations and the Kalliwoda Morceau Du Salon. In order to make a nice sound I had to work a little on the higher register but the intonation was spot on. A lack of trill keys makes for a little bit of nifty fingerwork and cross-fingerings but I was able to play the pieces.

Would I buy one?

Hmmm.. Tough. I’ve got this for another two weeks. I hope to make my mind up by then. I’m often doing workshops and demonstrations to children as young as four years old. Naturally they want to grab the instrument. Having a cheap £320 instrument to play at that point is a big draw for me. I could leave “my baby” at home and kno that it would be safe from roaming hands! So ask me in two weeks’ time.

Would I recommend one for a young student?

Certainly. I only wish all of my schools would buy some new instruments like this and get rid of those terrible 40 year old, barely working, instruments that they insist on servicing in a pointless attempt to improve the instrument quality. Of course, the instrument is crippled through a lack of keywork but if you’re looking for an instrument for the first year of learning it is a fantastic candidate.

Could it revolutionise oboe takeup?

Maybe not, but one can hope…

I’d really like to follow this with some more discussion. Please do post comments!

As some of you know I’ve just replaced my Saxophone with a brand new one made at a shockingly cheap price. I’d mentioned that I wanted to get an oboe from the same company, John Packer Ltd to see if their ultra-cheap (when compared to the competition) student oboe was actually any good. Today I picked it up.

I’ve got the 081 on a two-week approval. If I like it at the end of then I’ll stump up the £375 they want for it (or £319 ex. VAT) and get one. Why? Because I’d quite like a cheap second oboe that I can take to places I don’t want to take my oh-so-precious and scarily expensive professional one.

There’s a snag though. If you know me well you’ll know that I’m a hopeless oboe snob. In the (nearly) twenty years I’ve been playing I have never owned an oboe made of anything other than wood and metal. Us oboists are quite particular when it comes to what materials our oboes are made of. For me it’s been wood all the way with my first Howarth B/Orsi to my Howarth S20 which helped me through my Grade 8 and into music college. The past ten years I’ve owned a beautiful Marigaux 901, an instrument which was hand-picked for me in 1998 and still has the wonderful tone I remember when I first picked it out of the case on the 27th December, 2008. No, I’m quite happy with my oboe, thanks.

But for beginners there’s a huge quandary, not to mention music services who seek to help schools and students learn to play a musical instrument. See, you can get a flute or a clarinet suitable for beginners and have change from £250. Not so with the oboe. The oboe has always been so expensive to buy that many schools and perspective students are put off even before they’ve started. If I told you that my professional instrument would cost the best part of £5,000 to buy today you get my point.

The Howarth B, which is the instrument that many a professional remembers starting on, is no-longer made. The replacement, the S10, is still a shade over £1,100 brand new Ex VAT. And yes, that’s for a student-level instrument, not a professional one. Granted, it is an absolutely wonderful instrument and wherever possible I’ve tried to help students find them. Their keywork, tone and stability are second-to-none. Until recently it’s been the only instrument that I’ve viewed as being any good for students to start on. Sadly their retail value is very high and most students are not lucky enough to find one for sale at a cheap price and most schools would not entertain that kind of outlay on a musical instrument.

Earlier this year, Howarth announced their Junior Oboe. Unlike the S10, which can help a student progress up as far as grade five without too many issues, the Junior has less keywork and is only really suitable for a student in their first two or three years of study. As it has less keywork (and doesn’t have Low B or Bb) it’s much lighter. It’s also cheaper, at £608 ex.Vat. But at £608 it’s still a lot more expensive than most parents will consider spending on an instrument for their child to start lessons on.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Junior. I’ve played it twice now and was instantly impressed by the sound and build quality. But the price is a little prohibitive for many music services. So when I heard about the 081 I was interested.

I’ve got a few students with the next model up that John Packer have been making for many years now. The 181 has identical key work to my Marigaux but the bore is made of the same composite material to the 081. Of the oboes I’ve encountered the early 181s were awful, with really soft keywork and poor intonation. However, two of my students have fairly new 181s, which they had purchased before I started to teach them. I’ve always like the more recent JP 181s, although to date no student of mine has purchased one new while with me.

It should have been a quick 50 mile drive down to Taunton this morning to pick up the 081 and to get my Sax looked at (which coincidentally is the saxophone equivalent of the 081 - and played by professional sax players countrywide due to it’s astonishingly good sound and build) but the drive was marred by some big traffic issues on the M5.

Anywhoo…

I got back this afternoon and thought it may be fun to get you all to help me out with a little test. I had a play on the 081 and although it’s only meant for students under grade 3/4 I was able to get a full 3 octaves out of it, from B below middle C to three octaves higher. (The 081 doesn’t have a Bottom Bb). Once I’d got used to it I decided to do a quick recording of a simple Hinke study, which at memory is about grade 4/5 level. Both times I used the same reed.

Obviously it’s easy when I show you the picture to figure out which oboe is which, but…

…can you tell which oboe is which?

Initially I’m impressed with the 081. I’d quite like to have an oboe to take to primary schools and demonstrate without worrying about small children breaking a ££££ oboe. I also really want to return to my schools in September with a set of oboes I can recommend which don’t break the bank. I’m going to continue to play it for two weeks and show it to students both advanced and beginner to see how it fares in daily playing. Then I’ll make my proper review and decide if it’s any good.

Any thoughts, based on the recording? Can you tell which oboe is which? (My initial guess is that some of my colleges in the oboe world can!) How about you non oboists?

moar funny pictures

I know… I found myself doing it without thinking.

moar funny pictures

I thought that perhaps these two offerings would be a good way to break the silence. I think I must be the worst blogger in the world. There is a reason. I’m just not sure of it. Blame it on the latest gadget to make it into our home. Wait. Not Gadget. Gadgets.

The Saxomophone
_{Below is a music geek bit. If you’re not a music geek you may want to jump the next few paragraphs…}

As some of you may know, I’ve recently joined the fun funky band known as Meet Your Feet as a sort of saxophonist. I don’t view myself as a bone fide saxophonist since the oboe is really my thing. The oboe is the instrument I’ve been playing for nearly twenty of my almost twenty-nine years. It is the instrument I sweated blood and tears over at college. It is part of me. The sax was, until recently, just an instrument I played. The call out of the blue to join the band and pick up the Saxophone was heeded and I’m now really enjoying it. Heck, I’m even improving. As a consequence I spent £316 of my (our) hard-earned cash and purchased a new JP45R Saxophone. Unlike most cheap saxophones this has a beautiful sound and ease of playing and when combined with my Yamaha 6C mouthpiece and a nice hard rubber Rovner ligature and a Van Doren Jumbo Java it all sounds great. Sure, it’s no Yanagisawa but it does make a surprisingly expensive sound for what is a very cheap instrument. It has knocked unbelievably high-quality Chinese spots off the Jupiter 500 series it replaces. And, for the first time in what seems like ever I’m able to play the full range from Bb to High F# without making any horrid squeaks.

And the band love it.

The saxophone itself was made in China. An important turning point for me as I must admit I had really bad prejudice based on past experience of Chinese-made instruments. In the past students would turn up to lessons with £99 instruments made in China and purchased at the local bookstore or supermarket. They would fall apart in a few weeks and sounded horrid. The tone was narrow and the intonation sucked. But these JP instruments are really different. The UK shop, based in Taunton, travels over to China frequently and checks on both the manufacturing process and the workforce’s standard of living etc. The wage they are paid is much higher than any native industry pays. So that makes me happy on my humanitarian concerns.

JP are currently refining a £300 student oboe. Never before has an oboe been so cheap and I’m very keen to try one. Granted, it’s missing some key work that more advanced instruments have but it is a direct competitor for the Howarth Junior, an instrument I’ve watched develop and have played. The JP oboe has to really perform to beat the Junior on tone but it has it squished on price at nearly half the price. So I want a JP081 for my birthday I think, even if it’s just to have an oboe I can take places I don’t want to take my £5,000 professional one.

Talking of oboes I finally uploaded the misfortunate oboe of Dan, one of my students destined to be an undergrad oboist this fall. A local shop, namely Trevor Jones, swore that the oboe was in perfectly good order and wasn’t leaking like a sieve. I had previously tested the oboe and proved it to be certainly un-airtight.

Why?

See if you can spot them. Two nasty little cracks.

One very expensive piece of firewood. Dan is now the proud owner of a beautiful Howarth XL which will be far more use to him this year than the horrid Ward&Winterborne he had.

Anyway. On to gadgets numbers two and three.

We got a Wii

Despite our best resolve and the fact that I lost 20 lbs and then put 15 lbs back on while our scales were broken we purchased a Wii. It was on special super-cheap offer at our local Costco where we now do our once-a-month shop. (I can highly recommend costco for anyone who runs their own business as it’s far cheaper to buy in bulk if you have somewhere to put all those toilet rolls and baked beans.) The Wii has been a welcome addition to the family and although I seem to be using it more than Kate I am enjoying the fact that it’s okay to play on this video game console if you’re up and doing things at the same. Next stop: WiiFit and pushing my weight back down below 175 lbs….

Now I’d like to share a fantastic program with all you Mac People out there. It’s gadget number three.

Delicious Library 2.

While I’m sure Delicious Library was pretty good in the first version I have jumped on the band wagon with version 2. This fantastic little program is only $40 of your earth money and has helped me organise my music at last. When your studio houses over 1,000 discrete manuscripts of every size and instrumentation you really struggle to know where everything is. Not to mention the other 1,000 or so books we have stashed away around the house. If you’re anything like me you end up buying duplicate copies of scores when you forget you already own the piece or the fact you’ve leant it out to a student. Plus friends end up buying you stuff you already own. This program takes care of both.

Using your built-in isight camera on the more snazzy macs of recent years (or if you’re like me and have a Mac Pro without a camera, any video camera attached to your mac), you simply hold up the back of your book to the camera. The program reads the book’s ISBN barcode and almost instantly looks it up using amazon and various other book-searching Api out there. For books without ISBN numbers you can either manually enter the details or search for the title online. In about eight hours I’ve added nearly four-hundred books. The program also keeps track of your video game collection (yes, Chrissy, I know you still have Assassin’s Creed), your iTunes library and any gadgets or apparel you want to add to the database.

Apart from knowing who has what amongst your friends and in my case, students, you can sell any of your library items from this program via Amazon or even keep a running total of your library for insurance purposes. Neat eh?

Anyway. Give it a go. I’ve exported part of my library to my .mac homepage, so you can see how the html export looks.

Before I head off and walk the dogs (I have a lesson in half an hour) I also want to add the following.

Velma now has her first additional battery! It’s not in yet but after a long trip down to deepest darkest Cornwall I have a 201V NiMH battery pack for my PHEV project. Behold!

Not only that, but I have a fuel-filler cap from the same Prius who donated her battery.

Way to go!

There’s the usual Flickerated photographs of the last month. As always, if you want to know what I’ve been up to inbetween posts it’s worth checking my Flickr Homepage or you can always follow my microtweets on Twitter.

Until next time.

X

P.S. If you’ve been following me in Bristol and found this site because of the sign-writing on my car then for the moment I have one thing to say.

Oh! Hai!!!1!

Why is today that I my contacts have been in for a total of two hours before I had to take them out? And why is it that in doing so, one of them split while I was cleaning it? I’m not impressed. (Though it was the lens which was irritating the most)

Am I frustrated? You bet. It was a new set of lenses which replaced an old set yesterday.

Ah well, it’s goggle vision for me today. At least I can now focus correctly….

Out of interest, do other lens wearers get that from time to time? I mean, it’s hellishly frustrating to say the least!

Because I think I look great in it.

Seriously, boys and girls. It’s a green, guilt-free electric sportscar with a range of 225 miles and a sub 4-second 0-60 mph time. It’s also £80,000+ Yeah… er… little snag there. Either the band has to do incredibly well and make us all millionares, I have to become the world’s best oboe teacher ever and charge £100 an hour or Kate’s company needs to get bought out by google for any figure higher than £1,000,000.

Hmm. Yeah.

But don’t I look at home in it? A car I can finally feed my need for speed without feeling guilty. A reformed Petrol-head’s car. Yup. Thanks

Vanity over and done with. Photos from yesterday’s free Motorshow jaunt are here.