#ophicleide

and we went there to help out run one of their little shops (which was fun) but also to get away from our family

and they had a small collection of weird instruments on sale there, and one of them was an ophicleide (imagine a sort of smaller metal bassoon shaped thing but with a trombone mouthpiece on it), and we were obsessed with this thing (not least because of its name) so one morning we snuck it upstairs to our room and started figuring out how to play it - and for who knows what reason, we started playing god save the queen on it (we were anti royalist), and part way through, there came this noise from another room, that we instantly recognised as someone squeezing the bag of some scottish bagpipes

so we went HONK, and they went SQUAWL and we went HONK, and they went SQUAWL, and then we did shave-and-a-haircut and they did the okay part - and we stepped out of our room and he stepped out of his and he was very good about it considering it was a sunday morning and we had no idea how early it was and he had a hangover

anyway Finchcocks is still there, well worth a visit if you like weird historical keyboard instruments

I haven’t really done any substantial #japethposting, or anything exactly full-scale, but he has been a part of certain sections of some of the analyses I've done. You can find some of them by typing "#japeth" into the search bar of my blog. Or, if anyone wants me to, I could look for the links and send them to you. And, this overall precedent doesn’t mean I won’t possibly post about him in the future, potentially if/when I start my reread of The Camelot Years.

Generally speaking, I don't think I've paid enough attention to him to be able to analyze him in great depth. That said, I will redirect you to @discjude as she/they is/(are?) the Japeth expert, and her/their analyses are phenomenal! (Please tell me if I've gotten your pronouns wrong and sorry in advance if anything is wrong, Jude.)

Though, I will leave you with one meager headcanon: it seems unlikely, but if Japeth were musically-inclined, I think he’d play atypical instruments, like the serpent and the ophicleide because of course he would. Music could be his opportunity to rebel, defy what's expected of him, while also referencing his snake symbolism.

Here, you can listen to some orchestral performances involving these instruments. If you start the first of the videos around the timestamp 3:38 and listen to the end, you can hear the deeper, foreboding, lower-pitched parts and some tense, stringent parts that sound higher, like his Scims whirling, to my mind. There's a very obviously sinister "march" of sorts, with ghastly, winding, serpentine "movements," twists, and turns.

The ophicleide is a brass instrument from 19th century France, literally called “serpent with keys”. The ophicleide was made to play the lowest notes in the brass section. However due to the difficulty the instrument took to play once the tuba was invented it quickly got replaced and died out. The ophicleide’s body is a long tube and has 9–12 keys. The keys are placed where the player can reach them rather than what is the most sensical, making the instrument troublesome to play.  

Oops, I got another ask about this a while ago from @froglordt, but I admit I don't doodle as many terrible brass instruments as I used to, so I dug out some photos of old ideas. Apologies if the brass instrument designs are hard to understand, I generally just draw lines to represent tubing except for in bits like the bell flare

Compilation of terrible ideas:

-Trumpet converted into a bell-up soprano saxhorn-ish thing with half-step and whole-step trill keys and a main slide trigger (to fix the inevitable terrible intonation) in this drawing

-Wagner bombardon (a horn-length instrument attempting to look kinda like a paperclip contra clarinet, inspired by ophicleides and bombardons from the early 1800s, with Vienna valves and an opera-glass style main slide tuner on it, like a Conn 80A uses)

-a double Vienna horn, I spent a while trying to figure out the best wrap and everything, but fundamentally I think it's a terrible idea

This was a first iteration, it's a mess and the change valve is actually split in two, which would make alignment suck

This is probably the most elegant type of wrap I figured out, here I was planning a funky Vienna-esque change valve but I think a rotary valve would make more sense honestly.

-Experiments with new versions of kastenventil (https://brassandpipes.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/1913-jacob-lowmunster-kastenventil-tuba-in-b/), probably on a natural trumpet first because they're not soldered together so it's easy to replace bits. I'm really curious what a kastenventil horn is like, but that's a more complicated project.

-Oh yeah, I was working on this at one point before giving up for the moment, but funky keywork for horns that were inspired by a dream Jeremy had (tbh tests around when I took this photo showed that it's way too easy to pinch your fingers between the keys lmao)

I haven't been doing as many brass instrument designs recently because I've been more focused on electronic instruments, mostly just modifying vintage stuff

-Simmons SDS7 drum synthesizer but replacing the original memory with a microcontroller to let you edit parameters with MIDI, and replacing the EPROM samples with more microcontrollers so you can load up whatever sample you want without having to yank out the EPROM (I've managed to emulate the SDS7 memory, but not while also handling MIDI messages, which might not be possible without missing clock cycles)

-Hammond S6 chord organ but add custom filter modules and make the whole thing controlled by MIDI and also replace the god-awful chord button array it uses with an expanded Stradella system like accordions use

-Rodgers 321 electric theater organ but also make it controlled by MIDI and give it velocity and aftertouch and ribbon strips and lots of faders and 3 more swell pedals and tap into the unfiltered oscillator signals to make it into a paraphonic synthesizer using filter modules cross-compatible with the S6 (this is my most feral idea but also the most likely to happen, I just need to finish these Simmons boards and then I can think about that project)

Just posted pictures of both the serpent and the ophicleide...and here we have them both together, kicking off my 100% favorite part of one my very favorite music pieces - the Des Irae bit from Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz. This version is just slightly less kick ass than I’d prefer (Faster!! Louder!!!)  but it’s still good - turn it loud! (Must be loud!!) and boy, you do get a good feel for the brass part in this video. 

Like, c'mon, they're like tubas if they were 50% worse and also really scrunkly. Look at this gods forsaken thing and tell me you wouldn't play it in a heartbeat.