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A little real Melodica action: Cryosphere
The cryosphere is the sum total of the Earth’s frozen water, in the form of snow, permanently frozen ground (permafrost), floating ice, and glaciers. If all this were to melt, sea levels would rise by 70 metres, coastal cities would be inundated, and the habitable surface of the planet would be greatly reduced. Who knew Kevin Costner was a prophet?
Following the suggestion of @TimRussell to the effect that rather than using a Melodica app ( as I did on my last but one piece, There Is A Sickness At The Heart Of Everything), I should just get a real one, I took delivery this morning of a 1969 vintage Hohner Soprano Melodica. This one:
An £18 bargain off eBay. 
I put a £5 piezo mic on the back, and played it live into AUM through the Wingie 2 Resonator, then applied my usual generous slathering of FX and live mixed it down into AudioShare. No other instruments or instrument apps used. Everything you hear came from the Melodica, including the percussive thuds.
It was a great suggestion, Tim! I know this will be a ‘duh!’ moment for instrumentalists out there, but yes, it definitely helps with expression having an actual real instrument to mess with instead of just random generators. (Well, there was still one random generator - the old lady holding the darn thing and wondering how long her next breath could last.)
Incidentally, the amazing photo which was the inspiration for the piece is not AI, but also the real thing, taken by a friend of mine on the black volcanic sands of a beach he visited as part of his recent Icelandic cruise.
All comments welcomed as usual. Enjoy!
Comments
Even Laurie Anderson would have been impressed of this Melodica track!
Great! Another example of how 'the fx maketh the (wo)man'. Technical skill is not always needed to play instruments beautifully (unless accompanying others and they are leading). As long as you have taste, and in this genre, as long as you can play your effects, you can go far. Hainbach is in this category, so you're in good company. I really enjoyed this. What a bargain for 18 quid. Again you are giving me Wingie gas, but again I must resist.
Glad you went for the button melodica. Showed this to both kids and I have two "that's cool" comments to relay onto you, plus one from me.
Great textures out of the melodica and the resonator, and quite a nice variety of sounds.
Nice. I have one of those old Hohners, but the red one with keys. Haven’t played it for years because one of the notes is way out of tune. I will have to look for it now and try some things.
Ha love these things, nice work, there’s an exact replica of one of these hiding somewhere in my house and I’ve not seen in in donkeys despite keeping my eyes peeled every time I move a mystery box… even the colour is the same 🙌
Same problem for me. I think it’s inside one of my hand drums. My wife is always hiding my drums. Cannot imagine why!
Thanks, all, for the listens and the comments.
I feel validated!
The melodica is a brilliant thing, very solid and weighty in the hand, more like Bakelite than modern plastic, and surprisingly loud. I’m so glad I went for a vintage button model over a cheap modern keys type. (Though actual keys players might feel different, obvs.)
Prices for them fluctuate wildly on eBay: I saw a match for mine at £9.99 - and at £99. I was almost tempted to buy another bargain priced one and wait for the inevitable hipster uplift. The 1960s grey German schools edition button models look particularly cool. And they just cry out to be fed into fx. A £5 sticky-pad piezo on the back makes that easy.
Speaking of which, @Gavinski : you really should consider giving into gas for a Wingie II! For a ‘boutique’ device it’s both pretty cheap, and pretty small, can be powered off a power bank, and it is surprisingly deep and flexible but also very instinctual to use, very interactive, if I can put it that way.
It encourages me to get into a ‘dialogue’’ in real time, with the noises I am making if, shaping them to excite the resonator in interesting ways. It’s a very different, organic relationship than the usual just feeding a sound into a more or less fixed effect. I think anyone who is at all into experimenting with sound will find it rewarding to mess with.
Majestic. And I had a giggle at the bit about running out of breath - I had the same problem with my attempts at vocal interaction with electronics during Jamuary (I should really get back to that stuff soon). The “dialogue in real time” description is spot on - making interactive setups/patches, particularly if they’re unstable so you really have to engage and listen deeply, is remarkably satisfying. It works really well here.
💡 !
Love it, great sound design to create the cryospheric atmosphere! ❄️☃️
Coincidentally, l just acquired this vintage beauty for FREE. Between the mini keys, the breath, the tonguing… it’s all a bit more difficult than l had hoped, alas! Then the clacky noise of the key themselves… how to mic it..another thing to sort out.. lt’s very cool and sounds great, but l have to admit the sampled instrument I’ve been using is SO much easier!
Oh, that looks lovely! Very envious! FWIW, for my own, perhaps less demanding, er, experimental’ purposes, (I am a big fan of your very polished professional productions), I found that sticking a simple sticky-pad-n-cable attached piezo on the back was all the miking I needed. Lets me plug it in like an electric instrument, surprisingly little handling noise, the buttons don’t clack, (maybe keys are more prone to?) and it sounds pretty good to my uneducated ears. The mike cost me £6 off Amazon:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08G7ZJZGL?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
I guess a keys model like yours might complicate a mike being fixed to the back if you wanted to play it with an extension hose flat on a surface, though. You’d also have to add some suitably thick sticky pad rubber feet to lift it up enough to accommodate the mike and cable.
…Hey, if it is bugging you, and you want to throw it out, I’ll happily take it off your hands. I’ll even pay postage!
Some inspiration for anyone melodica minded:
Like father, like son…
I could be wrong (I can’t play, so I’m not able to tell) but it seems to me that getting the nuance of performance as well as the sound into a piece would be tricky to achieve just with samples. It’s the breath control that gives it the edge, I think, as in this rather excellent performance of a Pablo cover:
I wish I had one of those extension tubes so I could lay it flat and get used to the minikey spacing. I guess finding mouthpieces and tubes for these vintage models can be tricky. I was reading about one person who had to have a mouthpiece 3D printed for one of these vintage models.
My main inspiration is probably Donald Fagen, Jon Batiste, maybe Billy Preston... Blues or jazz-type stuff.. or like basically a substitute for Steve Wonder-ish harmonica, maybe. But there is a really nice free melodica for Kontakt, which I've been using on a current project. I've also thought about trying to learn chromatic harmonica, but that's a whole other can of worms, not the least of which is they are pretty expensive. Hard to justify those kind of funds for something I may only use on one project. I'm getting great sound with this Kontakt instrument + about 7-8 plugins, but I'm thinking of maybe just hiring a harmonica player!
I've never seen melodica used in reggae.
Here is an interesting performance I ran across -- essentially assuming a more accordion-like role, tango..
Whole thing is an interesting wild and wooly world.. Seems like you can do a lot with it, but I don't know if I have the time to devote to learning it properly.
Another beaut !
I have a theory that given the technology available to us it’s not necessarily what you start off with (sound wise) but what you do with it… this is a great example 👌
Btw I’m lucky enough to have been on that beach… it’s unbelievable 🧊🏖️⬛️