Eliana's First Proper Gig

That was... confusing.

So, despite having Eliana since 2021, I have never really taken her out on an ``official'' gig---I play on her a lot in between as part of the long-standing principle of ``cross-training'' that sifu has taught me nearly two decades ago. But for a proper gig, that has never happened.

The reason is much simpler: alto flutes need their score to be transposed a perfect fourth lower from concert pitch. The reason for this is practical---unlike the crazy recorder players (with all due respect of course), flute players tend to like playing using their ``instrument'' keys, mostly because the music for the flute tends to be very technical, and thus writing in the same ``fingering pattern'' (i.e. the instrument keys) makes it much easier for the regular concert flute (or C-flute) player to adapt accordingly.

But most music isn't transposed, so it becomes hard to just grab an alto flute out to play to scores originally written for concert flute. There's also the issue of ambitus, but that is usually more obvious---the highly technical stuff will span the full three octaves and thus cannot be easily transposed for playing, while most ``singable'' things stay within two octaves.

Which brings us to today.

Aurelia and Stella have traded places with Davie, and are now at MusicGearWindWorks undergoing their annual servicing (clean, oil, & adjust). I could bring out Azumi, and I was trying her out again last night as part of preparation for serving at the music ministry. But I sounded poor on her---and there was something clacky about her keys that made me draw pause. I dropped in some heavy key oil (probably too high a viscosity), and it helped a bit, but that was when I had a thought.

Why not bring out Eliana?

The pieces were in D-key, B♭-key, A♭-key, and C-key. The tempi weren't too drastic (they were hymns, and therefore needed to match up to what your regular church-goer can sing), and were therefore the best pieces to pick up transposing on-the-fly on Eliana.

It all worked fine, except when times I was confused with concert high-C, concert high-D♭ and concert high-E♭.

Oh, and a surprise hymn requested by senior pastor that was in G-key.

The trick, it seems, is to forget all the rubbish theory that people tell you ``oh, it's like reading the bass clef's top space onwards'' and just play the damn thing, remembering that the default scale runs with F♯ that needs to be taken care of. It's about reassociating where in the [treble clef] scale the fingering patterns are located, and just going without thinking too hard.

With enough repetition, it becomes easier. I dare not say that it becomes ``second nature'' until I can hot-swap between C-flutes and alto flute within the same gig without going nuts.

And that's all I wanted to talk about to day. Am still recovering from whatever the hell I had caught on Friday.

Till the next update.

May Too?

I could, in theory, have taken my off-in-lieu for previous Saturday's Hari Raya Puasa some other day.

But I chose to take it today, the day immediately after Labour Day, for the sole reason that it will be a day off on a day that isn't a day off for most people.

I would have spent it at MusicGear just putsing about, but since I already did that last Saturday when I took some of my ladies (Stella, Aurelia, and Eliana) in for a look-see at WindWorks. Stella was due for her tune-up after the first month of playing, Aurelia was in for a worn out bumper for the B♭ lever, and Eliana was in for... too many clacky sounds due to worn out bumpers and imperfect regulation to begin with. And Sean has brought in something interesting that I play tested---not sure if I would buy it since it involves electronics and I'm not particularly kitted out for that, but it definitely does bring some rather interesting possibilities. The other classically trained woodwind players in the shop found that interesting thing a little tough to work with though, possibly because they operated from the absolute pitch world of music, as opposed to the relative pitch one that I worked with most of the time.

That and probably because the interesting thing used the simple system as opposed to the keyed systems that most woodwind instruments these days have.

Anyway, an additional day off, and I went cycling along the North East Riverine Loop once more. The Loop... each time I go cycle on it, it shows changes. This time round, some parts of the tarmac were converted into pure concrete, and damn it was hot when I went over it in the morning on my bicycle---I could feel the infra-red energy just blasting at me; it was not at all comfortable.

But cycling is fun. I should do more cycling. I used to cycle to my office, but thanks to all the constructions now, that is not possible any more, and so the next best thing is to actually make an effort to cycle around my side of the island.

Cycling made me think of an old acquaintance with an unusual name, and as such, I shall simply call her ``E''. I met E back when I was still active in Aikido, and she was a fun person to train and hang out with. She got married (of course), and while I don't actively chat with her, I still follow her adventures of cycling all over the world with her husband.

It's interesting because that whole cycling persona was something that she developed much later, after her short foray into Aikido, and her longer one in outdoor adventures in general.

I did muse to myself if there was some new persona that I would like to take up, not with the intention of getting hitched of course, but as a different means of living yet another type of life.

No answer to that now. I suppose one dependency on it was whether I wanted to run my own household. I'm past the age in which the government gives a crap with respect to housing, i.e. I can, if I wanted to, get ahold of some brand new one-room/two-room apartment, be chained to a multi-decade mortgage, and have all the space that I need to run all the interests that I have.

But it also means that some fifteen or so years later, I will need to somehow come back to my childhood apartment to take care of matters after my parents have passed on. Not to mention my quiet worry of my parents living alone without some kind of alert observational supervision the way that I am doing now---they aren't dumb people, but sometimes they are so set in their ways that they need a proverbial bonk in the head to wake up a bit more and look at the world for what it is.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. The mark of an adult, especially when the decisions matter. And when the decisions start to matter for more than just oneself, be it family or subordinates, maaaaaaaan it starts to be Serious Business---the mark of an adult in middle age.

Anyway, that's enough for today. Tomorrow, I'm back to the office, and there are things that need to be done. Meanwhile, playthrough two of Nier: Automata awaits.

Till the next update.

Chop Chop

Alright alright, I'm almost late.

Or maybe I am truly late by the time I post this.

I ran some errands today. Had to get Eliana's issue sorted out, and it was. Went to church.

Watched Amelia Watson's new outfit reveal, followed by Bae+IRyS in ``rat review''.

All's well. Till the next update.

Edit: Forgot to add that I also spent time digging out more cobblestone and what-not in my mines in Minecraft. I think I'm going to keep to the 1.17.1 world for now, and if I want to run the 1.18.1 version, it's likely to be a new world instead of extending this one. The changes in the new version are too drastic for me to comfortably keep my current set up, and honestly I want to try different things in 1.18.1. But it will be a while before I go there though.

Thirds of Months

And just like that, a third of the month has gone. Not sure if I had mumbled about this before, but I generally like dividing a month up into thirds as opposed to the more usual weeks. It's mostly due to the peculiar way in which we number off the days in a year.

When we divide the month in thirds, each third is usually 10±1 days, where that ±1 applies to the last third of the month.

Dividing a month into weeks is ugly. While each month has at least 4 weeks, the remainder of between 1 to 3 days quickly adds up more interstitial weeks. Thus, 12 months of 4 weeks each yields only 48 weeks or 336 days, leaving another whole ``month's'' worth of 4 weeks.

Incidentally, that's where the ``13th-month pay'' comes from. Note that in SIN city, it is gaslighted as an annual wage supplement, a means for companies to potentially not award under the undefended claims that the business results are ``exceptionally poor that year''. It is for this reason that I'd rather talk about annual compensation instead of monthly too.

Note also that for SIN city, CPF rates are taken into account from the company's perspective for compensation as well. So any annual salary package quoted will need to adjusted to take the CPF rate into account, either by subtracting (to find comparable take-home salary), or adding (to find the cost from the company's perspective). But I digress severely.

10 calendar days translates to about 7 working days even, and gives a much easier effort estimate with built-in slack compensation. It is also less susceptible to the aliasing effects of using weeks alone, and allows faster back-of-the-envelope calculations too.

But mostly, it really is that much easier to see which third of the month we are in by just staring at the date itself. And I like that a lot.

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Anyway, I spent much of the day doing my reading for my baptismal classes, as well as just general contemplation as part of the winding down of my sabbatical year. I managed to secure a job through Providence even before I formally started on my job search, and with that, I am thankful to the Lord who always provides. I pray that my role at this job will be a fruitful one, and that I will have joy working at it.

I have an appointment tomorrow morning to bring Eliana down for a technical look-see. For the confused, Eliana is my anomalously designed alto flute. Her issue is that the padding between the B-key and B♭-key seems to either get too compacted and hard, or had fallen off---each time I play instrument C, that rebound of the B-key from the spring keeps giving me a loud ``piak'' sound.

It really doesn't help that I play Eliana like how I would play a D 曲笛, i.e. using the instrument C-major fingering to play concert G-major. For the non-flute player, this means that I will keep hearing that ``piak'' sound non-stop.

Due to that appointment, I think I will just turn in for the night. Before I go though, I will just drop off a link to the Smol Calli concert that was produced by Amelia Watson. I think it qualifies as a legendary Hololive EN video, as it is the first all-in-home-based-VR/3D concert. Other Hololive 3D concerts had been done through Cover Corp's studios in Japan, so this alternative set up can be seen as a watershed moment for the Hololive EN crew since they span the entire planet as opposed to being in Japan itself. It's worth checking out for the legendary moment.

And with that, I'm done with this post. Till the next update.

Eliana is Anomalously Designed?

Hmm. I think I have an anomalously designed alto flute.

Here's the context. I was checking out entries in the Flute Forum in Facebook when I stumbled upon this picture post of the Muramatsu alto flute as put up by a member. It was a pretty picture of the Muramatsu alto flute, and I was enjoying it very much when I noticed something strange about this particular picture. I will replicate it here for ease of reference:

Look at the upper right corner of the picture of the alto flute---this is where the upper part of the flute (i.e. the part of the flute body closest to the head joint) is located.

There are keys attached to levers that actuate the covers that cover the tone holes for the entire left hand there.

On Eliana (my alto flute), I instead have this particular set up:

Don't mind the yellowish colour---it is reflective of the wall colours than any type of tarnish. Look carefully at the upper right corner of the picture as well---notice that Eliana does not have those levers that I saw. In fact, the keys are what I would call ``direct driven'', in that my fingers immediately actuate the covers that cover the various tone holes for the left hand.

I got confused. Was the Muramatsu alto flute special or was Eliana weird?

I went to the Muramatsu alto flute page, and looked up their alto flute schematic. I will replicate it here for ease of reference:

The picture is correct; the Muramatsu alto flute does have levers in the left hand that actuate the tone hole covers.

What about alto flutes by other makers then?

A quick check with Altus' alto flutes showed the same. I replicate the image here for ease of reference:

Yep, levers in the left hand.

Another quick check with Kotato's and Fukushima's alto flutes showed the same too. I replicate a rotated version of one of alto flutes here

Yes, levers in the left hand.

Dizhao's alto flutes? Replicating the rotated and cropped image here for ease of reference:

Yes, levers in the left hand also.

I was getting confused. The last major flute maker that I knew that made alto flutes was Eva Kingma. This is where I was a little amused. Looking at the details of the left hand, we see the levers. I replicate the image here for ease of reference:

But if we scroll down the main alto flutes page to the section on ``open hole'' version of the alto flute, we find that the left hand are also ``direct drive'' on the key covers. I replicate that image here for ease of reference:

This sort of makes sense because the idea of the ``open hole'' alto flute is to allow better venting like the open-hole versions of the regular concert flute.

There was one more thing I had to check, and it was The Flute and Flute-Playing by Theobald Boehm, father of the modern concert flute design. In it, he references the ``bass flute in G'', which is what we call in modern times as the ``alto flute''. In it, on p127, he shows his mechanism schematic for the left hand (or upper parts of the flute).

From this, it is clear that everyone who was making alto flutes were basically following this idea of using levers.

I mean, even the Wikipedia entry's picture of the Yamaha alto flute shows the same left levers. I replicate the image here for reference:

It is therefore rather clear that Eliana's design is indeed anomalous.

Eliana's design seems to follow closer to that of an upsized concert flute than one that is based off of Boehm's design, possibly as a way of avoiding the need to fabricate longer and more complex parts.

That said, she still plays like a charm, and I was glad that I had enough knowledge to figure out what was going on. I suppose the lever mechanism helps reduce the arm stretch that might be needed for the left hand, which can help in the support of the rather long instrument, but for me, there really isn't that much of a difference. It is possible that I'm just used to the correct support from playing the 倍大 D 笛子, which is roughly of the same tuning as that of the alto flute.

In either case, that is all for today, I suppose; I'm kinda sorry that I nerded out again. Till the next update.

Gifts to Myself

It's just past my birthday for this year. So, it is time for yet another retrospective.

I bought myself a gift for this year---a silver-plated cupronickel alto flute with straight and curved head joints made by 龙口金鸣乐器有限公司. It's the ``last'' representative that would round up the core instruments of the flute family. The original intention was not really to purchase my own alto flute---it was to have a shared high quality alto flute with my then wife-candidate. Well, she is no longer my wife-candidate, and thus that plan is garbage.

I already own a B-foot version of a vertical bass flute made by them, and I love the resonant nature of the sounds, as well as the quick reaction of it. Getting an alto flute from them seems like a no-brainer as well, despite their obvious ``no-name'' nature. My then wife-candidate owns an alto flute from them as well, and it definitely sounds good enough.

And so, I am now an owner of an alto flute, whom I named Eliana because it is a cool name, and it commemorates a new friend I made while spending some evenings at the nearby bar drinking and reading after work, before I had quit from my last job.

For these two low harmony flutes that I have, I can attest to the soundness of the mechanism, the goodness of their reaction, and general accuracy of intonation. I have not tried their other instruments to make any other pronouncements. But what I usually say still holds---the strength of a brand name only suggests that there is a certain low variance in the quality, it is still important for one to physically try out any musical instruments that one might purchase to see if one likes the experience of making music out of it. A ``no name'' brand can still have pearls among them all, but their usual high variance would mean that one may need to try many more instruments before finding that one pearl.

I think that this alto flute is likely to be the last purchase of a musical instrument for myself for quite a while. As seen in the instrument family representation section, I have very good coverage of the different ranges/timbres of instruments within the three instrument families that I care the most about (dizi, flute, recorder, and saxophone). Most of my planned and actual purchases over the years were done according to this principle. The only instruments that I may want to look into the future are a baritone saxophone, a contrabass flute, and maybe a sopranino saxophone.

I may want to get a special piccolo at some point, something that goes down to a low C, or even low B. But that is really not of the highest priority, as are the rest of the instruments that I might want to get to round up the representation. As is, I think my sound palette is good enough, and as many people have pointed out exasperatedly, I only have that one mouth to play these instruments.

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The anniversary of my birth came and went mostly uneventfully. Folks who cared enough to remember did come out of the woodwork to wish me a birthday greeting (shoutouts to CH, RX, YT, Winnie, XL, my other sister, and folks from the care group), and everyone else who didn't have Facebook to remind them did not say anything.

It's okay. It is the consequence of a deliberate choice that I made a few years ago to keep that specific date from being blasted all over the Facebook. On that social networking website, I am largely invisible, as it should be. I can be contacted as needed, but there is usually no need to contact me there.

It is the same strategy that I use for LinkedIn as well.

I did end up having dinner with my other sister and her hubby in the evening though, having north-east Chinese cuisine out next to Lor 27 Geylang. We did a la carte instead of the BBQ/hotpot, because we were just lazy to do our own cooking. Food was great, company was, as always, amazing. The power did trip at some point, but it was quickly rectified; it is still a mystery to me why the power could have tripped then.

Just a point of note though, ``my other sister'' isn't some half-sibling from nowhere---she's my unofficially adopted sister because she and I share the same surname. Our surname is sufficiently rare in Singapore that it is just funnier and easier to think of each other as siblings. Same reason why when I see anyone else with the same surname, I just call them my cousins when I am talking with other people---makes a good conversational piece that makes it more memorable.

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I met up with Harish to go on what can count as a hike in Singapore, along the southern ridges of Singapore. This is a route that I love walking, and had done so on several occasions with folks like Wangki, Roticv, and even XL with her hubby. Of all the times I had taken this route (traditionally beginning with the really stupid stairs of Marang Trail off Marang Road), I had only ended up in Kent Ridge Park maybe twice, including this one with Harish. But this time, the weather held up fine, and the company was right, and we managed to extend the route from Kent Ridge Park to go through NUS, before heading through to the west most end of West Coast Park, a park that I had hitherto not known of its existence before, despite having spent four years studying in that region, and about six months doing internships nearby.

It was a good hike.

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And that's about all I care to write at this point. Till the next update, I suppose.