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Monday, January 11, 2010

More bass...


The recent reading(s) about ButtKicker's vibes drivers and the under-couch mounting I showed in a couple of pixes, drived me to re-think to the past... TRUE past, folks.

I've always been an organ music lover and I visited and (badly) played some old and newer church organs in the years.

I remember, eons ago, I also knew an ancient organs restorer, a man in his seventies who taught me something...

His tidy workshop was the simplest workshop I ever saw... an huge, hangar-like loft with metal tubes and sheets, rivets, some paper jigs, cutting models, some hammers, some different sizes scissors, some soldering irons and very loooooong wooden slabs... 'twas all: no oscilloscopes, pink noise generators at all... the "art", the skill was in the artisan hands and ears, not in the exotic, missing tools.

I'll talk you about the tonewood, spruce long timber... the mighty 16 hz subbass pedal of some old organs (the best, he told me the artisan...) were played not by air columns, but by those 5, 6 also 10 meters long spruce vibrating slabs!

... oh, oh...

What if I gonna bolt those Buttkickers' vibrating drivers not to a (maybe too much) rigid floor or wall, or to a so prosaic sofa under-side... BUT to a tunable, harmonically vibrating French-polished spruce soundboard, tensioned between floor and ceiling?

Must stop smoking that dope...

2 comments:

Soundlistening said...

wogoodears,

I have been considering bass notes recently as you know.....

Reading your post invited me to submit my current thoughts on bass, these would also apply to the other frequencies. Should we not consider differently the emotions and sensations from bass notes? Maybe there is a confusion for many.

Yes sub 20hz, wall vibrating, sofa shaking deep.....give you sensnations more than emotions.

The sense of a contrabass, when one can feel the emotion and implication of the player, is closer to emotions.

Each and every will will have their prefrences. They both rely on a different setting, enviroment and mind set to be appreciated.

T

twogoodears said...

Must agree, of course... emotions first, being moved by and with and through music...
... yet sound is a part of the recipe, indeed...