Here are descriptions, images and recordings of some of the instruments that I own and play.
The audio clips on this page are in Ogg Vorbis format. You can click on the small images to get bigger versions.
Contents
Mandolin-family instruments
Italian bowlback mandolin
This is a fairly typical early-20th-century bowlback mandolin. My dad inherited it from his father in the late 1990s; it had been sitting in his living room for many years, with significant damage to the pearl inlay and a huge crack down the back between two of the ribs. It was restored by Malcom Tysoe in Farnborough.
While it's not particularly pleasant to play — the frets are very low and it needs a lighter set of strings than those it's currently got — it's certainly a very pretty instrument, and it was the first mandolin I played.
It's tuned GGDDAAEE (when it's up to pitch, which it isn't at the moment).
Flatback mandola
Bought new in December 2003 from Socodi in Canterbury, a Christmas present from my parents, this is a simple flatback mandola made somewhere in China and resold by one of the big UK music suppliers (Hobgoblin sell pretty much the same thing under their "Blue Moon" brand name).
It's well-built and sounds quite reasonable, particularly for the price. Two minor problems: it doesn't play in tune very well up the fingerboard (no matter where the non-compensated bridge is positioned), and it drifts out of tune fairly quickly when played with a pick.
It's tuned CCGGDDAA a fifth below the mandolin.
You can listen to a clip of me playing this mandola, recorded using a tie-clip microphone as a contact pickup; the recording was multitracked with both parts played on the same instrument.
Freshwater octave mandola
I bought this octave mandola second-hand from Hobgoblin in Crawley in October 2004 (at the same time as the bouzouki below). It was made by Freshwater for Soar Valley Music, according to the label.
Its previous owner clearly got a lot of use out of it; the finish is rather beaten-up, but it feels smooth and precise to play (even with the action set fairly high — it's got an adjustable bridge, so if it ever were a problem I could easily fix it), and it sounds very nice. It's very solidly-built — the top is 3-4mm thick, and it's noticably heavier than the bouzouki despite the shorter scale length. It's also the only mandolin-family instrument I own with a strap buckle, so I can play it standing up.
It's tuned GGDDAAEE a fourth below the mandola (and an octave below the mandolin, hence the name — Americans will know it as an octave mandolin).
Musikalia 705M Irish bouzouki
This came new from Hobgoblin in Crawley in October 2004. It was made by Musikalia in Sicily.
It's effectively an octave mandola with a guitar-like scale length. Compared to the other bouzoukis that Hobgoblin had, it has an unusually wide neck (which suits my large fingers), and it's very light — which means that it sounds very bright. When I bought it it had a very light set of strings fitted with about six inches of string wound onto each tuning peg — a more usual set of bouzouki strings fitted following Frank Ford's instructions on frets.com not only made it sound nicer but also meant that it could hold its tune for more than a few minutes at a time. The frets and nut have rather sharp edges.
It's tuned GGDDAAEE, like the octave mandola. I used to have it strung as it was when I bought it — with the upper string of each of the bottom two courses raised by an octave — but changed to unison tuning in January 2006 to make it easier to play in tune further up the neck. (The new tuning also makes the sound a bit less "jangly".)
Bass instruments
Fender 013-6208-575 Fretless Jazz Bass
Bought new, this bass guitar was built by Fender in Corona, Mexico; the colour's "Midnight Wine". Fretless bass guitar seemed the natural next step after playing double bass at school; I wanted a more portable instrument, and I was already used to playing a fretless instrument.
This instrument is very heavy — there's no hope of playing it without a strap, and it's awkward to play sitting down because it's so large. It's one of the biggest body shapes that Fender do, and it's solid, very thick alder. While it's a standard Fender product, it's beautifully made, and feels great to play (it's a far better instrument than my skill at playing it justifies).
I play it through a homemade 15W IC-based amp — which'd probably cause screams of anguish from tube-amp purists, but it's loud enough to use in a large hall, and I've got no complains at all about the sound. It came with a Hiscox Liteflite moulded case, which is almost absurdly strong; the salesman demonstrated it by jumping up and down on it...
It's tuned EADG, the same as a double bass.
You can listen to a clip of me playing the bass without any effects (an overdub for a multitrack recording I was doing), or a clip of me playing with one of the sillier effects on a Boss DSP stompbox.
Percussion
Djembe
This is a pretty typical small djembe, about 45 cm tall. It was a Christmas present from my parents several years ago; I don't know where they got it, but similar instruments are available from pretty much any music shop.
The body's carved from a single large piece of wood, smoothed and varnished on the outside but roughly-textured on the inside. The wood's got a distinctive (pleasant) smell. It's quite heavy, so when I'm playing it gripped between my knees I need to be careful not to drop it on my foot.
This is a very loud instrument — as you'd probably expect for a hand drum. It's great fun to play, but lack of acoustic insulation means I don't get the opportunity very often. You can get a surprising variety of noises from it by playing in different ways: as well as the usual tom-tom sound that just hitting the skin gives you, you can get sharp snare-like noises by tapping the rim, muffled bass thuds by muting it with one hand and playing with the other, loud scratches by running your nails across the skin, quiet taps by hitting the body, and even talking-drum-style sounds by playing it upside down and making it resonate by drumming across the open bottom.
It's not really a tuned instrument, but my chromatic tuner claims that it resonates at a rather sharp A, which you can bend down to F or so by partly covering the bottom.
Here's a clip of me playing a not-terribly-exciting drum part on the djembe.
Synthesisers
I grew up playing my parents' piano, but I don't own one myself. I've also done quite a lot of work with trackers in the past, mostly on the Amiga with OctaMED, and more recently on Linux with Soundtracker.
StudioLogic SL-990 Pro
This is a very large and heavy 88-key full-size weighted MIDI controller keyboard — and it's available remarkably cheaply (under £250) if you shop around. (I think it's recently been discontinued in favour of a model with a few more controller inputs.) It's got just about the bare minimum of features to be useful as a controller keyboard: 88 keys (slightly larger than the piano I'm used to), pitchbend and mod wheels, a sustain pedal input (it didn't come with one, but since it's just a switch contact I use an old pedal I've had around for ages), buttons for programme change and bank select, and another to select the touch-sensitivity response curve.
The feel is very good — it's clearly not a real piano mechanism (there's no "snapback" after a key is pressed), but the keys respond to very small amounts of force and are appropriately-weighted to behave like a real piano when it's being played. The only fault I can find with it is that the mechanism is quite noisy, but I suspect that's difficult to avoid.
I use this to control various softsynths and the D-110; most of the time I'm playing FluidSynth with a piano or electric piano SoundFont, and some effects in JACK Rack.
Roland D-110
This is a 1U MIDI synth module dating from the early 90s; it's based on Roland's LA synthesis algorithm (which is similar to Yamaha's FM synthesis: you pick oscillators and formulae to combine them). The built-in sounds are unremarkable, but you can use SysEx to dump new instrument sets to it; there are some decent electric piano, chromatic percussion and drum sounds available. It predates GM, but you can of course dump a GM instrument set to it (Roland provide a fairly unpleasant one).
One neat feature is that it's got eight separate outputs, and you can assign channels (and, with some limitations, parts of patches) to different outputs — so this would make a great trigger source to control a load of external gates, if I wanted to do that. It's mostly so that I've got something to play with the SL-990 if I'm away from a computer, although I do sometimes use it for drum sounds.
Roland EP-11
This is a low-end "electronic piano" keyboard dating from the early 1980s. It's got a full-size keyboard and produces a variety of different harpsichord-like noises; five buttons select different sets of harmonics, and a slider (labelled "Sustain") controls the envelope decay rate. I think it's 8-note polyphonic. It's also got a pretty standard auto-accompaniment system, a pitch control on the back so you can tune it to other instruments, and a sustain pedal input. Unusually, it's got a transpose button, so it's really easy to play in awkward keys.
It's not the world's most reliable bit of equipment, although it had a hard life before I got it: it used to belong to Sevenoaks School's music department. It was nonfunctional when I got it: the mains cable was broken, the top couple of keys didn't work, the volume knob was missing, and the case contained a surprisingly large collection of chewing gum wrappers. Since fixing those, I've also had to straighten the copper bar that's used as a ground contact along the length of the keyboard a couple of times, and glue one of the keys back together after the bit of plastic that the spring attaches to broke off. I didn't get a sustain pedal with it, but fortunately I had a spare pedal from somewhere else that was easily adapted to fit.
While the keyboard's unweighted, the feel's quite good, and it doesn't sound too bad through an amplifier if you mash several of the "tone" buttons down at the same time. Nobody's ever going to mistake it for a real instrument, though, and since I've got the SL-990 my sister's now got it.
You can listen to a clip of me playing the EP-11, with no intervening effects or amplifier so it sounds even worse than it does through the built-in speaker.