Video: Alpine Legend, and More for April Fools

April Fools produces some good humor. Two horn related items to not miss.

First, following up on the widely successful Sousaphone Hero, Xbox just released the alphorn version! Alpine Legend is described in the website as follows:

Jam with alpine legends like Franz “The Manz” Lang and Johann Hornbostel. Shake the mountain tops with 100 classic Alphorn tracks including, “Whose spit is in my horn?” and “More goat bell (It needs)”.

Take your band through all the alpine rights of passage: a mountainous village tour, recording sessions in a log cabin studio, overcoming throat soother addiction, and even competing in a live yodel off.

Be sure to check out the trailer below. I hear they are working on a mellophone version of this as well.

[HT to Jed Hacker, via Facebook].

The other joke of the day I think was a bit obscure for many to get that saw it on the horn list. It is a note from Kendall Betts, owner of Lawson Horns.

Dear Hornlisters,

I am very excited about the news I will convey to you here and now!

Bruce Lawson and I have been working on this for some time and finally, today, made a major breakthrough in the acoustic analysis of the horn!

Bruce has written new software, called SoundStill, that can analyze the sound at any point in the tubing of the instrument. Using our prototype “digital-microphonic input-output pickup,” we can literally “make sound stand still” right on the computer screen! The program shows a clear graphic picture of what the tubing is doing to the sound at that particular moment that it travels past the selected point. Far beyond mere Fourier transform sound wave spectrum analysis, which only analyzes what we can hear, this actually shows the exact correlation between the diameter of the tubing, material of its construction, weight (thickness) of the material, hardness/softness of the material, acoustical parameters in relation to the length of tubing, relationships generated by different dynamic (decibel) levels and both acoustic and psycho-acoustic relationships between harmonics generated at any frequency relative to the nodal point being analyzed or, in the case of analyzing a non-nodal point, the acoustic-reference harmonic nearest to that point.

For example, I played a third space C on both the F and B sides of a 300,000 series Elkhart Conn 28D with an original NY Giardinelli C8 mouthpiece. We sampled the sound at .0314159 increments throughout the length of the instrument. What we found was that the sound was drastically different for each sample. For instance, at .0314159″ in the mouthpiece just past the embouchure, the sound “picture” was a vibrant blood red! At 3.14159″ in the leadpipe (yellow brass w/nickel silver cap) the sound “picture” was a sort of desert taupe where at 12.56636″ (yellow brass) the sound picture was a deep, Egyptian brown! Further down the pike in the nickel silver valve section, the picture was a brilliant Romanesque yellow! At 138.22996″ (where my hand rests in the yellow brass bell flare) the picture was a cloudy, clammy gray on both sides of the horn! We had no idea that this old piece of junk had such colorful sounds and I can’t wait to test a new horn!

I will keep you appraised of further developments and any musical or non-musical findings that might surface.

Thank you!

Kendall

I did not even know that Conn made a 28D back in the 300,000 series!

UPDATE: As I suspected, a source tells me that the 28D was not produced until into the 400,000 series of serial numbers.