Posted by Rick Denney on May 08, 2001 at 11:43:17:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Contra-Octave in band playing posted by Greg Crider on May 08, 2001 at 09:40:06:
I haven't watched Pokorny play pedals, so I don't know how he manages it. I do know that whatever he does is right, at least for him. The results are breath-taking.
My point in bringing him up is two-fold. The first is that I had just spent considerable time listening to a recording of him playing pedals without competition from other instruments. But the main point in using his example is that if anyone gets credit for a rich lower register, it is surely him. And I heard mountains of upper harmonics in his sound, and very little of what sounds like a sine wave. Yes, I have studied waveforms of my own playing. I'd analyze his recording, but I would not be able to separate what is coming out of his bell and what is being added by the room. More valuable than the waveform is a spectral analysis that uses a Fourier Transform to identify the period of the repeating patterns in the time series (read: counting the frequencies of the bumps on the waveform). You can't see this with an oscilloscope.
I have no argument with the notion that a poor embouchure makes a bad-sounding pedal. But I wonder which came first. Is the sound bad because of the shift? Or is the sound bad because of the other fundamental problems that necessitate the shift in the first place?
My response to you wasn't intended to argue that point one way or the other, but to correct the notion that the best players have a lot of fundamental in their pedal tones. It just isn't so. Fred Young has been saying this a long time, and it has taken me this long to put together the equipment to explore the issues myself. Doing so has been revelatory.
When I get a chance, I will post some waveforms and spectral analyses to illustrate what I mean.
Rick "who can demonstrate bad sound in any register" Denney