innovation

Hints for Tuning

~ Paul Phillips ~ Leave a comment

The old cello reclines lazily on its side, awaiting the day when its new owner walks in unawares.  I’ve seen it a hundred times; The unsuspecting victim of love at first sight pushes through the door, the muttered “Just looking,” merely a prelude to the purchase of the instrument they can’t resist.  I thought maybe the battered old veteran of who knows how many practice sessions had found its newest admirer the other day, when the young man sighted it across the room.  He asked to take it down and quickly noted that it needed to be tuned.  The Lovely Lady, not comfortable with tuning some instruments, found a listing of the correct pitches for him and he attempted a tuning.

From the back room, I heard the strings being stretched upward and, knowing the young man to be a competent musician, didn’t move to the sales floor to interfere in the process.  After a few moments of struggling with the tuning pegs, with dubious success, he half-halfheartedly drew the bow across the strings, to be met with a cacophony of improperly tuned intervals.  The poor cello was reluctantly returned to its former resting place and he left, after making the terse announcement that it wouldn’t stay in tune and the strings needed to be replaced. 

I thought about that this afternoon as another young man who helps out in the store asked me an insightful question regarding violins.  I’ll tell you more about Andrew some day, but for now, it should be enough for you to know that more than anything else, Andrew wants to know about and work with musical instruments.  In working in the store and other experiences he’s had, Andrew already knows that the instruments in the string family (violins, violas, and cellos) require a special technique when setting the tuning.  The tuning pegs are simply round, graduated pieces of ebony which require not only the easily recognizable twisting motion to tighten them, but also a pushing motion to set them in place when the pitch is achieved.  Other instruments with strings only require the twisting motion and then they stay relatively well in tune without further positioning.  The pushing to set the peg is not required at all.  This is actually the reason that the young man who attempted to tune the cello was unsuccessful.  He turned the pegs, but didn’t know to set them by pushing on them, so the strings just slipped back down when released, leaving a noisy, useless instrument.

In light of all this, Andrew didn’t need to know how to tune the violin.  He only wanted to know why!  Why don’t they change the tuning method for the violin?  We discussed that the instrument’s tuning mechanism has remained largely unchanged (and unimproved) for the last four centuries.  When you really consider it, the method for tuning these instruments is the same as any of their primitive predecessors going back for many more centuries.  Over the last two hundred years, there have actually been many new methods for tuning developed and attempts made to modernize and improve the instruments, but the answer to Andrew’s question is very simple.  The people who play the instrument refuse to change.  They prefer to struggle with a primitive system, because it’s the tradition.  Oh, they have arguments.  These include weight differences, a protest made invalid by modern materials such as graphite and fiberglass, and loss of tonal quality, a minuscule, nearly imperceptible change which can be discerned by only a tiny percentage of those professionals who play the instrument hours upon hours daily.

The reason that millions of violins, violas, and cellos have been made with these primitive, ineffective wooden pegs, instead of moving into the modern age of efficiency and ease in tuning, boils down to this:  “We’ve never done it that way before!”  Untold thousands of prospective players have given up in frustration because nobody wants to change the way it’s always been!  Closer to home, I lost a sale the other day because of it!

When you get right down to it, all of life is this way.  We have to stay on our guard constantly to avoid just this type of thinking.  Our nature is to continue on, doing the same thing over and over as long as it gets the job done.  I’m not really disturbed over the problem with violins, but it does give a pretty accurate picture of human nature.  Until someone comes along and says, “I’m not doing it this way anymore.  This is stupid!” we just plod along, making do.  For most of my life, I’ve done this, never thinking, “There’s got to be a better way!”  As I get older, I’m finding myself more and more being reminded to look for alternatives and ways to be creative.  That said, it still goes against my nature.

And, even today, the old cello sits there, a not-so-mute witness to the stubbornness of generations of musicians, but a brilliant reminder of our need to innovate and grow.  It may take another four centuries to change the tuning peg, but I’m thinking some other changes had better come sooner than that.

“Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity–Not a threat.”

spp

It’s Not Rocket Science!

~ Paul Phillips ~ 1 Comment

Innovation.  What is it about doing things in a new way that scares us to death?  For all of the history of mankind, the only way our lifestyle has improved is by finding new ways of accomplishing old tasks.  For instance, the introduction of the wheel into the enterprises of humans altered history with implements of war, to say nothing of the improvement in diet, in personal transportation, and in countless machines that improve the lot of mankind, but that wouldn’t function at all without wheels and gears in them.  Even today, as we sit at our ultra-sophisticated, technologically-advanced lap-top and desk-top computers, there are wheels inside which allow them to function, to be cooled, to open and close mechanisms.  The use of fire and subsequently, flame-less sources of heat allow us to live comfortably, to eat cooked food which offers less health risks, even to build mammoth machines with huge welders or minuscule circuit boards with the tiniest of soldering irons.  But to achieve any of these historical transformations, along with countless others, someone, or more accurately, a lot of someones, had to be willing to think creatively, to imagine what was possible, instead of only seeing the current reality.

I’m not such a thinker.  Many times, when I’m presented with a new, innovative apparatus, I look at how it works (I’m fascinated by mechanics) and say, “That’s so simple!  I could have invented that!”  But I never have invented anything.  My brain doesn’t work that way.  A case in point–I have complained for years that the digital tuners used for adjusting the pitch of guitars and similar instruments are useless in a room full of musicians, simply because they pick up each and every note being played in the room and cannot be made to focus on the instrument which is being tuned.  All this time, I’ve known about and used, piezo or contact microphones, which pick up sound transmitted through a solid instrument, for amplification.  In recent years, some visionary had the insight to see that the two could be married into a digital tuner with a piezo microphone built into it, which could then be clipped onto any instrument you wish, thus tuning only that instrument.  In a room full of ear-shattering music, the tuner is impervious to any sound but that of the guitar or banjo or bass to which it is affixed.

How simple is that?  And how could I not have been the one who combined the two very common tools, thus making a fortune?  I want to have a “Eureka” moment, want to be able to say, “I knew it would work all along,” but that doesn’t seem to be one of my gifts.  In fact, I often find myself looking down on the dreamers, the visionaries, as simply goof-offs…nut-cases who don’t have anything better to do with their time than sit and play with Frankenstein-monster devices that will never work.

I was proud of myself today, though.  Little Addison was here again.  You remember…the little girl and the puzzle?  Well today she was marching around the store banging on a child’s drum we keep for just such occasions.  I always like to show the young prodigies how to hold the drum and the ideal way to grip the mallet and then encourage them to hammer away at the drum, but today, I let Addison go.  She used the mallet for awhile and then, knowing that a guitar pick was also a tool for making music, relinquished her grip on the mallet in favor of a pick, trying one shape and then another on the head of the drum.  It wasn’t nearly as loud as the mallet, but the varying sounds she achieved captivated her, encouraging her to continue her quest, trying all the shapes, then different materials, until she had exhausted the possibilities.  Now, I know that you don’t play a drum with a guitar pick, but she doesn’t.  This little explorer hasn’t yet been told that you should only use the “right tool for the right job” and I wasn’t about to be the one to tell her.  I live in hopes that some of the young brains that come in and out of my business will one day surprise everyone around them with some brilliant device which will revolutionize music.  And the way it starts is with experimentation; with sounds, with textures, with manipulation. 

My days of imagining and innovating are long since past.  I have been a black & white, linear thinker for too long to suppose that I will be able to break free of this path.  But, I fervently and passionately believe that we can encourage the dreamers among us, instead of making fun of them.  We must find ways to channel their imagination and help our children to see that there are better ways of doing things.  It’s not easy for me to do, but I am resolved not to be the one who says, “We’ve never done it that way before.”

Long live the Addisons of this world!

 

 

“These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.”

(Alfred Hitchcock)