Pachyderm pack in, more tuning and sound samples.

Saturday I packed Phil the Elephant into the car, drove to the Civic and assembled him in the Taj Mahal room ready for the show next weekend.  Everything still fits in the car, including a computer to run the slideshow from.  It's a fair walk from the loading bay to the rooms we are performing in, and it's hot work carrying an Elephant.   I assemble the Elephant with a little help.  I can almost put the Elephant up on my own, but it really needs someone to support the front legs while I manouver the backbone in place, and support the backbone while I slide the rear legs in.  Once assembled Phil looks quite at home in the Taj Majal room.   Various people have a play on the Elephant so I can stand back and see/hear it all from a distance.  It looks and sounds amazing, and I come to the realisation that I have, indeed, created quite an astonishing musical Elephant.  

After setting up everything that can be set up, and mics attached I remove the Kundi and Marimba and come home.

Sunday I intend to have a day off from Elephant related activities, but I can't resist doing some more Kundi practice and retuning the Marimba.  The tuning was pretty good, but I wasn't quite happy with it, the whole instrument was a little sharp, and the notes weren't quite in harmony.   A couple of the musicians who played the marimba were polite about the tuning, but it was clear that the off notes were obvious.

Getting the marimba to this close has taken hours of tuning, so I had been trying to convince myself that it was OK as I was a bit reluctant to do more tuning as there is the risk of going too far and ending up with a worse tuning.  But in the end I won't be happy with tuning this bad so I bite the bullet and start tuning from the lowest note.  Fortunately I'm only trying to shave about a quarter tone off most of the notes, so it doesn't take that long.  I realise that the tuning was quite 'stretched' as I end up having to shave nearly a tone off the higher notes.

I finally have a tuning that I'm happy with.  There's still room for more fine tuning but it's definitely a lot better.

Here is a video of me playing the final Marimba, this is really the first time I've ever tried to play one of these.   I'll have to improve a bit by Thursday, although the Marimba will mostly be played by Phil Dadson on the night of the performance.

Here's a video of me playing a couple of tune fragments on the Kundi.  The first tune is the tuning melody, Wili pai sa sunge.

The words, which I am not going to sing just yet, go like this.
Wili pai sa sunge
Mu ta kundi ki bi bialeu kindi
Kuluo pai sa sunge

Which is approximately translated as
Something a little, this is of work.
One must play the harp and sing its song too.
The old things are the work.

The second piece is Nzanginza mu du kporani yo - The harp is in our village.