{"id":1954,"date":"2012-10-19T07:18:55","date_gmt":"2012-10-19T11:18:55","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2012-10-19T07:47:34","modified_gmt":"2012-10-19T11:47:34","slug":"what-instrument-have-you-owned-but-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/what-instrument-have-you-owned-but-still\/","title":{"rendered":"What Instrument Have You Owned But Still Not Learned How to Play, No Matter How Cool You Know It Would Be to Play Said Instrument?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Here’s an old topic worth revisiting not only for the benefit of those of you who have entered the Hall since early 2009, but to see if any of the thread’s original respondents have since learned the cool instrument they never got around to learning. Can even older dogs learn new tricks?<\/em><\/p>\n

This post initially appeared 1\/21\/09.<\/code><\/p>\n

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This guy has is all together!<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What instrument have you owned but still not learned how to play, no matter how cool you know it would be to play said instrument?<\/em><\/p>\n

The year my wife and I lived in Hungary I saw some folk bands with guys playing a Hungarian version of a bagpipe. One of these bagpipe players also wore a really cool hat. I’ve loved bagpipes since I was about 10, when my Dad took me to see some Scottish marching band at the Spectrum. I had no interest in buying a kilt from the concession stands after the show, but I recall crying over the fact that my Dad wouldn’t buy me a set of bagpipes that day. I got that they were expensive, but this was 1973 or so, long before Internet shopping. If I didn’t make a trip to Scotland, I thought, I might never have another opportunity like this to buy a set of bagpipes. Waaahhhhhh!<\/em>
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\nAnyhow, 20 years later, I spent that entire year in Hungary on the lookout for Hungarian bagpipes, which used a real animal skin bag, complete with the animal’s wirey coat intact! I was sure I’d come home with a set of those bad boys, but I couldn’t find them in any of the music stores in Budapest. One of my musician friends said they were rural folk instruments, that no one wanted them in a big city. I would have had to go to some distant region, he said, to track one down. Whenever we got to one of these distant regions I kept looking for a Hungarian bagpipe, but no dice. Bulgarians had similar bagpipes, but the long day I spent walking the streets of Sofia, eating excellent food from street vendors and admiring that city’s spectacular women, I could not satisfy my one true goal: finding a set of bagpipes.<\/p>\n

In our final week there I did find the next best thing on my list of Hungarian Things I Was Willing to Spend a Relatively Good Deal of Money to Acquire: one of those black, sheep’s wool hats, like the one Charles Mingus<\/strong> wears on Black Saint and Sinner Man<\/em>. If I’d only found the bagpipes as well I would have been as happening as the guy whose picture I’ve used to kick off this post.<\/p>\n

We spent the final month of our year in Hungary using a Eurail pass to go west across Europe. Our final stop was in Barcelona. There we stayed with an American friend. I couldn’t get the bagpipes off my mind. Time was running out (this was still a couple of years before the ease of Internet shopping would have made the purchase of any kind of bagpipes a breeze). The bagpipes came up in conversation and my friend said, “I’ll take you to a music store that may have something along the lines of what you’re looking for. I know there’s a type of snake charmer horn that I see folk musicians playing.”<\/p>\n

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Gaita chanter, second from left.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The store had all kinds of cool folk instruments, but no bagpipes. They did, however, have the wooden snake charmer reed instrument that my friend told me about. I’m a sucker for anything in that reedy snake charmer family, so I snagged it! You can see the type of horn I bought in the picture above, the second from the left. The website where I found this thing identifies is as a Gaita chanter<\/strong>. It sounds amazing. Every couple of months – for the last 15 years<\/em> – I’ve picked that thing up, wet the reed, and blown into it. I suddenly feel just weeks of practice away from making the squealing noises I love so much on late-60s jazz albums – was it Dewey Redman<\/strong> who played some kind of snake charmer horn – and early Pere Ubu<\/strong> albums. Just weeks<\/em> of practice from being able to handle the instrument enough to use it on one of my own recordings. But I never follow through. My cheeks quickly hurt from the effort it takes to blow. I’ve never played a horn of any sort since recorder in third grade. I don’t make the time to figure out what the notes are when I finger different series of holes. It’s lame, but I’ve got this near-dream instrument sitting in my house for the last 15 years and I’ve never learned how to play it!<\/p>\n

Wanna hear what it would sound like if I took some time to learn how to play it?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s an old topic worth revisiting not only for the benefit of those of you who have entered the Hall since early 2009, but to see if any of the thread’s original respondents have since learned the cool instrument they never got around to learning. Can even older dogs learn new tricks? This post initially […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[77],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}