Malthus
New member
Hi everyone,
I've been searching for an instrument to play for ages and I'm about to give up. For one reason or another they are all (so far) unsuitable. Perhaps someone here knows one that overcomes the disadvantages that I'm facing.
Here's the big one: volume. Probably for the rest of my life I'll be stuck in places where I'll only be able to play at, say, 3am, with multiple people sleeping in other rooms only one thin wall away. I need an instrument that can sound nice at a volume that won't wake people up. Every brass instrument screams like a wounded elephant. Every woodwind plays at only two volumes, "squeak" if you don't blow hard enough and "piercing" if you do. Percussion is right out, and I'm really hoping not to have to settle for an electronic keyboard and headset which isn't an instrument, it's a computer pretending to be an instrument. I've tried strings, but so far only instruments like the autoharp where it's too hard to play a tune because you can't actually pluck one string at a time unless you've got fingers the size of toothpicks or your accuracy with a pick is so great that you could slice a fly in half by flinging a pick across the room at it. I'll add that one of the attractions of my latest failed attempt, the ocarina, other than the fact that it's cheap, is that they make multi-chambered ocarinas so that you can accompany yourself, since I'll always be playing alone.
Aren't there, somewhere on the earth, some instruments for which playing alone, quietly, is assumed to be the normal mode of playing, so that it isn't deliberately engineered to always be audible over a train wreck? The harp looks appealing, particularly since a rich harp player could buy a "double strung" harp and play multiple notes simultaneously. But I'm not spending hundreds on a cheap harp just to find out that plucking a string at 3am will make a noise so loud that the windows vibrate.
Is my next stop an electric guitar that makes no actual noise but synthesizes it through a sound chip and headphones? Seems to me I saw something like that somewhere once. That's not a really attractive option, but if it's the only one...
thank you,
Malthus
I've been searching for an instrument to play for ages and I'm about to give up. For one reason or another they are all (so far) unsuitable. Perhaps someone here knows one that overcomes the disadvantages that I'm facing.
Here's the big one: volume. Probably for the rest of my life I'll be stuck in places where I'll only be able to play at, say, 3am, with multiple people sleeping in other rooms only one thin wall away. I need an instrument that can sound nice at a volume that won't wake people up. Every brass instrument screams like a wounded elephant. Every woodwind plays at only two volumes, "squeak" if you don't blow hard enough and "piercing" if you do. Percussion is right out, and I'm really hoping not to have to settle for an electronic keyboard and headset which isn't an instrument, it's a computer pretending to be an instrument. I've tried strings, but so far only instruments like the autoharp where it's too hard to play a tune because you can't actually pluck one string at a time unless you've got fingers the size of toothpicks or your accuracy with a pick is so great that you could slice a fly in half by flinging a pick across the room at it. I'll add that one of the attractions of my latest failed attempt, the ocarina, other than the fact that it's cheap, is that they make multi-chambered ocarinas so that you can accompany yourself, since I'll always be playing alone.
Aren't there, somewhere on the earth, some instruments for which playing alone, quietly, is assumed to be the normal mode of playing, so that it isn't deliberately engineered to always be audible over a train wreck? The harp looks appealing, particularly since a rich harp player could buy a "double strung" harp and play multiple notes simultaneously. But I'm not spending hundreds on a cheap harp just to find out that plucking a string at 3am will make a noise so loud that the windows vibrate.
Is my next stop an electric guitar that makes no actual noise but synthesizes it through a sound chip and headphones? Seems to me I saw something like that somewhere once. That's not a really attractive option, but if it's the only one...
thank you,
Malthus