Largest Flute: The Subcontrabass [video] | Hacker News Reader

Largest Flute: The Subcontrabass [video]

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25 pointslisper15 comments

Really intrigued by the instrument. Would be nice to see the whole thing on screen for more than 1.5 seconds without jumping to all kinds of zoomed in shots of who knows what. Horrible video editing!

Big woodwinds are fun. I got to play a contrabass clarinet in college, where you feel the lowest notes even more than you hear them. The opening of Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand [1]--written for Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig's brother--has an amazing solo for contrabassoon [2]. And there's Anthony Braxton and his contrabass sax [3]. For all these low instruments, it's best to experience them live.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_for_the_Left_Ha...

[2] https://youtu.be/Yme2336j81g

[3] https://youtu.be/PuoBeYB-O1M

Interesting instrument, but I dislike this journalistic style. We didn't really get to hear the instrument even.

Well, a few notes. As she said, it isn't really a solo instrument.

She plays some notes at about 1:10 without the high-pitched flute backing track.

Kind of surprised it has a lot of harmonics. Flutes generally produce something that's at least close to a pure sine wave, but apparently not this one.

I like how the melodic line is the backing track to you. This instrument would be the backing track of the music.

Given the story is about a particular instrument, it was kind of annoying that you can only really hear it by itself for a brief segment. If I was listening to the music just to listen to music, then yeah, the extreme bass flute wouldn't be what I would be focusing on.

Similar is traditional Slovak long flute "fujara": https://youtu.be/SuMxWlVYP2o

Does anyone know about the PVC pipe comment? Is there some common knowledge about how to DIY build bass flutes?

Haven't watched yet, but there seems to be a whole world of PVC contrabass flutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK_CJeAavpA

Holy crap! That's Dave Benham[0] who has answered metric buttloads of questions on Stack Overflow re: CMD.EXE. If there's anybody who knows about arcane and idiosyncratic behavior in CMD.EXE it's him!

He wrote a really fun snake implementation in batch, too[1].

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/users/1012053/dbenham [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EZeDoZjnsc

Wow, what a cool set of obsessions! I love that he used his own flute improv as the soundtrack to his batch snake video.

I was going to suggest the Blue Man Group, but then remembered they are percussive instruments.

I don't know much about the flute world, but there's a guy on youtube who's been extending his contrabassoon's range to absurd new lows for years now. Here he is seven years back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8nRRwTnSbM

In the ensuing years he's been manufacturing a proper subcontrabassoon and here's a more recent video of its progress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWQADWh3D8s

Overtone flute tutorials are very common and easy to make. There are a lot of traditional cultures that used contrabass woodwinds as the foundation for overtone instruments.

https://youtu.be/-dB8DDjCU14

This guy's channel is great!

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