Well since there's a dedicated subforum for it

I guess I'll start with a simple 'hello' before I descend into a spiral of incoherent rambles because I (probably mistakenly) believe that's what I'm supposed to do.

Hello.

First, to explain my username, because I feel like doing so -- it's a portmanteau of ebony and ivory, which are supposed to be piano keys, and um.. in blending together into one word they form a cohesive whole much like an assortment of notes magically metamorphoses into music? No not really I didn't really think that deep, I just thought it sounded quite nice. And I hope it does.

Anyway, I'm 17 years old, but reveal anymore and I'd be exposing myself to the not-so-hidden dangers on the internet, so I shall shroud myself in secrecy. Which kinda defeats the purpose of an introductory thread, but still.

So, cue the boring recount of my life. Whoops, that's going to defeat the purpose of defeating the purpose of an introductory thread.

As for instruments I play, primarily the piano, and also the erhu, which is a Chinese stringed instrument (called the Chinese violin by some, which spares people quite few pronunciation issues). I started taking piano lessons at around 6 (yeah, typical Asian mentality), and tediously bore my way, bored, through boring piano exams from grades 1-8 without actually touching the piano outside of lessons. Whoops. To be honest, I didn't think very much of playing the piano till around 3 years ago, when I saw, or heard rather, someone improvising and playing by ear, which kinda spurred me on to learn to do the same. Suddenly those beansprouts on lines didn't seem as necessary (and actually I'd very much rather learn by ear than from a score, although in most cases it's not very possible). Although it did take me rather a long while to get used to the idea of not reading from a score, even though I couldn't read very well from it in the first place. And from then on, I started loving piano, music, and piano music. Well, tonal music at least.

So well, composers I like -- Rachmaninoff mostly, Brahms, Liszt, Saint-Saens, to an extent, for classical; Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo, for video game music (yeah I love video game music even though the only console game that's held my attention is Pokemon, and I didn't even get past all the gym leaders. Ohwell.); (note the hidden emoticon yay) and a couple of others like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joe Hisaishi, from other random unrelated areas.

Favourite pieces -- my preferences are horribly skewed towards piano pieces, so Rach's 2nd and 3rd Piano Concerto, Moszkowski's Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky's.. oh and Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy.

And finally, composing experience and stuff. Which should be the important part given this site's name, but it's a wall of text separating this paragraph from the site header. Gosh I hope posts don't have word limits, whoops. I started trying to compose around a year back, but it wasn't very successful, and was horribly simplistic. I've done more remixing than composing actually, because I get overly perfectionist-ic about getting that perfect melody and all, and just give up in frustration after a while. They've all been either orchestral or solo piano so far (and I can here shamelessly insert a plug if you want to go watch them http://www.youtube.com/user/jeremyngyd or if you just like clicking on underlined words.) Also, I stubbornly refuse to write anything down so there are tons of ideas floating around in my head screaming 'write me down', but I just ignore them and slowly they fade into the deeper recesses of my consciousness and go to idea heaven. Because that's where the good ideas go and when I forget them it's frustrating.

Having never played in a Western orchestra (only a Chinese one), getting the intended effect with Western instruments has proved quite a bit harder than I'd imagined. Especially since I still can't properly tell the difference in sound between an oboe, clarinet, cor anglais, bassoon, and a really soft trumpet. Yeah, that's even more options than a multiple choice test, and I can't write ambiguous answers like an 'a' with an extended neck to look somewhat like a 'd'.

What struck me about this forum was that the people here seem to have really sound theory backgrounds (pretend the word 'sound' was somewhat of a pun), which makes me want to remember all the theory I threw away after stopping theory exams. Except they're in theory heaven. So I really hope to, um, somehow learn something here, even though the internet is precisely the thing that distracts me most from actually getting down to writing stuff.

Writing music that is, I've written enough stuf here already so i should make an anagram of it and disappear (if you don't get it, nevermind, stay innocent).

Poof.

Welcome to YC, evory. You play ehru? That's really awesome. I play shakuhachi, which is similar to the xiao. Uematsu and Hisaishi are two of my favorite composers as well; their abilities to pump out and orchestrate beautiful and catchy melodies have always impressed me. I know what you mean about being a perfectionist in relation to melody and having a hard time writing your ideas down. A lot of us stumble with these things, but it gets better the more you compose and the more you develop your musical way of thinking.

Have you ever written music for the ehru? If so, I'd love to hear it.

Welcome to YC, evory. You play ehru? That's really awesome. I play shakuhachi, which is similar to the xiao. Uematsu and Hisaishi are two of my favorite composers as well; their abilities to pump out and orchestrate beautiful and catchy melodies have always impressed me. I know what you mean about being a perfectionist in relation to melody and having a hard time writing your ideas down. A lot of us stumble with these things, but it gets better the more you compose and the more you develop your musical way of thinking.

Have you ever written music for the ehru? If so, I'd love to hear it.

Wow haha, I'd assumed that most people here would play the usual array of western instruments, that's really cool as well :) Mm I really hope I can start getting past those blocks in due time.

I haven't actually, mostly because I don't have any proper recording thingums to, well, record sound, and I find pieces way too empty if it's just one instrument without even piano accompaniment or anything. Although a few ideas have floated my way before, but just didn't exactly materialise as usual D: Hopefully I'll churn something out eventually though!

Your introduction makes me think you must be an "old soul" in a 17 year old's body :lol: There's something rather cynical and "adult" about it...

Thanks for introducing yourself, it's my favorite intro thus far! :D

Heya, Evory! Welcome to YC. If you have any innocence, positive world-views, or happiness, run away as fast as you can. Either that, or be prepared to lose them very quickly. Haha. :P Just kidding, sort of. I love the ehru, it´s a phenomenal instrument. Good to have you hear! I hope to see some of your music on the forum soon. :)

I guess I'll start with a simple 'hello' before I descend into a spiral of incoherent rambles because I (probably mistakenly) believe that's what I'm supposed to do.

Hello.

First, to explain my username, because I feel like doing so -- it's a portmanteau of ebony and ivory, which are supposed to be piano keys, and um.. in blending together into one word they form a cohesive whole much like an assortment of notes magically metamorphoses into music? No not really I didn't really think that deep, I just thought it sounded quite nice. And I hope it does.

Anyway, I'm 17 years old, but reveal anymore and I'd be exposing myself to the not-so-hidden dangers on the internet, so I shall shroud myself in secrecy. Which kinda defeats the purpose of an introductory thread, but still.

So, cue the boring recount of my life. Whoops, that's going to defeat the purpose of defeating the purpose of an introductory thread.

As for instruments I play, primarily the piano, and also the erhu, which is a Chinese stringed instrument (called the Chinese violin by some, which spares people quite few pronunciation issues). I started taking piano lessons at around 6 (yeah, typical Asian mentality), and tediously bore my way, bored, through boring piano exams from grades 1-8 without actually touching the piano outside of lessons. Whoops. To be honest, I didn't think very much of playing the piano till around 3 years ago, when I saw, or heard rather, someone improvising and playing by ear, which kinda spurred me on to learn to do the same. Suddenly those beansprouts on lines didn't seem as necessary (and actually I'd very much rather learn by ear than from a score, although in most cases it's not very possible). Although it did take me rather a long while to get used to the idea of not reading from a score, even though I couldn't read very well from it in the first place. And from then on, I started loving piano, music, and piano music. Well, tonal music at least.

So well, composers I like -- Rachmaninoff mostly, Brahms, Liszt, Saint-Saens, to an extent, for classical; Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo, for video game music (yeah I love video game music even though the only console game that's held my attention is Pokemon, and I didn't even get past all the gym leaders. Ohwell.); (note the hidden emoticon yay) and a couple of others like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joe Hisaishi, from other random unrelated areas.

Favourite pieces -- my preferences are horribly skewed towards piano pieces, so Rach's 2nd and 3rd Piano Concerto, Moszkowski's Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky's.. oh and Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy.

And finally, composing experience and stuff. Which should be the important part given this site's name, but it's a wall of text separating this paragraph from the site header. Gosh I hope posts don't have word limits, whoops. I started trying to compose around a year back, but it wasn't very successful, and was horribly simplistic. I've done more remixing than composing actually, because I get overly perfectionist-ic about getting that perfect melody and all, and just give up in frustration after a while. They've all been either orchestral or solo piano so far (and I can here shamelessly insert a plug if you want to go watch them http://www.youtube.com/user/jeremyngyd or if you just like clicking on underlined words.) Also, I stubbornly refuse to write anything down so there are tons of ideas floating around in my head screaming 'write me down', but I just ignore them and slowly they fade into the deeper recesses of my consciousness and go to idea heaven. Because that's where the good ideas go and when I forget them it's frustrating.

Having never played in a Western orchestra (only a Chinese one), getting the intended effect with Western instruments has proved quite a bit harder than I'd imagined. Especially since I still can't properly tell the difference in sound between an oboe, clarinet, cor anglais, bassoon, and a really soft trumpet. Yeah, that's even more options than a multiple choice test, and I can't write ambiguous answers like an 'a' with an extended neck to look somewhat like a 'd'.

What struck me about this forum was that the people here seem to have really sound theory backgrounds (pretend the word 'sound' was somewhat of a pun), which makes me want to remember all the theory I threw away after stopping theory exams. Except they're in theory heaven. So I really hope to, um, somehow learn something here, even though the internet is precisely the thing that distracts me most from actually getting down to writing stuff.

Writing music that is, I've written enough stuf here already so i should make an anagram of it and disappear (if you don't get it, nevermind, stay innocent).

Poof.

So I have never heard of the erhu,(I've already stated my woeful ignorance of this subject in my intro). What's it like? How do You play it? If that's like a chinese violin, is there some equivalent to cellos and violias?

Your introduction makes me think you must be an "old soul" in a 17 year old's body :lol: There's something rather cynical and "adult" about it...

Thanks for introducing yourself, it's my favorite intro thus far! :D

I have no idea if that's a compliment or not, my inner ego wants to parse it as mature, but my inner self-deprecating side wants to parse it as blase and weltschmerz-y. Ooh two blatantly borrowed loanwords they couldnt even bother to anglicise there :)

Heya, Evory! Welcome to YC. If you have any innocence, positive world-views, or happiness, run away as fast as you can. Either that, or be prepared to lose them very quickly. Haha. :P Just kidding, sort of. I love the ehru, it´s a phenomenal instrument. Good to have you hear! I hope to see some of your music on the forum soon. :)

Hmm that's rather at odds with the name don't you think, I'd expect young composers to be filled with innocence and compose happy music reflective of their positive world views. And there I've just proved my innocent and incorrect view of the world (whoops, cynicism at its most blatant).

I'm probably going to remain lurking till I actually manage to compose something vaguely decent in my opinion, which may be rather a while D:

So I have never heard of the erhu,(I've already stated my woeful ignorance of this subject in my intro). What's it like? How do You play it? If that's like a chinese violin, is there some equivalent to cellos and violias?

Since a picture speaks a thousand words or something like that, and it'll take way more than 1000 ascii characters for me to attempt to draw out a picture which won't even look like one and therefore do nothing at all to drive my point across,

It's basically an instrument with two strings (er, or 二 in chinese means two. Because the character has two lines in it.), and the bow is wedged in between. So rather than just using one side of the bow as a violin does, it used both sides to alternate between strings. Oh, fun fact, the bow is made of horse hair, and the sound is amplified or something through snakeskin. Somehow though the erhu only gets used to imitate the sound of a horse, but never the sound of a snake though. And there's even a plethora of pieces about horses (to translate literally, racing horses, war horses, handsome horses running about, etc), while I can only think of one about snakes (to translate literally, golden snake dancing madly) Poor snakes, they died in vain.

Other than the erhu, the other common members of the huqin family are the gaohu and zhonghu, and if one were to compare them to western instruments, I guess the gaohu would be the first violins (because it's higher than the erhu), the erhu the second violins (except with way more nice melodies and stuff), and the zhonghu the viola (because it's lower and nobody likes it very much. Which is a pity because I actually really like the sound it produces, which is way more mellow and resonant compared to the erhu.) In most chinese orchestras around the world they actually use cellos and basses to cover the lower frequencies (the reason being that the chinese orchestra is actually a 20th century construct, and therefore doesn't have proper balancing in terms of bass/treble ranges, and there really isn't any other instrument in the chinese orchestra that goes that low. Other than the timpani, but then again that isn't really very chinese again.) A couple of attempts to create "chinese" instruments with a low range include most prominently the gehu and beidagehu (yeah, prominent because they were, well, big), but it was pretty impractical, especially given the rarity and difficulty in capturing and culling fat snakes. Apart from that their sound was pretty weak as well, so cellos and basses, in you go.