SteveCastellano.com

If, instead of being cars that turned into robots, the Transformers were Anvil cases that turned into discotheques, they’d be International Dance Party.

Via Niklas Roy on Vimeo.

Some years ago, enough that I can’t quite remember the exact number, I found myself at Steve’s Music in Toronto noodling around on the newest cool thing, a multi-timbral synth from the folks who brought us the Prophet-5 (so favoured of Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, and pretty much anyone else who had five grand to drop on a polyphonic synth in the late seventies) and its more affordable little brother the Pro-One (I have one of each and you don’t, ha ha ha) called the Six-Trak. MIDI was a big effin’ thing when this four-octave number hit the shelves, and add to that a built-in loop sequencer and the almost-unheard-of ability to play more than one different sound at once, and you’ve got a pretty happening little synth on your hands. Until, of course, you notice that it’s got only one oscillator per voice, and the one voice on the inside of your head starts making tsk tsk noises and saying “thin, thin, thin” – but then you say to the little voice “what about stack mode, in which you can layer six different individually programmed oscillators on top of each other” at which point the little voice in your head says “hmph” and tries to pretend that it’s more interested in rearranging the flowers in that vase over there than playing with your new synthesizer. But you’ve got yourself a new Six-Trak, and it’s cute as a lost golfball and cheap as chips and there it is on the harvest table by the window over there. And anyway there I was recording a multi-timbral loop sequence, and gathering a small crowd at my elbows, and not caring whether it was me or the new synth from Sequential that was a pretty effin’ cool thing going on at Steve’s Music on a Saturday afternoon in, jeez, could it have been like 1984.

A while back when the band was considering covering some Cake tunes I started searching eBay for used trumpets. This is not so outlandish an endeavour as you might think; I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the trumpet, having played one for a few years in high school, until my dentist and parents insisted on corrective dental appliances. I ended up with a Tru-Tone trumpet of indeterminate vintage, which the folks at the Scarborough Music Company where I had it fixed up assured me was a decent find.

The next problem with which I had to contend was the fact that 20+ years of disuse renders an embouchure pretty much non-existent. Well, no matter, it’s all about practice, isn’t it? So I dedicated myself to practicing in the car, after the fashion of a sax player friend of mine. But I soon discovered that the RSX is a bit cramped for trumpet practice, even in the passenger’s seat, and I was garnering more than my share of strange looks from passers-by in the underground garage at my place of work. Enter the Yamaha SB79 Silent Brass System.

The SB79 is predicated upon a simple theory: jam a mute into the end of the trumpet to clam it up, jam a microphone into the mute, wire the microphone up to a headphone amplifier, jam some headphones into your ears, and listen to yourself practice in relative quietude. And the SB79 actually works, and works quite well; as if in tribute to the unlamented Rockman, engineered by Tom Scholz, credited by many with doing for the guitar what Kraft did for cheese, the SB79 even boasts an echo effect to further enhance the sound of your private performance.

In an attempt to improve my intonation and fast-track my practice I’ve wired the output of the SB79 into my G5, in order to take advantage of the instrument tuner built into GarageBand. And the most exciting thing about the SB79 may not be how well it works – a note at full volume sounds natural and realistic in the headphones and is entirely inobtrusive (though not, obviously, inaudible) to those in adjacent rooms – but that they make one for the tuba as well.