This is a very didgeridooistic didgeridoo article, a technical construction, that I believe only the bravest of the long didgeridoo seekers can go through 😉 However, if you do, you will gain yourself a brand new honour in the eyes of the deep didgeridoos.
I see it has become sort of a trend in didgeridoo world (at least in certain parts of world) to make longer and longer tube to play. It is a nice change, after the era of phobia of long didgeridoos that are “slow” and “low” and only for “meditative” playing. However it is maybe now good time to take a good look at it again, not to go far with a broken car..
I would like to reflect upon three different aspects of longest didgeridoo family. They come from three different periods. First one is from playing practice, second is from solo recording, third is from recording with a band – Druyd.
1. Days of solo practice. When I first started to play longer and longest didgeridoo instruments, I did that with normal didgeridoos, taped together. I joined everything that could be joined, and found only very few combinations that actually made sense. I used PVC tubes only to prolong further the long didgeridoos… I found that cylindrical extensions in the beginning worked quite well. Later, I have built only PVC didgeridoos so I can get a feeling how 10+ meter didges behave and sound like. Problem was that cylindrical structure of PVC, even if carefully assembled in progression of width, was too rough to feel the true nature of long didgeridoo. I believe it was for two reasons.
First is that consecutive cylindrical parts of half a meter or one meter are not working acoustically close enough, and in a way efficient enough – the way conical tubes do.
Second reason might be that thin PVC material cannot withstand the power and frequency of big long didgeridoo drone, and it gets dissipated through the instrument walls.
It resulted so that these didgeridoos never excelled in playability or tone quality… I could have probably found some interesting toot relations, but I wasn’t motivated at that time doing it like that…
I know it is difficult to find long didgeridoos, or ones that can be assembled, but it is really worth it if you look for the wonders of deep didgeridoo world.
2.I discovered problems the first time I wanted to put live sound to a higher level during my performance “This illusion”. It was one year after “Storytellingstories”. I got some nice preamps to use as outboard of mixing desk and I brought many nice condenser microphones. The only instrument giving me real questions was the longest didgeridoo, 7 meter with a horn. I had two really good sound engineers with me, on a sound check in a great theatre hall that lasted for half of the day. It seemed in the beginning that we had problem because of the end horn, the sound was muddy, and not punchy enough. But it turned out to be more of a transient problem. It is partly concerning micing positions and number of microphones, and it is partly in the essence of every long didgeridoo. Sound waves have to bounce long way back and forth until they reach stable position of a standing wave, and that lasts longer than in normally sized instruments. Also the sustain of these instruments is really big.
In a way it is like driving a truck. If you have a good truck, with strong engine, it will go fast, but everything you do affects big mass. So it is more difficult to accelerate, more difficult to break, and when it gets carried away a bit, you have different ways of manouvering it, you have to use the momentum smartly to get it back on track. This is relatively ok when you are alone in the road, but what happens when there are other vehicles around you?
3. Now we come to the most recent story – from recording of Druyd‘s first album (soon to be out:-). There is one song “Daorson” which includes a 4,3 meter D didge. Lately I’ve been changing it with a B didge for convenience of rehearsals… B is the first toot of the long D didgeridoo, so it made sense. And so we practiced with shorter instrument for some time, so the song got new inside rules, and curves… On the recording, I recorded both didgeridoos. With B didgeridoo I had no problem. But when I recorded D didgeridoo, I noticed a very peculiar phenomena when I listened to the recording. Everything sounded as if played with latency/delay. It is due to the fact that it takes longer time for longer didgeridoo to generate sound, it creates a larger mass, and then the sustain keeps it alive for a long time – relatively speaking. In solo performance it can go unnoticed, but in tight rhythmic playing with other instruments, even higher didgeridoos, it is revealed.
What is the conclusion? One has to be aware of this. With practice it is possible to acquire enough skills to be able to play “forward” just right to compensate the latency of a long didgeridoo. It has a certain charm of its own, and one can not regard it as simply positive or negative issue. It also makes playing long tubes more challenging. Just when you thought you got it,
you understood
that deeper inside wood
you must reach,
and with invisible tentacles
feel and navigate
the massive vessel
of deepest sounds…
Enjoy your sound sea journey!