Instruments
As well as playing instruments, James Morrison has also had input into the process of creating them. In early 2010 he formed an association with Austrian brass manufacturer "Schagerl" and they have produced a number of "signature" models. These include two series - the custom, hand-made "Meister" series and the intermediate professional "Academica" series. There are trumpets and trombones in both series and the Meister series also includes a flugel horn and bass trumpet.
His new most prolific design is his new trumpet called "The Raven". The horn is unique for using rotary valves with a long lead pipe normally associated with a piston trumpet. As he describes in his blog: "The design comes from my wish to have a rotary valve instrument due to the different articulation you get compared to piston valves. I find the rotary sounds more precise and there is a smaller “dead spot” between when you push the valve and when the next note comes out clearly. This is particularly noticeable when playing quickly in the upper register (something I like to do)."
An earlier instrument creation project with designer and robotics expert Steve Marshall, produced the Morrison Digital Trumpet, a MIDI wind controller that looks and acts like a futuristic version of a regular trumpet. It allows a trumpeter to play electronic sounds in much the same way as a pianist can play an electronic synthesizer.
In addition, Morrison has broadened his love of musical technology to include vocal performing. On his collaboration album The Other Woman which features singer Deni Hines, he wrote a track called '(Tired Of Being) the other woman'. When Morrison performed this track at a performance in Sydney, he revealed his latest piece of music technology. It is a Roland keyboard (VP770) that has a microphone attached and 'sings' whatever Morrison speaks into the microphone - producing the sound of a choir.
Read more about this topic: James Morrison (musician)
Famous quotes containing the word instruments:
“I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Whilst Marx turned the Hegelian dialectic outwards, making it an instrument with which he could interpret the facts of history and so arrive at an objective science which insists on the translation of theory into action, Kierkegaard, on the other hand, turned the same instruments inwards, for the examination of his own soul or psychology, arriving at a subjective philosophy which involved him in the deepest pessimism and despair of action.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)