Musicians demonstrate weird instrument techniquesfrom @minnorch

Transcript

Of the weirdest things I've been asked to do is in a chamber piece by Gabriella Smith. And we were instructed to use these circular paper clips and to put them on our strings basically right where we bow. What that does is it totally changes the sound of the string, especially when you pluck it. Kind of sounds like a gong. In the instructions, every time we have a rest, she says to adjust the paper clips to make sure they're not able to fly off. So it was a lot of extra work. On oboe, you can do what's called multiphonics, which is where you play a fingering and the instrument basically gets confused and doesn't know what notes to play, so it plays multiple tones at the same time. Kinda sounds like an ambulance a little better. So... So, you know, brass players always have to blow air into their horns, but the weirdest thing that I had to do way back in high school. In orchestra, we were playing a piece where we had to kind of copy whale sounds, so they literally had us singing into the horn. So you can imagine what a bunch of high schoolers sounded like doing this.