No, not the pitter-patter of little feet. Bought Joey and myself a pair of these:
Yep, Yamaha YRN-22B Baroque-fingering recorders. Perfect instrument to teach some musical basics. I still have my tenor sax and a frankenstein clarinet from my days in the Breathitt County High School Band of Pride, but neither is suited to a 6-year-old.
Music was a big part my life, and now I’d like to at least introduce that to Joey and the rest of our children. If he likes it, great. If he doesn’t, that’s fine too, but at least it will broaden his horizons a bit.
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Played around with the recorder for probably an hour in the past week, and it’s a neat little instrument. There’s no set-up required–no moving parts, no reed to soak, no valves to oil, no pads to go bad. The fingering for it is (as you’d expect) like a flute, and since a saxophone’s fingering is based on flute fingering, most of the regular notes are familiar to me. The sharps and flats, though…um…aren’t.
The recorder has a 2+ octave range, from middle C up (this being a soprano model), and the timbre of the sound in the lower octave is pleasant, though the upper octave can be shrill. The real weakness I see is a lack of dynamic range–because the mouthpiece is fixed, more breath support to get to a mezzo-forte or forte sound will just cause the tone to go sharp. (At least, that’s what it seems like to me, so far). In that regard, you can see why the single-reed clarinet replaced the recorder, much like the forte-piano replaced the harpsichord.
Probably the neatest thing about the recorder is that it really makes you use your ear to develop a sound. Switching between octaves is more a matter of embouchure and ear than it is of hitting certain fingering. In that regard, it’s like the altissimo register on a saxophone (which I could never hit!).
Anyway, my goal with all this is to get Joey some music theory under his belt and help train his ear to appreciate some of the really great music–Bach, Mozart, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. And yeah, scratch my inner Band Geek.
Sue me.