Re: [Harp-L] Throat Vibrato

["Winslow Yerxa" <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- In harp-l-archives@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "samblancato" 

Throat vibrato is a sort of "gated" pulsation in the air column that 
can also affect the pitch of a note.

The gate is the same apparatus is the throat that makes you cough. 
When you cough delibrately, the musculature closes off the air 
passage momentarily, thereby building up pressure in the moving 
column. Releasing the blockage creates a percussive release.

As a child, you may have used this mechanism to imitate a machine gun:

eh!-eh!-eh!-eh!-eh!-eh!-eh!

(the ! indicates where the throat gate acts).

The point of vibrato is not to completely interrupt the air flow but 
to momentarily *almost close it off. This creates a narrowing of the 
air column which is then released, causing an audible pulsation in 
the air flow. As with note bending, it also creates a resonant 
chamber between the point of constriction and the reed, and you can 
use this to drive the pitch down in a controlled way.

Try doing the machine-gun cough, then back off so that it sounds (in 
whisper mode - don't use you vocal cords) more like Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah - 
you're putting a wave in the flow rather than breaking it into chunks.

Another approach would be to play a series of short, chopped-off bent 
notes - maybe try 2 draw bent all the way down, with a short silence 
between them:

!bent_note! (short pause) !bent_note! (short pause) etc.

Then, start trying to connect them so that you get a smooth pulsation.

Of course you also want to do this on unbent notes. Try playing an 
unbent note, use the throat gate to get a pulsation going, then, if 
you're not getting any pitch "throb", try useing the gate to dig in a 
little more - make it more like each time you cativate the gate, 
you're also getting a bend and pulling the note down just momentarily.

You bring up diaphragm vibrato - laughing vibrato as you call it. 
This is a useful vibrtato, very different in sound, and it can be 
used together with throat vibrato.

Diaphragm vibrato creates a pulsation in the airflow with pulses 
originating in the abdomen, giving the air colum little nudges. It 
doesn't have a note bending component, For this reason it can be very 
useful for creating a vibrato on a deeply bent note or an overblow, 
where changing the bend with a bendy vibrato may destabilize the 
bend, cause it to break up into staccato notes instead of a wave, or 
make the pitch vary too much.

Throat vibrato acts primarily on the forward half of the air column 
(throat to reed), but there has to be "backside" component, and that 
is the part of the air column that extends backward from the throat 
into the lungs. By concentrating on letting the pulsations resonate 
downward into the lungs as well as forward to the reed, you can 
reinforce the strength of the vibrato. This could be called passive 
abdominal vibrato (sheesh - the stuff I make up!)

In addition to strenghtening passive abdominal vibrato, you can use 
diaphragm vibrato simultaneously with throat vibrato. With practice, 
you can even learn to control the proportion between the two. I 
suspect that Chris may be doing something like that. Vibrato that 
works on all notes equally will have a fairly narrow pitch bend 
component - all notes bend at least a *little bit, and an even 
vibrato must bend them all by the same perceived amount. At the same 
time by strengthening the air pulsation componenet and the resonance 
component, you can thicken the overall sound of the vibrato.



<samblancato@xxxx> wrote:
Hi Folks,

I have inquired about the following subject on Harp Talk, another 
list but I
thought I'd give it a shot here as well.

> but you have to have tb to do certain other
> things getting vibrato on a hard bend, for instance, 

Not necessarily - see above re diaphragm vibrato and deep bends.

Winslow