Wood Blocks in Commercial Music
Studio percussionist Emil Richards had a set of piccolo woodblocks in his instrument collection, which were chromatically tuned in two octaves, from C6-C8. He bought them from Professional Drum Shop in the 1970s, as the uniqueness of the instrument combined with the keyboard layout was appealing. This shared western tuning system enabled him to play the instrument along with other orchestral instruments. In the studio he often performed piccolo woodblocks on cartoon soundtracks such as Looney Tunes; composer Stephen James Taylor used the piccolo woodblocks a number of times in his Disney projects such as in the Timon & Pumbaa TV series. Due to the diminutive size of these woodblocks, Emil often used small, hard xylophone or glockenspiel mallets or even triangle beaters when playing them.
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Famous quotes containing the words wood, blocks, commercial and/or music:
“He will not idly dance at his work who has wood to cut and cord before nightfall in the short days of winter; but every stroke will be husbanded, and ring soberly through the wood; and so will the strokes of that scholar’s pen, which at evening record the story of the day, ring soberly, yet cheerily, on the ear of the reader, long after the echoes of his axe have died away.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The vast silence of Buddha overtakes
and overrules the oncoming roar
of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues;
it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around—the music and the ideas.”
—Bob Dylan [Robert Allen Zimmerman] (b. 1941)