duende

La Tulipe Noire brings romance back into the world of didgeridoos.

It is gentle but powerful, big but elegant. Standing 239cm tall, thin with curves and knots it now seems impossible to drill. But it once was. It is a thin walled didgeridoo chiseled for resonance. The power of this didgeridoo overwhelms a small room. But power comes at some cost. Beyond first toot it becomes a little bit more demanding lady. But let’s hear what its sound has to say.

[nggallery id=44]

LTN is in idea a bigger sister of the didgeridoo B Fantastique. Made to have more bass and volume. This was accomplished by shape. LTN has a lot of bass and low mids, giving it an extreme “fat” sound. It was quite a big log in the beginning and LTN was made from the center. It seemed to me that this was somewhat harder bloodwood eucalytpus than it is usual. And this fact gave its contribution in 4,5 kHz frequencies. This didgeridoo has a slight bend around 250Hz which is not heard by most, but this is soundwise the last bit of balance I was not able to accomplish at the time.

[nggallery id=45]

LTN payed its sound and size in somewhat less playability than its younger and smaller sibling B Fantastique. Drone is very easy to play. In fact many people were astonished how easy for the didgeridoo of this size. First toot is easy, then 2nd and 3rd toot are a bit more tricky. Impedances are a bit lower, and toots are a bit higher than you would expect, so it takes a bit of a time to get used to it… Beyond this I believe it is mostly up to one’s personal skill. Generally I learned that songs that LTN resonates with mostly are the kinds of “Mandala” or “Koridoro del Sono” or “Misao iz daleka”. Even though I feel it could fit songs like “The Spatialist” also. Very nice sound of first toot with voice.

In appearance LTN is very strong. It is much bigger than usual instruments, it has carvings of black tulips which are sometimes painted black and sometimes inlayed with Fuchsite or Agate. Wood is very very red. Due to some unusual defects it has very nice colour transitions at the bell, going from violet to yellow and dark brown/red.

I would recommend the didgeridoo of the kind of LTN to an accomplished player who wishes to perform acoustically and who is still in love with the sheer beauty of the basic drone.

Flying Tree Dragon is an example of such an extreme in classical conicaly shaped didgeridoo that it is very hard to describe without letting you try it. What does it mean extreme classical conical shaped didgeridoo? It means that FTD follows the logic of relatively well known didgeridoos that have flare. But flare of FTD is so deep inside and so large outside that it breaks certain laws of playing. The most peculiar characteristic of this didgeridoo is extreme loudness while not being harsh and having enough “juice” at the same time.

[nggallery id=30]

As usual, we start from the sound. It is a bit bright D, but pitch measuring is probably not very accurate with sounds like this, because of the relationship between bass and other frequencies. But this is an assumption. If I could change one thing about the sound, that would be to add more of the first harmonic into the basic drone, around 150Hz, to make it perfect. The second harmonic and so forth are healthy and strong. When I was playing FTD, I was compensating that by percussive playing or by voice. Didge has nice harmonics, and shines around 8 kHz and 16(!)kHz – so high probably due to very hard wood (ironbark). This didgeridoo was the loudest we have made up to June 2010 by subjective listening. However, SPL meter was not showing such loudness. It is probably due to bad bass response of the not very high quality SPL meter.

[nggallery id=31]

From the playability side, we could say it is an easy-to-play didgeridoo but difficult to control perfectly. I had it for a short while to experiment. My favourite way of using it was in fact for the percussive small sounds. Small lips movement, small tongue movements, small voices. Flying Tree Dragon makes these sounds actually hearable in the acoustic performance. Everything normal can be played on it. I did not have enough time to adjust to impedances and therefore using precise cascades of toots in fast articulation manners. I believe it takes time to get used to this didgeridoo, and it takes effort to find its perfect purpose, but FTD is rewarding with a new kind of sound.

The characteristic appearance of The Dragon starts low, at the big bell where green fuchsite and red jasper form a “tree circle”. Up in the middle, there is a flying tree made of jasper and hematite, and two birds resting on it made of fuchsite.

I would recommend somebody to buy didgeridoo like this if he/she is looking for an adventure, for exploration, for acoustic playing, for learning basic principles of parallel playing, or a collector of long very flared eucalyptus didgeridoos. I would probably not recommend it as the only didgeridoo as it is very specific.