Soundboard Quotes

Most helmsmen would’ve been satisfied with a pilot’s wheel or a tiller. Leo had also installed a keyboard, monitor, aviation controls from a Learjet, a dubstep soundboard, and motion-control sensors from a Nintendo Wii. He could turn the ship by pulling on the throttle, fire weapons by sampling an album, or raise sails by shaking his Wii controllers really fast. Even by demigod standards, Leo was seriously ADHD.

On the stern quarterdeck, Leo rushed around like a madman, checking his gauges and wrestling levers. Most helmsmen would've been satisfied with a pilot's wheel of a tiller. Leo had also installed a keyboard, monitor, aviation controls from a Learjet, a dubstep soundboard, and motion-control sensors from a Nintendo Wii. He could turn the ship by pulling the throttle, fire weapons by sampling an album, or raise sails by shaking his Wii controllers really fast. Even by demigod standards, Leo was seriously ADHD.

Mookie McDonald bore his scolding about the soundboard quietly, head down, nodding, at the end promising he would do better. He would, too. For awhile. Then, a week or two from now, I'd come in and find the board on again in 1, 2, or both. I think the idea of putting people in jail for smoking the rope is ludicrous, but there's no doubt in my mind that long-term daily use is a recipe for CRS, also known as Can't Remember Shit.

With the violin nestled below my chin, I feel more at home than I ever have in any house. With my fingers on the soundboard and my right hand holding the bow, I close my eyes briefly and breathe. It's like a part of my body has been missing, and now, at last, it's reattached.

Leo rushed around like a madman, checking his gauges and wrestling levers. Most helmsmen would’ve been satisfied with a pilot’s wheel or a tiller. Leo had also installed a keyboard, monitor, aviation controls from a Learjet, a dubstep soundboard, and motion-control sensors from a Nintendo Wii.

Steinway made its soundboards with eastern white spruce until the 1920s. Today the remaining spruce trees in the East cannot provide boards long enough, or wide enough, for pianos. “That’s all logged out,” Albrecht says flatly. And, while Steinway can glue boards together vertically (with the grain), as it does for the rims, it cannot do so horizontally (against the grain). So, long before Albrecht came on the job, Steinway had gone west and found the Tebbs. Steinway adopted the northwestern spruce from twenty-five hundred miles away, where gnarly roots serve as an anchor in soil so wet that logging is often an amphibious proposition.

Similar to the Rodrigo in form, “La Catedral” has a slow, atmospheric introduction, followed by an episodic, rhythmic dance. It is constructed around a simple figure, an arpeggio that Barrios pushes through a series of chord changes: a small gesture, undistinguished in itself, yet full of musical possibilities. I set the music stand aside and play it from memory. The first finger of my left hand holds a bass note while above the theme sways with a tentative rise and fall. My left hand feels secure and steady, the ground on which the music builds. My fingers make swift, pulsing motions that gain weight and mass when the sound is larger, louder. The arpeggio grows increasingly insistent and agitated. I feel every note, not just in my fingers but along my arms to the elbows, where the fingers’ motions begin, and into my shoulders, neck, chest, and back. Everything is connected. My ear, my muscles, my flesh, these notes, and this wood and string—all are parts of a single vibrating structure, communicating their movement to each other. Playing feels different now. For the first time this cathedral is really dancing. It's built on a questioning anxiety. But the structure develops a kind of reassurance, like pleading that becomes a prayer. This feeling is not notated on the page. It is something that takes place within the notes, or between them, and within my body, within the guitar's body. I first played this piece in my third year at the Conservatory, just about the time I bought my church door guitar. With so fine an instrument in my hands, I suddenly heard an unexplored dimension latent in everything I played, as if the guitar knew things I had never dreamed of. It was a moment of great promise for me. The guitar offered a quality of vibration beyond anything I had imagined before, bringing greater forces into motion than just the strings. But in those days I couldn't play it. I was braced too tightly. Playing now feels somehow simpler. I'm not practicing a fantasy of the guitar or of myself, but this instrument, this wood, these strings; I'm playing this music, letting these notes dance. It's easy to forget how simple music is. I'm like a soundboard, whose job is to communicate excitement, to balance tension. Building the instrument and learning to play it involve complicated physics. But music is about vibration, about allowing myself to be moved.

A friendship with no conditions is a rarity. Rarer still is a non-judgmental friend who always allows you to be your own person, knowing that you are a critical soundboard and not a shadow.