THIS WEEK: Upcoming Gigs & Fluid Pianos

August 5, 2012August 5, 2012 | Hannah Sterry

Here’s what’s happening this week:

Tuesday Night is Music Night at the Cottage Hotel. I’ll be playing flute as part of The Sterrys and watching the sun setting over the water at Hope Cove. Feel free to relax with a cocktail and enjoy the music! Starts at 6:45pm.

Wednesday… brings the second of Ben Carr’s Music Sessions at The Hideaway. Anyone can come along, bring an instrument and join in (I’ll be there with my flute). The whole evening’s great fun and you’ll meet some really nice people. Starts at 8pm.

Thursday… features An audience with Auntie Pus at B-Bar, Plymouth. I’m really hoping to go to this, but haven’t quite worked out the logistics yet. Either way, I’m sure it’ll be a brilliant evening. Starts at 8:30pm.

Sunday… Gallows Ghost play The Hideaway and have asked me if I’d like to stand in for a few tunes as a guest musician. They’re lovely people and their music is great fun to play, so the answer is always yes!

Today’s discovery is… a new instrument called The Fluid Piano. The strings all have sliders that enable each note to be changed in pitch (by up to a whole tone) as the piano is being played. This also means that the piano can be tuned to the true harmonic series, making it much more compatible with traditional indian music, which doesn’t use the standard western tuning (twelve note equal temperament) and can often involve fluctuations in pitch.

Anyway, I hope you’re all having a good week and if you happen to be at any of these gigs, feel free to say hi (I’ll be the one with the flute and the long brown hair)!

Hannah Sterry playing Jazz Flute - Sketch by Jasmine Greenhill — Jazz Greenhill drew me! She’s a genius armed with pencils.

Photoblog: Yesterday’s Sunset

Golden Sunset - Clouds with a gold and silver lining at sundown in Salcombe, Devon. The sky is on fire.

July 27, 2012September 12, 2012 | Hannah Sterry

This sunset deserves a post on its own. It doesn’t look real, but I promise it is.

Other prints/cards you may like:

The Sterrys: Tuesday Nights at The Cottage Hotel

July 25, 2012July 25, 2012 | Hannah Sterry

Tuesday Night is Music Night at The Cottage Hotel has been a great succes, and was particularly lovely today, as we [The Sterrys] arrived to the sun shining and played until we saw it setting over the sea. Here are the photos from the evening:

John and Joe setting up in the sun.

Taking turns to improvise.

John suddenly turns in to a giant while Joe and Hannah aren’t looking.

The evening ended with this…

…and we couldn’t be happier.

Replacing Piano Bridle Straps

Piano Mechanism - Inside The Piano. Hammers, strings, tapes & keys...

July 23, 2012February 16, 2013 | Hannah Sterry

Today I spent some time replacing a few of the worn out tapes in our upright piano with clip on bridle straps (I found a relatively inexpensive full set of tapes here) after getting fed up with hitting ‘dead’ notes when trying to play.

Replacing the clip-on tapes was fairly simple and went something like this:

Remove the old, worn-out tape.
Clip the new tape on to the post just above the point where the previous tape was attached.
Fiddly bit: twist the clip around so that the tape is coming from underneath the post and push it right to the back (the part furthest from you).
Making sure that the tape isn’t twisted, bring it down to the right of the bridle wire and attach (use other straps in the piano as an example).

This diagram (found here) might help and shows the working parts of an upright piano mechanism. The part that needs replacing is part 20 (the bridle strap), which attaches to parts 18 (bridle wire) and the post between parts 24 and 25 (the back stop and hammer butt).

While the cover was off, I thought it would be nice to share a few pictures. When you see how much time, effort and skill it would take to create these instruments it makes you appreciate them even more.

This Week’s Music Highlights

Ben Carr's First Music Hall & Blues Night at The Hideaway Speakeasy

July 21, 2012July 25, 2012 | Hannah Sterry

It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable, musical week with lots of things happening, but here are the highlights:

Tuesday: John Sterry (pianist for The Sterrys) entertained guests and visitors to The Cottage Hotel with a relaxed evening of jazz piano.

Wednesday: Ben Carr hosted his first Blues Session in The Hideaway Speakeasy, which turned out to be an amazing success! The atmosphere was wonderful and it was good to see musicians who’d never met just getting up and joining in (at one point Ian Feetenby jumped in and provided us with some brilliantly spontaneous percussion on acoustic guitar). The next session is on Wednesday 8th August – Feel free to come along and enjoy the music or, better still, bring an instrument and join in! We’re all friendly, I promise!

Friday: Hamer & Isaacs played The B-Bar in Plymouth and were kind enough to ask me to step in as a guest musician on their second set. What followed was a foot-tapping extravaganza of swinging gypsy jazz with one of the liveliest audiences I’ve ever played to! I think everyone left that gig with a huge smile.

Music Cartoon: Bass clef is feeling low…

July 19, 2012October 18, 2012 | Hannah Sterry

The latest cartoon from my music cartoon series. I may update it with a slightly cleaner-looking version, but here it is:

Here are a some other cartoons you may like:

Musical Compliments - Music Cartoon by Hannah Sterry. Comic shows some music notes complimenting each other. Text reads: "Liking the natural look!" "Thanks! You're looking pretty sharp yourself!" — Musical Compliments

Minimalism - Silly, funny, musical cartoon for music geeks, teachers and musicians. — Minimalism

More cartoons from Hannah Sterry…

Follow Sterry Cartoons on:

Facebook | Google+ | Twitter

Back from Spain!

June 16, 2012June 16, 2012 | Hannah Sterry

I’ve been absent from the blog for a while because I’ve been holidaying in the Picos Mountains in Spain.

Anyway, I thought it’d be nice to do a quick photoblog of the time I spent there (Santander’s park might have to get its own post, because I took far too many photos).

We stayed in a wonderful house in Los Llanos, just down the hill from a beautiful old village called Mogrovejo, in a valley surrounded by mountains.

Favourite places that I visited:

Potes is the town closest to Los Llanos and on Mondays it has a really good market that sells lots of local cheeses, freshly baked bread (and some food not dissimilar to a pasty) and sweets. Most of the shops seem to sell the standard non-useful tourist gifts (as well as a selection of locally made alcoholic drinks and sweets), but the ferreterias (hardware/ironmongers shop) seemed to have some quite interesting and useful things in them (including massive tea mugs and really cheap tools).
Mirador del Oso, San Glorio, Collado de Llesba (Cantabria). You get some brilliant views of the mountains from this spot and it makes a great place to have a picnic.
The Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liébana is really pretty and worth a quick look. The highlight of that place for me is, perhaps oddly, finding a live baby owl in one of the bins and watching as someone told some passing nuns (who also seemed a little surprised by the the owl).
Fuente Dé is stunningly beautiful. A few minutes in a cable car (or “teleferico”) gets you right up in to the mountains and from there, you’re free to explore the paths as you wish. About 20 minutes walk gets you to the refuge, where there’s a small cafe (often surrounded by a few opportunistic horses).
Peninsula de la Magdalena, Santander. This is the best park I have ever been to and it’s all free. There’s a great play area, a beach (which you can choose to access via slide), woodland, castles, pirate ships and even a mini-zoo with seals, sea lions and penguins. Unfortunately it was a bit overcast on the day we were there, but we still had a great time.

Musical Updates

May 22, 2012May 23, 2012 | Hannah Sterry

This is what my diary has looked like for the past few weeks:

7th May – Recorded some improvisations with Stephen Abrehart, just to see how the harp and baritone guitar worked together. The sounds mixed brilliantly and I hope we’ll be able to record a few more things together in the future.

10th May – Saw Ben Carr play at The Refectory Bar, sampled some delicious cocktails (the Apple Crumble cocktail was really good) and joined in with some jazz flute for the last few songs.

16th May – Jam night at the Royal Oak. This night featured Tez Locke, Phil Kennerel, Rob Wheeler, Joe Sterry (and me), Tom Carr and was hosted by Ben Carr. Past guests have included: Rob and Laura Williams, Gallows Ghost, Blue Orchid and Hamer & Isaacs Gypsy Swing Band.

19th May – The Sterrys (John, Joe and I) played music for a surprise birthday party in Malborough Baptist Church.

That afternoon we also went to the Cottage Hotel to discuss their plans for music throughout the summer, which led to this:

I am delighted to say that from June 5th, The Sterrys will be playing at The Cottage Hotel every Tuesday throughout the summer. The line up will change week-to-week; one week might be solo piano, the next a jazz trio with flute and harp the week after that…

Anyway, we expect it’ll be a lot of fun and hope to see you there!

Photoblog: Music Photography

May 6, 2012September 26, 2012 | Hannah Sterry

This week has been a wonderfully musical one. My to-do list has looked roughly like this:

URGENT: DRAW MORE CARTOONS!
Learn the flute part of Benjamin Godard’s “Suite De Trois Morceaux”.
Take some promotional photos for a friend’s band.
Teach myself clarinet and saxophone (ongoing).
Add a few more pieces to the harp repertoire.
Go over recordings and stop faffing about on the internet.

Obviously, I have spent some time faffing on the internet and the cartoons are still in sketch form, but I’m reasonably happy with some of the photographs I’ve taken this week and think I might start a big music photography project where I’ll try to photograph and review everyone I ever play music with under the tag #SouthHamsMusic. We’ll see how that goes!

Anyway, here are some of the music-related pictures that I’ve taken recently:

Ben Carr & The Hot Rats — Benny Guitar Carr & The Hot Rats: Aly Day, Joe Sterry and Tom Carr.

These were from The Hot Rats gig at Kingsbridge’s Hideaway Speakeasy on May the 4th. It was a fairly quiet evening in Kingsbridge, so The Hot Rats livened the place up with an energetic bluesy set and wild improvisations.

On Wednesday there was another blues night at The Royal Oak. The highlight for me was a completely unexpected cover of Gay Pirates by Rob and Laura Williams. It’s a great tune, written by Cosmo Jarvis, with a brilliant video (good enough to be tweeted to thousands of followers by Stephen Fry) and here it is: