Week 17 $100 winner Vimol Faro!
rob gandara
Greetings,
We have our seventeenth $100 winner for our weekly contest, Vimol Faro on a Carbony Super boom Didgeridoo. You can watch the video here https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=359028621944658
Vimol wanted to share a little bit about himself:
I live in a beautiful coastal region called Galicia which is the north-western corner of Spain, just on top of Portugal. Galicia is known to be one of the Celtic nations. You can find remnants of Celtic circular stone settlements that we call “Castros”, all over this region, as well as their petroglyphs or stone carvings, that express Celtic culture and lifestyle. Galicia is full of them everywhere you go! With this background comes a unique tradition that involves music and dance.
In a town called Ortigueira, in the north of Galicia, the “Celtic world festival of Ortigueira” is hosted. It's a massive event in a precious seashore landscape, where bands from all over the world come to play Celtic music. In this festival, I meet Rob Gandara every year since I know him (except this weird year without festivals) and I get the opportunity to admire in person his vast selection of Carbony flutes, bagpipes and other wind instruments. Rob is a recurrent participant in the Ortigueira festival Celtic fair, and his stand filled with fantastic black carbon fiber instruments, is one of a kind.
I have been playing the didgeridoo and the harmonica for over ten years now. When I started formal music studies, I searched for a chromatic didgeridoo that would enable me to play in any pitch, and also change keys while playing, to be able to follow harmonies of different music styles. On the Carbony web page I encountered the one that offered the wider range that I had ever seen, it was the end of a long research. I had found the Super Boom, which I now play joyfully, and have travelled with ever since. Even though I have been playing it for many years now (I got it from Rob in 2015) I am still exploring its endless possibilities, as it offers a world of options far beyond the single note didges I had played before. Writing those emails to Rob, and getting to know him and his work, and acquiring one of his didges, was one my best didge choices ever. I am very grateful for his kind transaction!
I really like playing traditional tunes from all around the world. Traditional music carries the roots of its culture and origin, and it transports me while interpreting it in a way that I really enjoy. When I am playing, I get the feeling that I connect with the cultures of origin of these tunes in a very special way. It's also a type of music that transcends the typical ideas of copyright. The composers of many of these musical pieces are unknown, and the tunes belong to a culture that is growing in the present, and extends far back in time. The richness of the interpretation, and creation of new pieces inside the different world styles of traditional folkloric music, comes with the variety of ways that each player represents each tune, without giving so much importance to their first composer in the sometimes restrictive way that pop music works.
I also love to listen to electronic music, especially electronic dance music that involves the fusion of synth sounds and acoustic instruments. Recently I have started working with synthesizers and sequencers to make my own backing tracks for the music I play. I also love to use loop stations, because of the freedom and possibilities they offer me. Working with machines and acoustic instruments has become the main musical project that I am still developing. I want to create a fusion between the roots of traditional world music, mixing the flavors of different countries and regions, and the phonic richness of electronic sound.
Before I started my journey in the university with formal music studies, I was learning music online and in my own way. Even though I appreciate the doors that these formal studies have opened for me, I still feel that in the growing archives of free online tutorials, you can learn just about anything in an optimum manner. I am quite tired of the long explanations that I get in my classrooms over every musical topic, and I feel they try to make things more complicated than they are, just because you are paying for the knowledge. I often go to platforms like YouTube, to get some lessons on the same topics that I am studying at my uni and I find YouTubers that produce materials where the knowledge is displayed in a fun way without wasting time. I can see a 15-min YouTube video that covers what my teachers want to extend over sessions of more than an hour! This one of the reasons that I think formal studies are overrated and the learning paradigm is changing with the growth of new technologies. The official centers are not usually up to date with this phenomenon.
Some of my favorite bands and players that play modern folk music are Flook, Brian Finnegan, Shooglenifty, Harmonica Creams, and Doolin. I also love bands like Sponge and Celtic Cross that fuse in an amazing way electronic and acoustic music, obtaining a unique sound of their own. On the more classical side of rock music, I love bands like Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd. A very special player for me, who also builds and sells musical instruments of all sorts is Nadishana. In the loop station side of things, I want to mention Linsey Pollack and Beardyman. All these influences that explore the traditional sounds of acoustic traditional instruments, and also the vanguard of electronic music, inspire me to look for this fusion between the organic roots, and the cosmic technology sounds.
Entries are now open for week eighteen. Just make a video playing a Carbony instrument and include it as a reply to this email or directly post it on our Facebook page www.facebook.com/CarbonyCelticWinds you will be entered into the contest, the video with the most likes each week will win a $100 voucher.
Pro tip: ask all your friends to like the video.
And a reminder on how Carbony Celtic Winds is operating during this unique time:
We are open for business, but to minimize exposure we are no longer giving factory tours or in-person instrument demonstrations.