The Anotine Courtois 154R Redux: Ted Furman AKA Spacebrewer On The Electric Fluglehorn
Ted Furman, who records and performs under the name of Spacebrewer, has long since given up the trumpet in lieu of the much mellower Anotine Courtois 154R fluglehorn. Gearwire's Gretchen Hasse met with him in his studio, where Ted talked about how he's transformed the fluglehorn to a full-fledged electric instrument.
Furman drilled a piezo pickup into his mouthpiece and crafted a mute designed with an internal microphone. He runs these through a variety of effects and gives us a demonstration of the fluglehorn like you've never heard it before.
TED FURMAN: My name is Ted Furman. I record and perform under the name Spacebrewer.
The sound of the trumpet got a little -- kind of a little boring to me just like it's monophonic, and I started listening to heavy metal, rock & roll, and I wanted to make new sounds. It took a trip to Guitar Center and I found out there was a plethora of guitar effects that I could plug into a microphone or some kind of pickup, and just, you know, process the sound the way I wanted to when I was 16 years old. One thing led to another. I got my first reverb unit and you know I used to sit with headphones all night and play. I was amazed.
When I finally started picking up the instrument again, I always had the flugelhorn in the back of my mind. It seemed to be more of a mellower sound than a really brassy trumpet and seemed to fit my personality a little more, and there really weren't any flugelhorn players that are solely flugelhorn players. It was recently a second instrument for a trumpeter. I found the Antoine Courtois. It's the 154R for rose brass bell. From this point, it's a lot of copyright and so additionally, it has additional mellower to it.
I found this old Barcus Berry piezo pickup that you drill into your mouthpiece to pick up the vibrations from the mouthpiece and the lead pipe, so I didn't really have to alter the sound coming out of the instrument as I did initially. I created this mute, a stainless steel mute out of a cosmetic, you know, lotion containers, and I put two of them together and put a microphone in the end of it, and ran it through effects, and I found this. It's called Amadeus. It's actually, you know, a teaching piece of equipment...
GRETCHEN HASSE: Hold on a second. Okay. I got it. Yeah.
TED FURMAN: ...for music. It's for music educators that it takes the pitch, the sound from an analog instrument and converts it to MIDI, but they used it for -- they had the software that basically tells you whether you're on pitch or not, but it will drive any kind of synthesizer or anything that is equipped with MIDI. So that was my original electric flugelhorn concept.
So, getting back to the drilled mouthpieces, to make things lighter, I found the old Barcus Berry preamp that went with it back in the early 80s, and I was able to process the sound through my micro -- plug into a Nord Micro Modular through audio information. There's 99 patches and the first 30 of them are solely dedicated towards to audio processing direct audio input.
[TED FURMAN DEMONSTRATING HIS ELECTRIC FLUGELHORN CONCEPT]
TED FURMAN: Now, this is a little bit of a [INDISCERNIBLE] sort of thing where, you know, you start talking through the horn. The whole horn is like a [INDISCERNIBLE] a microphone and --
[TED FURMAN DEMONSTRATING HIS ELECTRIC FLUGELHORN CONCEPT]
TED FURMAN: [SOUNDS LIKE] The through, through, through. I mean the patch I had, I programmed. I call it the Yeti, and to me it sounds like the Yeti screaming in the woods.
[TED FURMAN DEMONSTRATING HIS ELECTRIC FLUGELHORN CONCEPT]
Flugel player?
He's no Chuck Mangione is he? Also the audio processing is not incredibly innovative if you think you could do any of that in you're average DAW. A little bit disappointing really in my opinion.
Nice to see Ted featured. I
Nice to see Ted featured. I enjoyed playing with Ted on a project in the year 2000. I enjoyed his use of fx on the horn.
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