Month / October 2018

by ams9006

Why Are Instruments So Expensive?

Are you ever surprised by how vast the difference is between a rare artifact’s mundane appearance and its contrasting exorbitant price? These luxury objects are usually exclusive and handmade using rare materials, perhaps in limited quantities. Usually, these items are relatively useless and mostly for show, but occasionally these extremely high-end products are the necessary tools of a trade. For example, professional photographers use cameras worth thousands of dollars as well as many lenses worth thousands more in order to do what they do. Professional bike racers spend thousands of dollars on a competitive bike. Professional politicians spend significant chunks of their savings on their campaigns. In the same way, cellists end up spending more than they’d prefer to on their instruments.

This is the situation that cellists like me find themselves in. I don’t regret choosing the cello, but it definitely is the most expensive hobby I have ever been involved in. That is understandable, I hope, since many instruments are expensive and instruments are usually not impulse buys. However, cellos are among the most expensive of all orchestral instruments.

Go ahead and take a guess and write down how much you think a student cello or professional-grade cello should cost. Write those values down, and I’ll let you know whether you were right at the end of this post. In the meantime, let me explain the remarkable construction of a cello that leads to its unique sound and price.

Cellos are handmade, and they take several months to make. This in itself speaks volumes about how much manpower it takes for a cello to exist. However, the labor is only one part of the cost. Cellos have some pretty special parts made of relatively rare materials. The pegs, nut, fingerboard, and tailpiece are all made of ebony, an incredibly hard and dense wood that is also quite rare. The main body of the cello is made of mostly maple, but with a pine front, all hand-carved and/or bent.

parts of a cello from wikipedia

The strings of a cello are made of similarly unique materials. In the baroque era of music, most cello strings were made of dried sheep/goat intestines. Today, they are usually made with a core of steel or synthetic materials. However, wound around this core is a coil of tungsten, steel, aluminum, or silver, which itself can be plated with chrome or gold to gain the desired sonic effect. These rarer metals predictably make a set of strings cost up to hundreds of dollars, which I am reminded of often as strings have to be replaced approximately every year under regular use, and far more often for professionals.

But wait, there’s more! The cello is a bowed instrument, and the bow itself has many unique parts. The main body of the bow, the stick, is made of pernambuco wood, also known as brazilwood. Unfortunately, the pernambuco tree is officially an endangered species with its international export now illegal, so bow makers are now sometimes adopting alternative materials such as carbon fiber. The hair of a bow is bleached horsehair from the horse’s tail, and the grip is made of leather or snakeskin. The frog can be made of ivory or ebony with a mother-of-pearl inlaid within. The tip of the bow (not seen) is also traditionally made of ivory.

Parts of a bow from Sessionville

To protect these valuable instruments, musicians need a protective case. However, the cello is rather unwieldy, necessitating not simply a strong case, but also a lightweight one such that a person could carry it to and from gigs, rehearsals, and performances. Most cello cases are made of fiberglass and/or carbon fiber. This also contributes to the cost of owning a cello.

Now, for the moment of truth. Due to the above factors, a student-quality cello would cost from $3,000 to $10,000, and a professional-quality cello would cost from $10,000 to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How does this compare to your initial impression?

What’s the point of paying so much money for a cello? Is there any alternative? Well, the the point of paying all this money is that there are some things you simply need as a professional musician. There really aren’t many alternatives today, since the art of instrument making is so detailed and traditional that modern technology is hard to apply to the process.

The point of this article is not to scare you from learning a new instrument or to complain, but rather so that you are more aware of something that I feel needs more attention. From now on, you will not be like my roommate’s classmate, who estimated Yo Yo Ma’s cello to be worth “about two hundred dollars.”

Edit: I found a website that completed an entire
study on the costs associated with owning a string
instrument, check it out!
by ams9006

eSports Are Not Sports… Or Are They?

According to Google, the definition of sport is “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” This definition makes sense; every sport requires athletes that train to be the best and compete in front of an audience. According to this definition, competitive video games are not sports, because there is no physical exertion. However, it’s not that straightforward.

First, some background. Competitive video games are known today as esports. Professional esports “athletes” compete in one of several games full-time to entertain viewers and win prize money in tournaments. Esports are an industry growing so quickly that its expected by Forbes to be worth over $1 billion by the end of 2018. This year, the League of Legends North American Championship had of 76 million viewers, which is 72% as many viewers as the 2018 Super Bowl, and that is only one of many tournaments in one of many games.

Esports are significant and cannot be ignored; however, are they sports? The main argument against this definition of esports as sports is that there is little physical exertion. While this may be true, many other activities that are popularly considered sports lack physical exertion as well, such as target shooting, motor sports, and fishing. These sports are defined less by heavy physical exertion and more by precision, coordination, and experience. These three skills required of athletes in these (admittedly minor) sports are all skills required in esports.

Does this mean that esports are just as much a sport as target shooting, motor sports, and fishing? I believe that technically, it does. Of course, culturally, it is not accepted as a sport, so I wouldn’t go around referring to it as a sport since it’s not popularly accepted as one. However, I believe it has enough similarity to a sport that it deserves the same recognition as as a sport.

Esports cannot be dismissed due to its economic size, as I noted earlier that the esports industry is skyrocketing. However, esports players cannot be dismissed as athletes either. Their physical precision, team coordination, and work ethic require more hours of work than I can imagine. An ESPN article reports that common practice hours include 12 hours a day, 7 days a week of scrimmages, strategy analysis, and drills. Like most competitive scenes, esports has incredibly fierce levels of competition that require relentless work.

This relentless work found in sports leads to a tragic end: early retirement. Like in many sports, esports players experience mental burnout, physical injury, and displacement by up-and-coming younger players that force them to retire early, usually as young as in their early twenties. Like retired athletes in other sports, esports players often settle down after their tumultuous careers and finally go to college and get a more standard job.

Esports are like any other sport. They have a gigantic and growing market and viciously competitive players. They have dedicated fan bases, an international audience, inspiring underdog victories, and tragic downfalls. However, society often relegates esports to the role of youthful fad. I cannot deny them by claiming that esports are sports by definition, but I can say that esports are real and they cannot be ignored for much longer.

by ams9006

Mechanical Keyboards: What’s the Big Deal?

Keyboards are part of our everyday lives. They are one of the main ways that we interface with our computers, which we use every day. They are the means by which we submit our ideas to the global forum of the internet.

Shoes are part of our everyday lives. They are one of the main ways that we interface with the world, because we use shoes to help us travel to achieve what we need to do.

It is generally understood that shoes are worth spending on, because we use them so often. Skimping on shoes results in discomfort, health issues, reduced efficiency in travel, and short-lived shoes that need to be replaced often. When people buy shoes, they often buy the best they can reasonably afford.

Why is it not the same with keyboards?

For a few people out there, it is. And when it comes to buying the best, there is no question as to which that is; mechanical keyboards are the best.

Why are mechanical keyboards so good? To answer this question, we must first consider the difference between mechanical keyboards and your run-of-the-mill office keyboard.

Most regular keyboards are rubber dome keyboards. That means that when you press the key, it depresses a small rubber dome that, when depressed, completes a circuit and sends a signal to the computer indicating that a key was pressed.

https://sitesdoneright.com/blog/2013/02/why-my-mechanical-computer-keyboard-is-better-than-your-keyboard

The problem with this mechanism is that rubber isn’t the most consistent, durable, or responsive material for keyboard keys. They are most often described as feeling “squishy.” The force required to depress a rubber dome switch varies greatly between keys or even between different presses of a single key. The force required to depress a switch varies even more as stickiness and jamming develop. Overall, rubber dome keyboards are not pleasant; some even describe them as odious. To go back to our shoe analogy, rubber dome switches are the equivalent of generic Walmart flip flops.

Mechanical keyboards, on the other hand, rely on a spring as their switch mechanism.

https://betanews.com/2017/02/06/hyperx-cherry-mx-red-brown-switches-alloy-fps-mechanical-gaming-keyboard/

These are extremely consistent in force required for actuation and feel, and boy do they feel good. (I know, I just said a keyboard feels good. Don’t make fun of me.) They are usually rated to last for 50,000,000 presses, and could probably survive being typed on by a hippo. I’ve never heard of anyone needing to replace a mechanical keyboard because it wore out; people always upgrade because they realize they want an even better mechanical keyboard.

That’s the one small (or large, depending on the person) problem with mechanical keyboards: once you use one, there’s no going back, despite the dramatically increased price. Every rubber dome keyboard I end up having to use in campus computer labs feels to me like typing on under-cooked noodles. But that’s not too dissimilar to switching from flip flops to tennis shoes for daily drivers.

However, just like tennis shoes, mechanical keyboards range from the budget staples to premium standard-setters to extravagant collector’s editions that come out in batches of 100 with assembly required, imported directly from South Korea. These premium keyboards are the ones for the aforementioned people who have a large problem with collecting keyboards. However, if you’re just a regular consumer looking for a reasonable product, most mechanical keyboards can be found for between $40 and $100. This price is worth it, in my opinion and the many others who own one. However, be warned: once you try it, you can’t go back.