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Watch this video – pretty compelling to see how powerful music can be. This guy is catatonic – barely one step away from the grave. As soon as he is given music to listen to he comes alive. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to load up my IPOD with Musical Saw Music just to get ready for when I check in to a Retirement Center.

In the video, this guy tells us that Cab Calloway is his favorite musician. Cab Calloway was in the African American Big Band scene – playing at the Cotton Club.

Here is another Musical Saw composition entitled “Sonata for Musical Saw and Electronics”. This composition is by Marcus Rubio. For more information please visit Marcus’ web page. You may also click below to listen to it.

Sonata For Musical Saw and Electronics by Marcus Rubio

How many deer do you see?

Please Leave a Reply of how many you see.

 

 

Once again, sorry – this is not a Muscial Saw related article – but fun none the less.

The Saw Festival is free and takes place at Roaring Camp in Felton, California. The first festival was in 1978, this year will be the 35th.
We have had participants in this festival from all over the United States, and from Canada, China, Japan, Czechoslovakia, England, France, New Zealand, and Australia.

There will be a gathering of sawplayers at 1pm on Saturday near Tom Scribner’s statue at the Pacific Mall, near 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz.

On Saturday evening until 10pm there will be a jam in the Roaring Camp Parking lot (free overnight parking for self-contained RV’s)

ROARING CAMP is located between San Jose and Santa Cruz just off Hwy 17 at 1 Graham Hill Road in Felton.

The main stage will have continuous music from 10am until 5:30pm including the saw contest and other entertainment featuring individual sawplayers as well as bands which include musical saws, guitars, mandolins, fiddles, accordion, bass etc. You’ll hear a wide range of music: Old-timey, Bluegrass, Classical, Blues, Folk…

The MUSICAL SAW CONTEST (The “Saw Off”) will start at 11:30am.

To assure your space in the contest please mail the following form by July 1, 2011. Also, please register at the festival by 10am. The entry fee for the contest is $5 and there is a $20 annual fee to become a member($25 for families).

There is more information as well as signup forms at the Festival Website: www.sawplayers.org

This wonderful book “Scratch My Back” is sadly out of print. If you ever come across a copy at an old book store, snatch it up!

120 pages – lots of photographs, tons of information about the history of the Musical Saw.

Hopefully, we’ll see a reprint of this magnificent book

Playing the Musical Saw can be painful, particularly if you stay at it for hours at a time. The key stress areas are: thumb and finger (unless you use a cheat), your left arm, and your thighs. Even your bow arm can get tired after awhile. We contort our bodies in an asymmetrical way to play the saw, resulting in muscle imbalances. You could end up twisting your torso to such an extant as to distort your neck and compress vertebra as well. A big culprit is repetitive motion injury (both hands) as well as carpal tunnel issues to the saw hand (a cheat will really help alleviate this)We risk injury from repetitive motion and we tend to build tension in our necks, arms and hands with extended practice.

In latter articles, I’ll talk about exercises, however, here are two important things you can do:

1. Warm up (as noted previously, this is something I’ll discuss later on) At this point, you can make up your own exercises – just keep in mind, the goal is to loosen up your muscles and joints so they will come under lesser stress whilst playing.
2. Number two: Take a break every 20 minutes or so and don’t just sit and relax, the purpose of the break is to once again, stretch out and relax muscles and joints.

We’ll come back to this topic sometime in the future. – In the meantime, play well!

Cleaning the saw should be done with just a cloth. If it is important to you to remove rosin buildup (this is just cosmetic – it wont impact the musicality of your saw) – use either soap and hot water or possibly alcohol.
If you need to scrub, do NOT use anything metalic (ie. wire brush, SOS, etc.). If you do, then mcroscopic particles of your scrubbing agent can embed into your saw and the two different metals in contact with each other can cause galvanic corrosion.
But make sure the saw is absolutely dry after washing.
If you are putting the saw away for a long time, you can protect it from rust by givning it a light coating of light oil (I use WD-40) – BUT REMEMBER TO ALWAYS WIPE OFF ALL OIL COMPLETELY BEFORE YOU PLAY – OIL WILL KILL YOU BOW!!!

If you want to really go crazy…. In nautical engineering, there is an item called a sacrificial anode. This is a peice of easily corrodable metal (typically, zinc) that you attach to the metal you want to protect. So a peice of zinc attached to a bronze condenser head will corrode quickly and by doing so will protect the condenser head. I dont want to go into details but suffice it to say, it works. You can do the same thing to protect your saw. Post US 1982 pennies are composed of zinc sandwiched between copper. To expose the zinc, stack up pennies on your drill press and bore a hole down the center. Next, get some copper wire and pass it through the holes and then wrap the wire around your saw.

Drawbacks:
A lot of effort to go through when it might be easier just to deal with the rust when it appears on your saw.
Possibly illegal – recently a law went into effect protecting pennies and nickles from mis-use (due to the fact that the mineral content is more valuable than the monetary value of these two coins)
The exercise is purely hypothetical – Ive never really tried it – but it should work!

Now, what to do when you discover rust:
Although this won’t do a perfect job in removing rust or blemishes – What I like to do is use emory paper or (non-metal) scouring pads with a little bit of oil to remove the rust – BUT PLEASE REMEMBER TO WIPE ALL OF THE OIL OFF THE BLADE BEFORE PLAYING.

The oil I use is WD-40 – but any light oil will work.

Any rust or blemishes on your saw are purely cosmetic and will in no way affect your music.

If you will be putting your saw away for any extended amount of time then it is a good idea to spray it with a coating of oil – but remember to remove the oil prior to playing. BUT REMEMBER TO ALWAYS WIPE OFF ALL OIL COMPLETELY BEFORE YOU PLAY – OIL WILL KILL YOU BOW!!!

Scott Munson has composed some very nice musical saw music for the movie Another Earth
You can listen to a clip here