A pressing concern

[orgrimdoomhammer]

I was just meandering over the ol' and mostly disused IMSoc message boards, when I saw a comment my 19 year old self had made about ukeleles being like guitars for dwarfs.

A crisis has emerged.

Dwarves are very metal. They have big beards. They wear armour. They enjoy axe wielding. The spend a lot of their time trying to get hold of precious minerals. They enjoy singing gruffly. And they have big beerhall type things.

Ukeleles are not very metal. They are teeny guitars. And sound clunky and rather twee. You can get Flying V ukeleles, but that doesn't detract from the whole not very metal image. I don't despise the very playing of a ukelele, and indeed rather like some bands that make (often overly) extensive use of them. But still.

So, here we have the problem. Ukeleles are doubtlessly guitars for dwarves. One is not metal, the other is. Where does this leave us. Where??

[Rachael]

A simple solution: Ukeleles are not guitars for dwarves, they are guitars for midgets. Like the circus midgets, or sex midgets, or midgets used for advertising. A dwarf of the Tolkeinesque persuasion would doubtlessly play a very metal instrument, but a mere midget must settle for a ukelele.

[Rachael]

It has also occurred to me that a ukulele could be played by a gnome just as effectively as by a midget. The difference between a dwarf, a midget, and a gnome is that dwarves have beards AND are metal. Gnomes have beards, but are not at all metal, they just wear stupid hats and sometimes go fishing. And a midget has no facial hair at all, because if they did then they'd be either a dwarf or a gnome.

[meathook]

all this still leaves us with the question of what the natural instrument of a dwarf actually is, if not a flying v ukelele.

[metalthrashingdan]

Dwarves would obviously play a drum kit made of stone and small guitars strung with dragon's sinew!

[orgrimdoomhammer]

Rachael, I'd have to take you up on the point that gnomes aren't metal. Wacraft tells us all that gnomes most certainly can be metal, as they fly about in pretty awesome gyrocopters bombing the crap out of things. And also have Gnomish Submarines. Which are pretty metal.

One possibility is that dwarves don't really play much at all, but have big male voice choirs. Like the Welsh. Only with more beard and less coal. Actually, probably more coal now post the 1980s.

[Rachael]

Ah yes, that works quite nicely. The dwarvish male voice choirs, that its. But those metal gnomes of which you speak are clearly no relation to the little buggers in the silly hats that sit around in gardens.

[Tom]

The thing about dwarves is, they're short but not exactly all that narrow, while they probably don't have the arm span to play a bass, I imagine they could probably play a 3/4 size guitar fairly well.

Gnomes probably aren't as squat so would have to settle for a ukulele. Those pansies.

Another alternative would be (large) brass instruments, a french horn or tuba (dwarves can carry a lot, I can't imagine a dwarf being weighed down by a tuba). There's a pun here about them being made of metal too but the right words aren't coming. I bet dwarves would be good at making them too.

[metalthrashingdan]

In the Hobbit, Thorin and co have a mini orchestra with at least Harps, Clarinets and a Drum if I remember rightly.

"Far over the Misty Mountains cold, to dungeons deep and caverns old, we must away ere break of day, to search for long forgotten gold"

[orgrimdoomhammer]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1L6DPFU-A

That's what dwarves do. Oh yes.

[xpic]

I'd have thought that vocal choirs weren't very metal either, unless they're power metal backing vocals. Or singing the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem. Or possibly O Fortuna from Carmina Burana.
Dwarves would obviously play guitars shaped like axes, like wot i saw in the window of a music shop in Kuala Lumpur. I did take a photo, but it came out rather blurry.
With respect to the bass problem, can you get a downscaled bass that's tuned like a cello, perhaps? But surely, if my little sister, who is about 5 foot nothing, can play a bass, then why can't a dwarf, who is probably shorter, yes, but has a shoulderspan of a man twice his height.

And the pun is pretty obvious if you've been to Wacken Open Air, and seen the Wacken Firefighters play; they're the local brass band, and they're so awesome even their instruments are metal. You haven't lived until you've seen a crowd of pissed metalheads singing along to a brass band playing traditional german drinking songs, being led by a gigantic dude in lederhosen with a beard and a huge stein of beer in one hand, conducting with the devilhorns with the other.