Posts Tagged ‘Guitar’
“Scuse me while I kiss the sky”*…
In 1967, Jimi Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler arranged for Jimi to meet Cream…
There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: “Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin’ Wolf’s] ‘Killing Floor’,” recalls [Tony] Garland, “and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that – it stopped you in your tracks.” [Keith] Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song “which he had yet to master himself”; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: “You never told me he was that fucking good.” – source
Hendrix’s extraodinary virtuosity has, altogether justly, gotten a great deal of attention; less well noted, his incredible mastery of the technology of music making, recording, and performance. Rohan Puranik explains…
3 February 1967 is a day that belongs in the annals of music history. It’s the day that Jimi Hendrix entered London’s Olympic Studios to record a song using a new component. The song was “Purple Haze,” and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. The pedal was a key element of a complex chain of analog elements responsible for the final sound, including the acoustics of the studio room itself. When they sent the tapes for remastering in the United States, the sounds on it were so novel that they included an accompanying note explaining that the distortion at the end was not malfunction but intention. A few months later, Hendrix would deliver his legendary electric guitar performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival.
“Purple Haze” firmly established that an electric guitar can be used not just as a stringed instrument with built-in pickups for convenient sound amplification, but also as a full-blown wave synthesizer whose output can be manipulated at will. Modern guitarists can reproduce Hendrix’s chain using separate plug-ins in digital audio workstation software, but the magic often disappears when everything is buffered and quantized. I wanted to find out if a more systematic approach could do a better job and provide insights into how Hendrix created his groundbreaking sound.
My fascination with Hendrix’s Olympic Studios’ performance arose because there is a “Hendrix was an alien” narrative surrounding his musical innovation—that his music appeared more or less out of nowhere. I wanted to replace that narrative with an engineering-driven account that’s inspectable and reproducible—plots, models, and a signal chain from the guitar through the pedals that you can probe stage by stage…
[And probe it Puranik does– fascinatingly, stage by stage…]
… Hendrix didn’t speak in decibels and ohm values, but he collaborated with engineers who did—Mayer and Kramer—and iterated fast as a systems engineer. Reframing Hendrix as an engineer doesn’t diminish the art. It explains how one person, in under four years as a bandleader, could pull the electric guitar toward its full potential by systematically augmenting the instrument’s shortcomings for maximum expression.
“Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer,” from @spectrum.ieee.org.
See also: “The Technology of Jimi Hendrix.”
* Jimi Hendrix, “Purple Haze”
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As we plug in, we might send well-connected birthday greetings to another wizard with wires, Geoff Tootill; he was born on this date in 1922. An electronic engineer and computer scientist, he worked (with Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn) to design a computer memory. To that end they built the first electronic stored-program computer— the Manchester Baby— at the University of Manchester in 1948.
The Baby was not intended to be a practical computing engine, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Nonethless, Baby worked: Alan Turing moved to Manchester to use it, and the following year, it inspired the Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available electronic general-purpose stored-program digital computer.
“How low can you go?”*…
… Pretty low if you have an octobass– which the Montreal Symphony now does…
The Montreal Symphony Orchestra has just become the only ensemble in the world to employ an octobass… Here it is dwarfing its new orchestra mates in Montreal:
“This is an octobass – it’s so low it will turn your insides to jelly,” @classicfm
Because of the extreme fingerboard length and string thickness, the musician plays it using a system of levers and pedals which engage metal clamps that are positioned above the neck at specific positions and act as fretting devices.
The octobass, which typically plays a full octave below the double bass, has never been produced on a large scale nor (though Hector Berlioz wrote favorably about the instrument and proposed its widespread adoption) used much by composers. Indeed, The only known work from the 19th century that specifically calls for the octobass is Charles Gounod‘s Messe solennelle de Sainte–Cécile.
Per Berlioz, the octobass’ three open strings were tuned C1, G1, and C2. The fundamental frequencies of the lowest notes in this tuning lie below 20 Hz—the commonly-understood lower bound of the human hearing range—still, these notes are audible due to the overtones they produce. More interesting these inaudible lowest notes (like the 32′ stop on an organ)– known as “infrasound“– elicit a physical reaction: feelings of awe or fear. It has also been suggested that since it is not consciously perceived, it may make people feel vaguely that odd or supernatural events are taking place. In any case, it’s why sound designers in thrillers and horror movies mix infrasound into the tracks at moments meant to be tense or frightening.
* “Born to Hand Jive,” Grease
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As we stretch, we might recall that it was on this date in 1925 that Lonnie Johnson made his first recording, “Mr. Johnson’s Blues,” in a session for OKeh Records. A Blues guitar innovator, his music fueled a blues craze throughout the rest of the decade and influences the next generation of blues and folk musicians.
Johnson was also a talented pianist and violinist, and is is recognized as the first to play an electrically-amplified violin.
“Yes, there are two paths you can go by / But in the long run / There’s still time to change the road you’re on”*…
Every winter and spring, rains across the central U.S. combine with snowmelt along the northern reaches of the Mississippi River to inundate the hardwood-dominated bottomlands of the lower Mississippi. When the floodwaters recede and soils dry up in summer, logging crews harvest species of trees that include green ash. Being partly submerged for months encourages these trees to produce thin-walled cells with large gaps between them, creating a low-density wood prized by musical instrument makers. Since the 1950s, American guitar giant Fender Musical Instruments has used this kind of ash to create its iconic electric guitars. Countless music legends, from bluesman Muddy Waters to rockers Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, have loved their Fenders, and many say this wood gives the instruments a warm but crystal-clear twang. This niche has earned it colloquial labels such as “swamp ash,” “music ash” or “punky ash” in the lumber and music industries (although the names are used for a couple of others species of ash as well).
Once cheap and readily available, swamp ash became an integral part of Fender’s DNA over the decades, says Mike Born, former director of wood technology at the company. But earlier this year an acute shortage forced Fender to announce it would move away from using swamp ash in its famous line of Stratocasters and Telecasters—reserving the wood for vintage models only. Fender blamed the dwindling supply on longer periods of climate-fueled flooding along the lower Mississippi—which is endangering saplings and making it harder for lumber companies to reach standing trees—as well as the looming threat of an invasive tree-boring beetle. Another renowned U.S. manufacturer called Music Man raised similar sourcing concerns in 2019, which the company described as having “one of the worst harvests in recent history.”
The ominous situation shows how climate change consequences can reverberate through all aspects of society—even rock and roll. And the swamp ash supply could soon become still more tenuous because experts expect global warming to continue making floods worse. “The average player just won’t be able to afford it,” Born says…
Flooding and a wood-boring beetle threaten supplies of storied ‘swamp ash’: “Climate Change Hits Rock and Roll as Prized Guitar Wood Shortage Looms.”
(Violin makers have their own version of the same issue…)
* “Stairway to Heaven,” Led Zeppelin… on which Jimmy Page played the solo on his swamp ash “Dragon Telecaster.”
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As we harmonize, we might spare a thought for Leon Theremin; he died on this date in 1993. A Russian inventor, he is best known for his eponymous theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments and the first to be mass produced. While the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” is the example of theremin use that springs first to most folks’ minds, that performance was actually on a knock-off (a similar-sounding instrument invented by Paul Tanner called an Electro-Theremin); still, it had the effect of driving demand– both for the theremin and for electronic instruments more generally.
He is also well-known in more arcane circles as the creator of “The Thing” (the Great Seal bug)– a covert listening device that hung in plain view in the office of the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and allowed Russian intelligence to eavesdrop on secret conversations for seven years. Concealed inside a replica of the Great Seal of the U.S. gifted by Moscow to Ambassador Averell Harriman in 1945, it was “passive” (relied on energy from nearby sources)– and is thus considered by many to have been the ancestor of RFID technology.
“My name is Max. My world is fire.”*…
The inspiration for this project was the Doof Warrior’s flamethrower guitar from Mad Max. Nothing says rock-n-roll more than actual fire entwined with your tunes!
I didn’t want to try to replicate exactly what he had, and I also wanted to scale things down to be marginally safer. This version can be built from hardware store parts in a very short amount of time…
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From Caleb Kraft and the marvelous Make. TotH to Bored Panda.
* Max Rockatansky, Mad Max: Fury Road
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As we fire ’em up, we might send glamorous birthday greetings to Luciana Paluzzi; she was born on this date in 1937. An actress whose career began with an uncredited walk-on in Three Coins in the Fountain in 1954, she acted in dozens of films, mostly in Italy, until 1965, when she appeared in her best-known role, SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe in the fourth James Bond film, Thunderball. A victim of the “Bond Girl curse,” her best-known role afterwards was probably a tangential turn in Muscle Beach Party.
Luciana Paluzzi/Fiona Volpe
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”*…
As income and wealth inequality has grown in the developed world, so have the ranks of security guards—for gated communities, upscale residential buildings, corporate offices, exclusive events, and more. That trend– more inequality, more guards– seems especially apparent here in the U.S. We now employ as many private security guards as high school teachers — over one million of them, or nearly double their number in 1980. And that’s just a small fraction of what we call “guard labor.” In addition to private security guards, that includes police officers, members of the armed forces, prison and court officials, civilian employees of the military, and those producing weapons: a total of 5.2 million workers in 2011– a far larger number than we have of teachers at all levels.
Samuel Bowles, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Arjun Jayadev, of the University of Massachusetts- Boston, explore these findings in their Opinionator piece “One Nation Under Guard.”
In America, growing inequality has been accompanied by a boom in gated communities and armies of doormen controlling access to upscale apartment buildings. We did not count the doormen, or those producing the gates, locks and security equipment. One could quibble about the numbers; we have elsewhere adopted a broader definition, including prisoners, work supervisors with disciplinary functions, and others.
But however one totes up guard labor in the United States, there is a lot of it, and it seems to go along with economic inequality. States with high levels of income inequality — New York and Louisiana — employ twice as many security workers (as a fraction of their labor force) as less unequal states like Idaho and New Hampshire.
When we look across advanced industrialized countries, we see the same pattern: the more inequality, the more guard labor. As the graph shows, the United States leads in both…
Bowles and Javadev conclude by quoting an august Utilitarian…
“It is lamentable to think,” wrote the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in 1848, “how a great proportion of all efforts and talents in the world are employed in merely neutralizing one another.” He went on to conclude, “It is the proper end of government to reduce this wretched waste to the smallest possible amount, by taking such measures as shall cause the energies now spent by mankind in injuring one another, or in protecting themselves from injury, to be turned to the legitimate employment of the human faculties.”
This venerable call to beat swords into plowshares resonates still in America and beyond. Addressing unjust inequality would help make this possible.
Read the whole piece here. [TotH to The Society Pages]
*”Who will watch the watchmen” (or literally, “who will guard the guards themselves?”) Juvenal, Satires (VI, lines 347–8)
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As we shore up our defenses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967, at the close of a show in Astoria (Finsbury Park, North London) that Jimi Hendrix first set fire to his guitar. Hendrix was treated for minor burns later that night (but apparently got the technique down quickly, as subsequent “lightings” didn’t require medical follow-up). The slightly scorched 1965 Fender Stratocaster was sold at auction in 2012 for £250,000 (about $400,00).
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