I strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created.
All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.
With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.
There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup).
Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre.
Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.
gwbas1c 28 seconds ago [-]
I watched Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips do something similar with some kind of "I don't know what" controller, it was some kind of input in his microphone stand. As he moved it around, the sound and projection changed.
I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.
deafpolygon 2 minutes ago [-]
I suppose you haven’t heard some really talented sitar players out there. For a traditionally non-electronic instrument, it’s got some crazy sounds.
solomonb 1 minutes ago [-]
I think you misunderstand my comment entirely. I'm not comparing electric to acoustic instruments at all.
jonnypotty 2 minutes ago [-]
Why is that pic labelled with the wrong names? Pretty sure that isn't Mitch and Noel.
yayitswei 45 minutes ago [-]
This is one of the few articles where I noticed a bunch of LLM-isms and still read to the end because it was interesting.
purplekohav 3 minutes ago [-]
Hi! I work at IEEE Spectrum and there's no way an LLM wrote this. We have a pretty strict Generative AI use policy (bottom of this page https://spectrum.ieee.org/about). I'm guessing this is from writers using actual writing techniques that Gen AI stole from...
post-it 42 minutes ago [-]
It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.
0x1ch 33 minutes ago [-]
Probably similar to what I do with my papers and resumes, I write them myself then throw them through LLMs for suggestions and corrections, manually reviewing the output.
nerdsniper 22 minutes ago [-]
LLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read.
I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
evilos 20 minutes ago [-]
I bailed, it just really kills my desire to keep reading.
gchamonlive 5 minutes ago [-]
I feel for you, because moving forward more and more interesting and substantious articles will be written with llm-isms, either because LLM was used directly in writing or because the authors absorbed the style.
RyanOD 14 minutes ago [-]
I've often marveled at the success many guitar players had with experimental electronics - Hendrix, EVH, Les Paul, Brian May, Jack White, and Tom Scholz (special case, of course) are just a few examples.
ozim 20 minutes ago [-]
There is art in engineering that we cannot deny.
While some try to make it as exact science, it is not, there are things you still cannot put a number on and it works ...
BrokenCogs 13 minutes ago [-]
This is a terrible article. In the first subplot, there is no explanation of what v(b1) and v(c2) are. The -8 on the on y axis (amplitude) looks like an upside down 8.
Further down there is a sentence: "First, the Fuzz Face is a two-transistor feedback amplifier that turns a gentle sinusoid signal into an almost binary “fuzzy” output." But the figure does not match this - there is no "gentle sinusoid" wave shown on the first fuzz face plot.
themafia 46 minutes ago [-]
The original title: "Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardy Explained."
> and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer.
So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.
btown 28 minutes ago [-]
Art and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology!
And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians?
We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)
dajt 22 minutes ago [-]
We should not call ourselves engineers - it's a massive insult to actual professional engineers.
alephnerd 36 minutes ago [-]
This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals (which only 10-15 years ago would have been treated as CS) in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry.
DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and cacheing, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class).
The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers.
And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Nagle!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.
jmalicki 26 minutes ago [-]
I came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work, not because people aren't aware (Adam and Muon can be seen as approximations to second-order methods, though, so it is useful to be aware of that structure).
Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads?
Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.
weinzierl 51 minutes ago [-]
Nice article, but that the signal chain in the top image doesn't match the signal chain described in the text annoys me more than it should.
threetonesun 38 minutes ago [-]
It's also a standard right handed strat, which seems like an oversight for a guy famous for playing with a right handed strat flipped upside down.
newzino 3 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
downrightmike 1 hours ago [-]
Jimi on the radio is my shorthand for bad economic times. Happened in 2007 and he's playing on the airwaves now
UncleOxidant 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting economic indicator. But isn't Jimi playing on the radio all the time somewhere?
mlhpdx 55 minutes ago [-]
I prefer the Circle Jerks:
In a sluggish economy
Inflation, recession
Hits the land of the free
Standing in unemployment lines
Blame the government for hard time
We just get by
However we can
We all gotta duck
When the shit hits the fan
actionfromafar 45 minutes ago [-]
And God is a DJ.
Rendered at 21:33:43 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.
See: https://www.scribd.com/document/55134776/48787070-Bob-Ostert...
With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.
There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup).
Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre.
Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.
I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.
I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
While some try to make it as exact science, it is not, there are things you still cannot put a number on and it works ...
Further down there is a sentence: "First, the Fuzz Face is a two-transistor feedback amplifier that turns a gentle sinusoid signal into an almost binary “fuzzy” output." But the figure does not match this - there is no "gentle sinusoid" wave shown on the first fuzz face plot.
> and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer.
So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.
And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians?
We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)
DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and cacheing, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class).
The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers.
And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Nagle!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.
Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads?
Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.