Nice article for engineers to understand something that most guitar players will intuitively know.
One of the great things about a hi-gain setup like Hendrix's is how the feedback loop will inject an element of controlled chaos into the sound. It allows for emergent fluctuations in timbre that Hendrix can wrangle, but never fully control. It's the squealing, chaotic element in something like his 'Star Spangled Banner'. It's a positive feedback loop that can run away from the player and create all kinds of unexpected elements.
The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.
A great place to hear artful feedback would be the intro to Prince's 'Computer Blue'. It's the squealing "birdsong" at the beginning and ending of the record. You can hear it particularly well if you search for 'Computer Blue - Hallway Speech Version' with the extended intro.
> The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony…
You know, I've heard that performance so many times over so many decades that I don't have to hit a play button or even close my eyes in order to hear it. It's there inside my head when I want it to be.
And somehow I never interpreted it in that way (sirens, screaming, etc) until just a moment ago. I thought it was just a quirky little early-morning break in the familiar tune from someone who had been up way too long by that point.
And now instead of just being the quirky sounds of an impromptu guitar solo that I can recall whenever I wish, it now has unpleasant pictures to go with it.
The imagery of 1969, I remember it well. The Vietnam war was the first war that was televised. Everyone would watch the nightly news at 6:30 pm (take my word for it) and hear the choppers, gunfire and real life screams of people.
I thought it was sheer genius that Hendrix was able to subtly bring that into the national anthem which made it resonate so well with those purchasing his music. But without that background reference I never supposed that younger generations would hear it entirely differently.
> "The imagery of 1969, I remember it well. The Vietnam war was the first war that was televised. Everyone would watch the nightly news at 6:30 pm (take my word for it) and hear the choppers, gunfire and real life screams of people."
Slightly off-topic--
Before my time, but my professor* recalled to our class his experience watching a _live_ news report from Vietnam. Something shocking happened during the broadcast. As a visual-media scholar he contacted the station to obtain a copy. No go. He remarked how he never saw that footage ever again (at that time it would have been over 15 years ago). In our modern digital age it's difficult to imagine anything going live to the nation, and then disappearing.
* (Charles Chess, Introduction to Film, SJSU, c1992)
The thing which blows my mind is that the NIC handle database is simply gone. This was the database of everyone who was responsible for some internet asset (typically a domain name) in some fashion such that it was recorded for operators' use. You could look it up, it was public. Now it's simply gone. (I'm FWM6)
Recently, the movie "Cleopatra" was on TV. I was watching it with the sound off while I did other things.
There was one scene where Rich Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were arguing with each other. I watched their lips move, and somehow I heard Burton speaking his lines in his voice, and Taylor her lines in her voice. I had to do a double take to see that the sound was actually muted, but my mind re-created it anyway.
Going way way off topic - when those two were a couple they had a house in Puerto Vallerta, casa Kimberly thats now a hotel. I stayed there once in the late 90s and from their website it hasn't really changed since I was there. The whole time I could just imagine them being there living the hollywood getaway lifestyle. Definitely a cool place to stay - in the old town not in the resort area, and very much worth it if you get the chance. (although it does look more expensive than it was then, even adjusting for inflation).
I read your comment and immediately wondered how much of my braincells are permanently occupied with remembering music. Probably quite a lot in an absolute sense but I wonder about the percentage of storage and whether or not that could have been used in other ways. And of course then I wonder if they are stored compressed, and whether that is lossy compression or not ;)
Thousands of songs reside quite comfortably in my brain. It's rather amazing.
I can tell when a musician is lip syncing their hit song, because nobody sings a song the same way twice, and the performance exactly matched the CD version of the song.
It's all tradeoffs. I can't remember names or faces even if doing so is worth money.
Instead, I can recall the complete works of Roger Waters or Nine Inch Nails, but not the names of the songs unless I really studied that part. I can recall themes from TV shows from decades ago, but be unable to place the name of the show.
At any given time, anywhere at all, I can listen to any of at least five different covers of Fat Bottomed Girls -- and have no idea who performed any of them, and therefore no ability to share them with others.
It's an interesting way to be and it is the only way I know, but there's reasons that I'm terrible at being a DJ.
If you listen to the Woodstock soundtrack it is clear that Hendrix was on a completely different musical level than anyone else in that scene. Ravi Shankar was probably the only person there above him from a chops perspective and possibly in the expressivity department as well. But when it came to sheer inventiveness no one was close to Hendrix. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to see and hear him. It must have felt like an alien was performing.
The Who followed him, and famously destroyed their entire set in a vain attempt to be noticed.
Like a jealous plumber, worried that Kim Kardashian's "Break the Internet" photo series will take away from his appeal, hurriedly posting photos of his plumber's crack online...
I've not listened to that song much at all. I am however obsessed with Machine Gun which has all those elements and more. Maybe I'll have a re-listen to SSB.
Do it; I think the political subtext of weaving an anti-war statement into the national anthem makes it both very obvious and very elegant at the same time.
I wonder if tube harmonics modeled by solid state settings has shaped music. Of course it has; music from that era is instrument-oriented.
The discovery of feedback tones and the resulting incorporation in the musical experience — a three hour warm bank of tubes turned up to the limit with a maxxed out savant unlocking new realms of sound.
It's quite likely that when Hendrix went to London the first time, he was the first person ever to play a Stratocaster through a Marshall full stack at full volume.
Also maybe not until the night of his first big gig there.
Townshend had Marshall build 100 watters so he could play louder clean, Clapton had already been cranking it with a Gibson SG which is a characteristic sound all its own, he was in the audience at the gig and was blown away watching Hendrix.
Every year from at least 1964 to 1984, more advanced amps were made than ever existed before.
> The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.
One thing for me to notice is his playing does not require a rhythm guitarist. I discovered that what worked well is Mitch Mitchell as a Jazz drummer his playing was heavily influenced by classics. In a way it complemented Jimi's guitar tone so well.
While I love Mitch's drumming and Noel's bass, can you imagine if Hendrix had worked with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce - both much more confident and strident players than the Experience's rythym section.
That would have blown the doors off of everything.
I don't think there was another as "out there" guitar player as Jimi until EVH came along - a little more controlled, but just as confident and chaotic. EVH was quite the systems engineer himself (variac, Floyd Rose later on etc)
Miles always impressed me with his ability to pick the best to back him up, and /then/ let them take the front. Some tracks he barely plays on, waiting minutes for his entry.
Jimmy wanted the best to back him up. But I agree with you; I'm just pointing out why I think he didn't.
Agreed! Like Pharaoh's Dance on Bitch's Brew, Davis doesn't come in for like 4 minutes. Same with In A Silent Way. He just lets the band groove for a while, THEN takes the lead.
In Davis' autobiography, he mentions trying to work with Jimi. I don't think it would have worked really, but who knows. Jimi was completely self taught, while Miles went to Juliard, I don't see how they would have communicated musically, literally. Like, if Miles tells Jimi to try a diminished chord here, or some modal scale there, Miles would have ended up doing a LOT of teaching along the way. And I say this as a guitarist of 30+ years who loves both of them.
Considering that Miles was firmly in a modal music phase at that point, I don't see Jimi's lack of formal training as a hindrance at all. I think he'd be able to hang just fine with Mile's band. Even if Jimi couldn't read changes on a chart, I'm sure he'd have no problem working it out by ear.
I'd like to think that, I love this period from Davis, and love Hendrix, so it would have been great to see a collab.
In terms of communication, I am thinking of something like the musical equivalent to software design patterns, etc. I.e. imagine two devs are pair coding, one of whom has a CS degree from 2002 and one is skilled but self-taught. While working together, the first starts talking about observer or singleton patterns, which the 2nd has never heard of but has coded something 90% of the way there on intuition. There could be some friction as they establish a common language. (Yes, this is based on experience, with myself more or less on both sides of the exchange at one point or another).
I think I recall reading about Hendrix that he tried to emulate the sounds of cartoons with his guitar, and then when he was in the army he did the same with trying to reproduce the sounds of fighter jets. Not sure if urban legend, but cool origin story.
I agree but when you’re dealing with celebrities people sometimes lie and exaggerate, and third parties sometimes extrapolate beyond any semblance of grounded facts. So most people subject to that level of scrutiny and fame are likely to have some allegations against them whether true or not.
Hendrix’s girlfriend Kathy Etchingham claims he never abused her. Some third parties dispute her claims about her relationship.
His arrest record suggests at least some type of altercation with a previous girlfriend but it’s far from clear cut to me.
People are complex and reality is complex. I myself was subject to false accusations about abuse from a disgruntled ex girlfriend (who actually WAS in fact physically and mentally abusive to me and I have the scars to prove it).
But regardless, I have zero issues reflecting on a person’s accomplishments and talents even in the context of them being a horrible person. In fact, I find that part of the intrigue of really talented people. Reality and people are quite multi-dimensional. The only general rule I know is that nobody is perfect and holding up ANYone as some example of moral perfection is almost certainly wrong.
This leaves me wondering what would happen if you attached a coupling to a trumpet and ran the sound through an effects/feedback box. Why should electric guitars have all the fun?
Well,i remember a performance of Jorge Lima Barreto (Portuguese electronic/free jazz) playing with a saxophonist with 2 microphones, one normal and the other with a brutal delay. He would play on the normal microphone and sometimes he directed the instrument output to the delayed microphone and it sounded monumental. Not sure what musician he was, i think is Tomas Stanko, but not sure. The performance sounded like you went through a big storm. :D
I like the thought, but trumpets require a lot of energy to excite them (i.e. you have to blow a LOT of air into a horn just to get a note. Getting an instrument like that to feedback would require a pretty radical system.
The difference with electric guitars is that guitar pickups are relatively sensitive and then go through multiple stages of amplification, which makes the system ripe for feedback loops.
Some saxophone players have been known to generate feedback through on-board microphones. Strictly speaking, this isn't exciting the horn, but it does introduce feedback that's excited BY the instrument.
People do! But you have to sit there and buzz your lips to make a trumpet make sound, but for a guitar you just have to shake the strings. And the sound coming from the amp will do this shaking, completing the feedback loop. So it's mostly portable stringed instruments that get this treatment. There are some violin players that play with feedback effects. I hear Jon Rose is one but I am not familiar with his music. Folks like Jean Luc Ponty and Jerry Goodman make ample use of guitar pedal effects in their violin. And there's a YouTuber out there who plays with them on her harp.
> Electric guitars attack hard, decay fast, and don’t sustain like bowed strings or organs.
Since the 1980s, we have had the "Sustainiac": an active circuit installed in the electric guitar along with a "reverse pickup" which is energized in order to excite vibration in the strings.
With this device, at the flip of a switch, you get indefinite sustain on any note on the neck, at any volume, distortion or not --- even if the electric guitar is not plugged into an amplifier at all, and just heard acoustically.
The best implementations of this have a three way harmonic switch. You can choose between excite the fretted (or open) note itself (fundamenta a.k.a first harmonic), an octave above it (second harmonic) or a higher harmonic still.
You can be sustaning the given note, and then at the flip of a switch, it will fade over to the higher harmonic.
YouTube videos of this in action are worth checking out.
If you don't want to or can't install a Sustainiac pickup, you can get a much cheaper handheld one-string "E-Bow" that does the same thing. It's not as easy to use as a Sustainiac and you can't also be playing with the whammy bar unlike with a Sustainiac, but you can get it to do tricks a Sustainiac can't do: see the "spiccato" section in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0V3pzxma-8
I've also managed to make an E-Bow work with a steel-string acoustic guitar (but only on one string IIRC).
You might enjoy this video. He really goes deep into using the guitar to create textures and emotions. He talks about the Edge (U2) and his Infinite Guitar and that he actually calling Michael Brook to see if he could get one. Eventually Fender did a custom build on his Clapton Strat which became the Fender EOB Sustainer.
This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry.
DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, 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 Animats!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.
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.
> Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads
Networking, OS, and Distributed Systems is increasingly treated as CompE or even EE nowadays in the US.
> Just because EEs are exposed...
That's the thing - I truly do not believe that EE and CS should be decoupled, and I believe ECE as a stopgap is doing a disservice to the talent pipeline we need for my verticals to remain in the US, especially when comparing target American CS and EECS programs to peer CEE, Indian, and Israeli CS programs [0].
There is no reason that a CS major should not be required to take a summary circuits, DSP, computer architecture, and OS fundamentals course when this is the norm in most CS programs abroad. Additionally, I do not see any reason for EEs and ECEs to not take Algorithms, Data Structures, and Compilers as well.
> 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
Mind you, I'm primarily in Cybersecurity, AI/ML infra, DefenseTech, and DeepTech adjacent spaces - basically, anything aligned with the "American Dynamism" or Cyberstarts thesis.
From what I've seen, the most successful founders are those who are able to adeptly reason and problem solve, but are also able to communicate to technical buyers because you are selling a technical product where those people make the decision.
Just because an approach isn't useful today doesn't necessarily imply it isn't in the future and being exposed to those kinds of knowledge and foundational principles makes it easier for one to evaluate and reason through problem spaces that are similar but not necessarily the same - for example, going to the Nagle's example - this was a bog standard networking concept that has now become critical in foundation model training because interconnect performance is a critical problem which can impact margins.
A lot of foundational knowledge is useful no matter what, and is why we fund founders and hire talent at competitive salaries.
I know multiple people who went to CMU who dropped out of CS to CE because they couldn't handle the rigor of the OS fundamentals course required for the CS major, as the OS course where you had to implement large parts of a kernel was required for CS, but not for CE.
Yes, you need solid fundamentals. I am saying CE/EE is not where you get them unless you actually are designing circuits. If you're doing the hard tech like you're describing, take the more academically rigorous program of CS instead of the easy CE/EE program where you learn irrelevant skills like circuit layout (that is now done by an AI anyway!) rather than very relevant skills like OS and networking, and algorithms which is not required by EE.
The issue is most CS programs in the US don't require a 15-410 style class anymore, or removed much of the more complex content within it.
There's a reason why a CS@CMU degree and a handful of other similar programs that are its peers are well regarded and continue to attract early career recruiters.
That said, I do still feel that the EE/CE/CS shouldn't be treated as different majors and should instead be treated as tracks within the same degree (yes ik what I'm describing is EECS but it ain't wrong), but that shouldn't distract from your overarching point which hits the nail on the head.
Muon is much more sophisticated than Newton's method. Neural networks have started to borrow techniques from statistical mechanics, and various branches of maths like invariant theory that were previously rarely used in engineering. CS is not dumbing down; its needs and focus are changing.
I've never needed or benefited from most of the EE curriculum. There is an opportunity cost in learning things you don't need.
I guess it depends on where you went. I was a CS student at Virginia Tech in the late 90s. The CS department wasn't even in the engineering school. We did have to take computer architechture which was the only courses other than math/physics we had in common with EE/CE
I know at MIT it was (and I think still is) one major - EECS, and students had substantial latitude on how much they wanted to concentrate into hardware or software at least after the intro courses.
I graduated in 2020 and I took a circuit design class and was taught Nagles algorithm. I guess I could have learned more but I thought the degree was packed enough with enough when you consider all the different parts of it, from the math to systems programming to ML stuff.
Hendrix and Mayer created a great sound, but I've always thought the most incredible thing about Jimi Hendrix was: he only played the guitar about 11 years. TOTAL. He picked it up around age 15, and died age 27.
That's wild to think about, I've been playing the guitar longer than that yet his are heights I'm unlikely to reach. He was such an innovative guitarist.
In general complete devotion to the craft by constantly practicing like it is a habit and not just when inspiration strikes is essential.
One could argue this lack of devotion predates even the smartphone. Heck, I remember getting a Nintendo Entertainment System in the late '80s and then not going out biking or playing basketball as a result.
Hendrix was a working musician who paid his dues on the chitlin' circuit with artists like The Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Ike & Tina Turner, and Sam Cooke before making it on his own. AFAIK those are pretty high-pressure assignments, and count as real work...
Part of what makes Hendrix's live performances so great is how completely unreproducible they are. Even Jimi himself could never recreate that one note sustain when he begins the solo on Machine Gun. To re-create it, you'd have to set the room up exactly the same, tune the guitar exactly the same, position the guitar relative to amps exactly the same, etc. So Hendrix being very sensitive and connected to the room was able to harness that energy into something unique that stands the test of time. Machine Gun is well known, but his Red House performance at Randall's Island also stands out to me as exceptional, those are the 2 key Hendrix performances. I read somewhere that Miles Davis was really impressed by Machine Gun and you can see why.
One thing I learned after buying some gear at home to try to record electric guitar at low volume is how important the physics of the speakers are. You can plug a tube amp into a cabinet simulator and you'll lose a lot more than using solid state electronics on a good but not great Fender amp, especially if you use fuzz / distortion pedals.
I'm not sure Hendrix was a systems engineer, but he was a transcendent blues artist, that's for sure.
Although I love Jimi Hendrix’s performances I’m not sure if not being to reproduce something necessarily makes it great. One could say the same thing about any disorganized person’s process but it doesn’t make it great. It just makes it not reproducible.
One could make a bunch of random noises with a guitar that are hard to reproduce but the music could be shit.
Interesting factoid: modern guitar effects typically have their input jacks on the right-hand side, and output jacks on the left. In this article's guitar rig diagram, the jacks are reversed, but this is accurate: back then, for whatever reason the jacks were reversed on each of these pedals. Modern reissues of the round-enclosure Fuzz Face pedals preserve this pattern despite the reversal of industry trends.
the ergonomic advantage of left-to-right is that most players use right-handed guitars, so the guitar's cord comes out the right side of your body, and it's most ergonomic for it to be directed straight away from you to the right side of your pedal board, not criss-crossing in front of you towards the left side of your board.
>criss-crossing in front of you towards the left side of your board.
No need to criss-cross the cable in front of you, you can connect the cable to the guitar on the right side and the cable will go behind you and emerge on the left side, into the pedal board/fx processor.
With your cable in your right hand, it is easier to plug into the right side of a pedal. If you were to try to do the equivalent with your left, the guitar neck would be a little bit in the way as well.
Typical modern practice would be to have a pedal board with all interconnects and power set up and fixed. Hendrix didn’t do that, but EVH did. And now the internet is full of people posting their pedalboards (P&W people especially).
But you still have to plug in from the right with the guitar cord, and from the left for the card to the amp. So I dunno, my theory may be bogus. But this pattern got established very early on, by the late 60s st the latest.
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.
The reverse example of this is musicians who play techno with analog instruments, like Pipe Guy, Basstong, and Meute[0][1][2].
There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.
EDIT: having said that, I don't think I would agree with your premise, because it is colored by a subtle form of survivor bias. None of us remember what it's like to not know electronic guitars or what they sound like, so claiming "the audience intuitively understands what Jimmy Hendrix is doing" is like saying everyone "intuitively understands" their native language. On top of that there's nothing about the workings of an electronic guitar that wouldn't in principle work for something like an electronic violin or whatever.
Legends Never Die - Leagueoflegends + Ethnic Instruments by Belle Sisoski [1]. And no, I've never played LoL, I probably never will, and I haven't seen that series based on it (Arcana or something?) either.
Also, I haven't checked what Juno Reactor do these days, but their old work is phantastic. My fav show of them is Juno Reactor – Shango Tour 2001 Tokyo [2].
For electric violin, I love Ed Alleyne-Johnson [3]. Never seen him live (I'm not from UK) but I own a couple of his earlier works. It reminds me of that time when my dad was in his final years of his lives, and when he finally passed away. Makes me cry every time.
You might also enjoy Beardyman, if you haven't run across him yet. Does techno and other genres with nothing but his own voice and a shedload of ipads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYVUlx7BhhI
Nathan Flutebox Lee and Beardyman @ Google, London [1] is one of my favs. At the time it was available on 'Google Video' before they acquired YouTube. So I don't have a link to the orig. post. SPOILER: especially that theme with the Godfather when he says Google is just epic and balls.
> There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.
I guess the part people don't like hearing is the implication techno is somehow not expressive. I'm not sure that it lacks expressiveness, but it is certainly more "controlled" than traditional music. When I first heard techno as a teenager in the 90s, my mind was blown. I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard Underworld [1], Photek [2], and Autechre [3]. I think I was attracted to these sounds _because_ they were so different. I think it's hard for electronic music fans like myself to accept the idea that it isn't expressive _because_ it is so different. Isn't it just a different kind of expression?
Still, people like what they like. I'm glad you found a version of dance music that works for you. I've long since moved on being judgmental about people's musical tastes. I think it's just wonderful that music exists at all!
> I guess the part people don't like hearing is the implication techno is somehow not expressive.
I think of it more like a painter's palette: every instrument and tool involved in creating music has a different set of colors to choose from, and can also filter some "colors" out if we think of things like audio processing filters.
The tools and techniques typically used to produce techno filter out "colors" that feel essential to me to connect with a song, and yeah, that "controlled" aspect of it is probably a large part of that. That doesn't mean it's not expressive, it's just expressive in a way that I struggle to connect with.
EDIT: funny enough I actually have protanomaly, so my choice of analogy is slightly ironic there. Some visual art and design out there objectively looks terrible from my subjective experience, since the colors look completely off. But that doesn't mean I'm saying the art is objectively bad.
The whole thing about people being defensive is interesting. I love techno, but anyone who has learned other styles of music recognizes the repetitiveness and quirks of a lot of techno and some other electronic genres.
They do a great job with changing their timbre and tones but often ignore a bunch of other factors that make music interesting. Whether that is the rarity of time signatures other than 4/4, the way certain rhythms are locked into certain genres, the choices of keys used, the limited or missing chords, etc.. at some point you start hearing two electronic songs that sound totally different at a superficial level and you realize they're incredibly derivative of each other.
Nice addition! First time I heard of them and I'm liking what I'm hearing so far.
And just to clarify: I don't dislike electronic instruments. I just think that on some subconscious level the human brain can detect other humans playing a live instrument. Like there's something "embodied" in the sound that is likely missing from a pure electronic instrument. And I needed that element to "unlock" access to techno.
Yep, there's a reason we have the industry term "humanization" in sound design, composition and arrangement.
Tons of work has been done on various modes of humanization by trying to parameterize and modulate these aspects over time. Timing accuracy, velocity variance, chance, etc.
A well-played instrument certainly feels like someone speaking and expressing themselves to you. There are attempts to capture this with MPE instruments such as the Osmose, or Imogen Heap's MiMU gloves.
Hmmm, I disagree, having played electric and acoustic guitars for over two decades and begun learning piano and synths for the first time in 2025.
For one, you can’t easily play two melodies simultaneously across several octaves, using both of your hands, with an electric guitar.
Stringed electronic instruments do have their advantages, but so do the others. Each music making thing has its place in the spectrum.
Two books that have helped me greatly in my musical life, in case people haven’t heard of them, are The Listening Book, and Bridge of Waves, by W.A. Mathieu.
There are certainly guitarists who can play simultaneous melodies.
If you're limiting to a 6 string guitar the distance between the two melodies would be limited compared to a piano but guitars don't have to be limited to 6 strings.
Classical guitar is full of this kind of thing.
Having taken piano lessons but being more into guitar I think the thing is almost all people who play piano are introduced to this and it is a core concept in far more piano music than guitar music. But it is not impossible on guitar, and many works for piano that get adapted to guitar require the player to do so.
E.x. there are plenty of players who have studied and played the Well Tempered Clavier on guitar.
You can play with both hands on a Chapman stick, right hand can do the bass, the left the melody/chords or vice-versa (Chapman stick is played tapping the strings with both hands)
Guitars certainly have a more intimate connection between the touch of fingers and the sound, including the bending of the tone, one of Hendrix’s virtuosities.
Keyboards can approach that with polyphonic touch keys like the Hydrasynth (lean into keys, pressing them harder, for bending the tone in a configured patch), sustain pedals, and pitch bend/modulation controls, but not the nuanced touch of skin on a vibrating string.
I think synth guitars exist, too, but don’t know anything about them. The pedalboards are enough, maybe :)
> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience
Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.
Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.
They're talking about electronic instruments there. The comment is about how electronic instruments don't generally match the physical expressiveness of acoustic instruments (like the Cello).
I'm talking about electronic instruments how they are deficient in expressiveness compared to your cello example.
> Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects.
The story is not quite so simple. Your synthesizer is going to have a buffered output so it wont have the complex impedance loading interactions with the amplifier as the guitar pickup.
This is actually critical to how early distortion effects such as the classic Fuzzface work and imo is essential for the kind of complex timbres you can produce with a guitar + tube amp.
In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.
I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups.
The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.
A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound.
If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects.
There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered).
E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.
That is going to be something like a transformer to step down your line level signal and some series resistance to match the load to help drive the amp.
An actual coil pickup has reactive impedance that is frequency dependent and will result in a more complex interaction between the devices.
> The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature
Sure if you think like an engineer, but everything you are complaining about is what allows someone like Jimi Hendrix to do what he did with a guitar.
Eminently separable, but it's good to be aware of the tradeoffs.
Not magic at all, physics.
It's good to understand that high-impedance is not the biggest deal, but one thing about the magnetic pickups that not everybody realizes is the way that plugging directly into a tube (pre)amp basically magnetically couples the strings to the grid of the input tube.
And that grid has no further physical connection to any other components in the circuit, not even within the same tube, except for clouds of electrons and the flow that occurs among the electrodes.
That way your music basically starts out being sprayed through space directly from the strings which create the magnetic signal.
The thing about high-impedance is the way the relatively minuscule resistor values between the amp's input jack and the input grid's tube pin are so insignificant by comparison to the pickup internal impedance, that resistance might as well be zero.
The only reason there is a resistor in between the input jack and the input grid anyway is to accommodate a high-impedance input with better stability under wider conditions than otherwise.
Now you can get a righteous sound with any number of pedals in between the guitar & amp, especially if the battery power is used to boost the signal to more than the guitar puts out magnetically, and it's been the mainstream for so long people almost never consider doing it any other way.
It's just not the same magnetic coupling from the strings to the tube, you can't have both unless it's a tube pedal.
I've designed lots of solid state circuits too and there is plenty of excellence when coupling the same magnetic pickup directly to a silicon or germanium crystal lattice and going from there. Whether it's pedals or a pure solid-state amp. Instead of using any tubes at all.
Also some people prefer having tubes only for the audio output section, coupled to the magnetic speakers through the antique-style audio output transformer the old-fashioned way.
they're comparing an electric guitar to electronic instruments, like midi keyboards. An electric cello would be the same thing as an electric guitar in this context.
> have a fundamental problem with human expression.
How up to date is this opinion of yours? Expression on guitar is pretty intuitive, but modern electronic instrument manufacturers have been working on this problem and created modes of expression that definitely solve this problem.
For example, EWIs allow you to use breath control for expression with many of the same techniques available on actual wind instruments. Also many synths now have features like polyphonic aftertouch, pitch/mod wheels, which allow you to add expression to a note while it is playing. Apps and hardware exist which allow you to use novel methods of capturing motion or other forms of expression. And most modern synths/midi controllers allow you to decide what parameters are affected.
> Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical
That's an affectation. I can stand on my tiptoes and close my eyes when bending up a note on the synth the same as I can on the guitar. Neither affects the sound, and both are a conscious decision to project an appearance of "I'm really shredding"
> 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.
That can apply to any instrument once you "electrify" it. What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect processing? I play guitar, keys and trumpet, and while I agree that a casio keyboard has limited expression options, your opinion doesn't sound researched.
> What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect
The difference lies in the pickup! On those other instruments you will be using a contact mic (piezo-transducer) wheras the solid body guitar is using an inductive coil.
The contact mic is going to pickup only physical resonance whereas the the coil is measuring an electromagnetic field. Plucking the steel string induces a change in voltage in the coil. This means that the coil can pickup all sorts of interesting electromagnetic interference from the tube amplifier that is all frequency dependent and involve that in whatever feedback loops are occuring.
So the difference in expression is in the oscillator type?
Are we using the same definition of "expressive"? I play synth, guitar and trumpet, and the trumpet is by far the most expressive of the three, both musically and physically. You have basically all the same options for expression that you do with a human voice (vibrato, dynamics, glissando, etc) plus the expressive techniques offered by the instrument mechanics (for example: half-valving, trills, lip slurs, using a plunger as a LPF).
Sure you need a microphone or contact mic, but again that's just your source of your oscillator. After that, sound design is just sound design. I'm not saying everybody should play electric trumpet, but it's just absurd to make blanket statements like "electric guitar is the most expressive electronic instrument".
My whole point is about comparing electric/electronic instruments. I NEVER said that the guitar is the best acoustic instrument. I explained how there is a difference between the way a guitar works with a coil pickup versus other instruments with a contact mic but you don't care.
I don't really want to keep arguing with you. You can win the thread if you want. Congratulations!
> I NEVER said that the guitar is the best acoustic instrument.
Me neither? This thread was about expressiveness. I asked the OP why they think guitar is more expressive than anything else and you responded with information about how pickups interact with amps.
Great argument -- but I'd also counter that "the turntable" (i.e. in the hands of experts like Q-Bert, Craze, Rob Swift, Jazzy Jeff and others) fits this quite well -- especially re your "have the audience understand what he is doing argument"
Haha that is a great highly expressive counter example! However, as far as versatility of sound I still think the guitar+tube amp wins as you have access to all of western music theory and techniques as its still a traditional string instrument.
There have been some interesting keyboard input devices coming out which allow for more expression than normal piano keys, using a sort of hack to the MIDI system called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression. For example the Seaboard Rise or the Osmose. Depending on the instrument it's possible to do per-note pitch bends, change pressure while holding notes, perform vibrato etc. Visually the physical movement is not as interesting as electric guitar though, so yours probably still wins.
> 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.
Electric bass? Heck, even in synthesizers, you have the EWI or the Haken Continuum.
Guitar (and bass) are obviously and far and away the most successful, but it does a disservice to a number of wonderful inventions to say they're the only ones. Just look at what the Japanese band T-SQUARE does with the EWI to see people innovating at the edges.
I feel like the synthesizer--CMI Fairlight, Moog anything, Synclavier, PPG Wave, and just the general concept of modular synthesis--are pretty staunch competitors. Yours is certainly a fun and fair take, and arguably the electric guitar+tube amps birthed so many genres (blues, soul, funk, rock, punk, metal, etc) where as synthesizers remained pretty niche with their contribution to experimental music and pop music, mixing in with rock funk and disco, and the titan of EDM that grew out of that.
This comment is a love letter to electric guitar. I adore it. Consider reading “Desolation Road” by Ian McDonald. I don’t want to spoil any of it, and perhaps science fiction isn’t your cup of tea, but at one point there is a character on Mars with a 700-year-old strat, and you can tell Ian McDonald loves the guitar as much as you do.
You could argue that it's one of the most versatile instruments, sure. "Greatest" is completely subjective.
But is it one of the most versatile instruments? You can do signal transforms with any kind of audio input, although it's done more with the electric guitar than any other instruments.
I would say it in practice, it has the most versatile sonic profile.
A modular synth is more versatile in terms of enumerated signal transformations. Its the ability to be expressive with those signal transformations that makes the guitar+tube amp what it is.
With the right interface, I think the synth can be more expressive. Look at the Haken Continuum or ExpressiveE Osmose - both can be used with something like the Expert Sleepers FH-2 to get MPE data to the modular.
I do see your point, and agree the amount of articulation you can do with guitar is hard to beat, but I do think a synth can win, if the setup is built for it.
Synths with mod wheels are the bomb, I used to have a roland that had a pitch wheel for bends and then push it for tremolos, vibratos and such, and way more voices, envelopes etc and that was a few decades ago and I'm sure that nowadays guitars are not going to compete except at one thing, making guitar sounding noises, you can get guitary sounds but somehow they come off to me to be too clean and lack the slop that various fingerings produce lol
Synth music elevated electric bound tones to anything ever heard.
I remidn you that most of the rock and roll and rock music was about speed and mimicking the sound of a rumbling car engine, as it was a symbol of the freedom in America, being able to run away from your toxic communities to find yourself better anywhere else.
That was the message for the young with rock and roll: a speedy engine for your ears.
Electronic music was like replacing a car with UFO evoking you a space travel.
With the progressive subgenre of techno music you got the same feeling, but with no subtle hints. Heck, one of the most known songs in Spain ever, "Flying Free", literally remixes the sounds of drifting cars between the melodies, making the listener really happy in a very direct way as tons of youngs in the 90's got into the outskirt night clubs... by car. So they felt as driving an infinite highway rave with no end for days.
The amusing thing (to me at least) is that while the DX7 gave users almost infinite options as to how they could create and shape sounds, if you know what to listen for you'll hear the E PIANO 1 and BASS 1 presets an about half of all mid 80s hits. Turns out when they gave musicians a tool with immense flexibility, many of them still chose to use two of the (admittedly great) preset sounds.
Apparently this happens every time. A sample disk included with tracker software was used in hundreds if not thousands of modules and pretty much defined the sound of the Amiga.
Yup. FM Synthesis is challenging enough to implement, but doing so on the DX7's interface is a whole other level of frustrating. It's far from the hands-on interfaces of most subtractive or modular synthesizers.
The DX-7 FM synthesis opened the door to a pretty narrow but interesting range of sounds, bells and brass, which people loved and it was a ripsnorting success for a time, but it didn't displace subtractive analog synths and people aren't exactly playing FM synthesizers any more, while they are now heavily back into analog subtractive. of course there are also romplers and samplers etc. and those can achieve sounds that FM did, but it's hard to call the DX-7 any type of be-all end-all.
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.
Imogen Heap created a set of gloves that transform finger flexing and wrist movement into midi signals you can use in whatever way your performance software allows.
Similar to the Theremin is the ondes Martenot. Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) describes it as a "very accurate Theremin".
You can hear it particularly on "Where I End and You Begin" from Hail to the Thief. Ed O'Brien compliments its sound using an EBow (back before he had the sustainer) in that song.
Yes! I always think first of How to Disappear Completely, which I think was the first song he used it on. I remember watching some concert in college from the Kid A days, and he would have like 3 Ondes Martenot players on stage with them, crazy stuff from the band that wrote Creep like 5 years earlier.
This video might be the best explanation for Creep, which while they never wanted to record it; they do acknowledge it set them up to be able to do everything since. But a lot of Pablo Honey is mediocre.
This is also cool; live version of How to Disappear Completely at the start and one of the few Jonny interviews where he speaks. From a documentary on the Ondes Martinot.
Very cool! I'm confused why you didn't link the video of Radiohead wearing all black and playing at MTV Spring Break :-).
I was VERY deep into Radiohead in college (early 2000s), and love all of these videos; I'm pretty sure I've seen that 2nd video footage around the time of the Kid A tour, but the dates are wrong. Kid A is probably one of my 5 deserted island albums.
I was never an MTV viewer, and came by Radiohead through JJJ radio (Australia).
My ah-ha moment was the release of Ok Computer. First heard the album driving in my car and was instantly blown away. Before that Creep, the singles from the Bends were just some of the better BritPop stuff I was into at the time.
Saw them early '98 on the tour which cemented them as my favourite band. They played Creep, but the high point was going out on Street Spirit.
>"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."
Look at Roli Seaboard, it has insane amount degrees of freedom / expression
No two trumpet players sound the same. I know who is playing just by the tone. Listen to Herb Alpert / Al Hirt / Maurice Andre, all playing the same instrument, but wildly different.
I generally reserve the word electronic to mean something with a microcontroller or discreet logic components. Electronic guitars exist, but they're basically differently shaped keyboards.
I often lament the lack of other electric instruments.
I have come around to the idea of guitars being electronic instruments. Strings are the original oscillators. Once they become electrical signals it isn't clear to me how they differ categorically from any other electric instrument. There are an almost infinite number of pedals, many of which offer things like filters, LFOs, and other synthesis stalwarts. You could even make the guitar a controller for more traditional synthesis work.
> I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.
1,000,000%. Guitar is one of those hobbies where people mythologize and build elaborate hagiographies around players they like and the gear that they used. Hendrix was a generational talent but I highly doubt he was sitting around enumerating problem statements and systematically exploring solution spaces. The Fuzz Face was one of like four dirtboxes available during that time so he chose that one. He flipped a guitar upside down because he could source one more easily than a lefty model. He leveraged feedback because he discovered it naturally and realized that he could make it sound totally badass.
The man clearly had a vision and executed it but his decisions were pragmatic, not the product of grand technical reasoning. It reminds me of the student who wrote a bunch of authors and asked to what degree they were conscious of the themes and symbolism in their work [1]. Many were not - as it turns out English teachers often put the cart before the horse. This is the rock and roll version of that.
I can't knock the article though as it has a lot of sound (pun intended) analysis in it as opposed to typical guitar forum dreck about NOS tube and hand-wired turret board magic.
> He flipped a guitar upside down because he could source one more easily than a lefty model.
I've read that he claimed he played a right-handed guitar upside down because his father was superstitious and didn't like him doing things left-handed, so he'd play a right-handed guitar upside down most of the time and flip it over when he needed to play in front of his father. (I'm not sure why he didn't play a lefty guitar upside if that was the case, but I could imagine that the availability might be relevant like you mentioned, or maybe his father was familiar enough with guitars to be able to recognize a left-handed one and figure out what was going on, or maybe because he was better left-handed he could play it upside-down well enough but due to not being right-handed he would have found it more difficult to play it in the non-standard way).
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...
I took my introductory college writing classes at a college I can’t name-drop without sounding like a jerk, which also did a bunch of LLM research over the years. We used a TON of em dashes in our writing. It’s no mystery, to me, where that stylistically prevalent quirk comes from. I’ve definitely been accused of being an LLM bot.
I was speaking with my 14 year old nephew via messaging last month. It was about a deep topic, synthetic consciousness. He wrote such an intelligent reply that I asked him: hey, was this from an LLM? He was insulted. I did research with his parents and found out that 90% no, he's just a very smart kid.
Is there a name for this this mode of confusion yet?
He was insulted on two counts. Firstly doubting his intelligence. Secondly the insinuation of deception: "You aren't that smart, surely you cheated."
The insulting didn't end there. You asked his parents! Even then you only landed at 90%, yet another insult because why can't he earn 100%? Ethical dilemmas on all sides!
Indeed. Along the same lines, the recent "humans parading as agents" on moltbook story made me think... what is the inverse of the goal of captcha? That's impossible practically, right?
Yes, suspected LLM is mimicry passing under the turning test,encheapened by poor editing, further encheapened by even poorer training. It is going to get both worse,and better at the same time. (I grew up with ELIZA.BAS, and used to easily spot fakes, and it is getting both easier and harder. ) I detest the words of LLM, but not the M. It's a statistical model. It is a very large language statistical model - that is constantly fooling slower hoomins.
That policy doesn't explicitly disallow writers from using LLMs as part of their process, nor does it mention reviewing submissions for content that could be LLM-generated.
I like some of the ideas in the article but there are some very "it wasn't just A, it was B" sentences in there. IEEE has a higher standard.
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.
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.
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. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.
I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
Ironic because IEEE Spectrum has an anti-LLM policy. So your complex about LLM writing styles has indirectly caused you to stop supporting genuine prose.
Seriously there's no LLM stuff in here. Only emdashed which were used in journalism decades before AI was even a thing.
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.
The way this article was written, is the standard way these kind of US pop science articles have always been written. It's LLM that absorbed that, not the opposite.
The amazing thing is that Hendrix during live performances has the same wonderful effects as he got in the studio. I only saw Hendrix play live one time, that was in San Diego a few weeks before he died in England.
I love how nonchalantly you threw this one in. I am proper jealous, how was it?
On your first remark, I agree. This is why I love Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler. The studio recordings are amazing, and then you listen to their live stuff and it's even better.
Interestingly, to me Hendrix and Knopfler feel kinda like creative opposites. Knopfler plays much cleaner and with much more variety, he has written many songs that are catchy in different ways (which is almost impossible for any musician), he basically achieves every goal that a beginner musician could choose to chase. And yet his stuff feels like a creative dead end, a dreary road leading to adult contemporary. While Hendrix has no songs to speak of and only one sloppy screechy sound, but it's the sound that launches a thousand bands and feels inspiring even now. Maybe the lesson we're supposed to learn is that we shouldn't choose what goal to chase, we should just feel it.
I think what you are trying to say is that Hendrix captured a specific sound and won over a generation of listeners, while Knoplfer displayed a mastery of the instrument, rarely seen in the mainstream. However, don't underestimate him, they sold out Wembley 16 nights in a row in '85, I am sure that spring some bands. It's now a bit forgotten, but for a period of few years, Dire Straits were the biggest band in the world.
Knopfler is usually associated with saying "your favorite guitarist's favorite guitarist" :)
The guitarist most frequently named as favorite by famous guitarists is Hendrix, second is Van Halen. Also often named are SRV, Jimmy Page and so on. I don't know anyone famous who names Knopfler as favorite.
It's subjective, guitarists such as Knopfler, Clapton, Belew, Fripp, et al all rank highly for many.
I', m not sure I'd trust the judgement of any with a single absolute favourite <anything>, reality is generally rich with competing strengths and weaknesses.
Hendrix seemed like a really nice guy. His vibe was that he loved everyone in the audience. I was close to the stage and took some nice pictures using Anschrome 500 that I developed myself pushing it to 1000 ASA. Treasure those pictures.
I like how the phone rings in the background on Gypsy Eyes. Wonder who called?
Voodoo Chile lyrics: "on the night I was born the moon turned fire red".
Poetic license? Stellarium reveals on the early evening of November 27, 1942 in Seattle, the moon was low on the horizon - just 25 degrees altitude at 5:30pm, directly East. The sun set at 5pm. While not a full moon it was 85%, so I'm calling it! The moon may have glowed a warm orange-red on the night (of the day) Hendrix was born.
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.
The podcast "History of Rock in 500 Songs" (full disclosure: I am a devout, slavering fan) provides these on the regular. I was actually smiling when I heard a fairly new song that attempts a really flat, fuzzed out sound because it made me think, "Buddy Holly invented that by accident with a broken speaker". One of the episodes on The Who goes into the Marshall behind Marshall amps in similar detail.
I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.
You can guess what I have been doing for the past 2 days :) Coincidentally, the last episode was about a song from my favorite album, so it was meant to be ;)
That's stretching the term to the breaking point, for me. Is there some evidence of systematic analysis of component parts? attempts to model elements of the problem? data gathering and data analysis? simulation? Intentional application of principles of physics or some other pure domain to a real world problem?
Artistic endeavors come from lots of places, not just people with an analytical mindset. Historically those two are seen as opposing tendencies, which I think is unfair, but it points to the importance of intuition and navigating perception and emotion for artists.
The caption on the photo is clearly wrong. No way the other two are Mitch Mitchell (not "Mitchel" (sic)) or Noel Redding, not at any time when Jimi was alive.
Even after The JH Experience, Noel Redding went on to do the band Fat Mattress, and he still had big curly/wavy hair, no moustache, didn't look or dress like an Arby's manager.
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 :)
That's great, but it doesn't make you or any of us engineers.
Just because I drive my car with immense focus, make precision shifts, and hit the apex of all of my turns when getting onto and off of the freeway doesn't make me a race car driver.
Engineers don't just feel good vibes about science and mix it into their work. It is the core of their work.
Simply having a methodology absolutely is not sufficient for being an engineer.
And great, you have an arbitrary system of ethics, like everyone does I imagine. But no one holds you to these ethics.
It was even crazier than that, it was four Fender Twin Reverbs!
Considering the amount of watts involved in this, it probably qualifies as rocket science haha
JM: Yeah. The tremolo sound from the intro? That was four Fender Twin Reverbs. Myself controlling the speed of two of them and the producer controlling the speed of the other two. So two amps were recorded on one side of the stereo and the other two on the other side. I recorded the part on the tape without the tremolo, and then I sent the part from tape out to four amps, and he controlled two, and I controlled the other two.
And it took a long time because inevitably the tremolo would go out of time with the track because the tremolo doesn't stay in regular clock time. Also we would go out with each other's amps, so we had to keep looking up at each other after every fifteen second bursts and kind of fess up, "Oh yeah, mine kind of went out of time." It took long time, but I'm glad we did it that way because if we had cut and pasted two seconds of audio, it wouldn't have had the same dynamic quality throughout the six minutes of the song, or however long it is.
A compressor pedal was the best thing I bought when trying to imitate Mark Knopfler doing Sultans of Swing. Not only does it sound good but a fender with a compressor is also much easier to play than an acoustic guitar.
For a better example of the guitar as a synth like feedback device listen to robert fripps solo on heroes by bowie. He used markings on the studio floor to achieve the desired tone.
No he wasn't. Sorry, but being a systems engineer will never be as cool as being a revolutionary musical genius. On the plus side you probably get to live 2-3 times longer.
Crazy example of when everything is AI generated, even the code referenced in git repo (refer to commit 3d733ca), and actually interesting and "new" in a way...
I’m curious because to tell you the truth the novelty struck me as similar to comparisons I’ve toyed with using LLMs on my own. The AI-generated logic between comparing two dissimilar things is too sterile for my liking.
I understand that this is appearing in technical publication, but for some reason that invites even further scrutiny on my behalf.
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.
Hendrix reportedly discovered feedback by walking away from a cranked amp. The guitar just kept sustaining on its own. What followed was years of empirical system identification: learning how body position, pickup selection, and guitar-to-amp distance affected feedback character. No transfer function, just iteration. That's a valid engineering methodology.
Any guitarist in a 1940s big band would have a big hollowbody guitar and an amp. That combination is incredibly prone to feedback. Everyone worked to reduce feedback and avoid it. That's what I do with my hollowbody when I play with a big band. It's the first thing that happens when you turn up.
Hendrix did not "discover" feedback, and in fact he did not discover the musical uses of feedback - you can hear it in BB King records that predate Hendrix, where feedback makes his notes "sing."
What Hendrix did was turn feedback into an intentional musical creation that he treated as a melodic voice.
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
Nice article for engineers to understand something that most guitar players will intuitively know.
One of the great things about a hi-gain setup like Hendrix's is how the feedback loop will inject an element of controlled chaos into the sound. It allows for emergent fluctuations in timbre that Hendrix can wrangle, but never fully control. It's the squealing, chaotic element in something like his 'Star Spangled Banner'. It's a positive feedback loop that can run away from the player and create all kinds of unexpected elements.
The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.
A great place to hear artful feedback would be the intro to Prince's 'Computer Blue'. It's the squealing "birdsong" at the beginning and ending of the record. You can hear it particularly well if you search for 'Computer Blue - Hallway Speech Version' with the extended intro.
Star Spangled Banner was incredible. The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony… that was a masterpiece.
> The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony…
You know, I've heard that performance so many times over so many decades that I don't have to hit a play button or even close my eyes in order to hear it. It's there inside my head when I want it to be.
And somehow I never interpreted it in that way (sirens, screaming, etc) until just a moment ago. I thought it was just a quirky little early-morning break in the familiar tune from someone who had been up way too long by that point.
And now instead of just being the quirky sounds of an impromptu guitar solo that I can recall whenever I wish, it now has unpleasant pictures to go with it.
Thanks (I think).
The imagery of 1969, I remember it well. The Vietnam war was the first war that was televised. Everyone would watch the nightly news at 6:30 pm (take my word for it) and hear the choppers, gunfire and real life screams of people.
I thought it was sheer genius that Hendrix was able to subtly bring that into the national anthem which made it resonate so well with those purchasing his music. But without that background reference I never supposed that younger generations would hear it entirely differently.
> "The imagery of 1969, I remember it well. The Vietnam war was the first war that was televised. Everyone would watch the nightly news at 6:30 pm (take my word for it) and hear the choppers, gunfire and real life screams of people."
Slightly off-topic--
Before my time, but my professor* recalled to our class his experience watching a _live_ news report from Vietnam. Something shocking happened during the broadcast. As a visual-media scholar he contacted the station to obtain a copy. No go. He remarked how he never saw that footage ever again (at that time it would have been over 15 years ago). In our modern digital age it's difficult to imagine anything going live to the nation, and then disappearing.
* (Charles Chess, Introduction to Film, SJSU, c1992)
The thing which blows my mind is that the NIC handle database is simply gone. This was the database of everyone who was responsible for some internet asset (typically a domain name) in some fashion such that it was recorded for operators' use. You could look it up, it was public. Now it's simply gone. (I'm FWM6)
> In our modern digital age it's difficult to imagine anything going live to the nation, and then disappearing.
The Epstein files would like a chat with you.
As would "flood the zone".
Maggot Brain begins with on-the-nose apocalyptic imagery, but ends with a release and rebirth. One day, the fighting stops.
Recently, the movie "Cleopatra" was on TV. I was watching it with the sound off while I did other things.
There was one scene where Rich Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were arguing with each other. I watched their lips move, and somehow I heard Burton speaking his lines in his voice, and Taylor her lines in her voice. I had to do a double take to see that the sound was actually muted, but my mind re-created it anyway.
Going way way off topic - when those two were a couple they had a house in Puerto Vallerta, casa Kimberly thats now a hotel. I stayed there once in the late 90s and from their website it hasn't really changed since I was there. The whole time I could just imagine them being there living the hollywood getaway lifestyle. Definitely a cool place to stay - in the old town not in the resort area, and very much worth it if you get the chance. (although it does look more expensive than it was then, even adjusting for inflation).
I read your comment and immediately wondered how much of my braincells are permanently occupied with remembering music. Probably quite a lot in an absolute sense but I wonder about the percentage of storage and whether or not that could have been used in other ways. And of course then I wonder if they are stored compressed, and whether that is lossy compression or not ;)
BrainOS 1.1> Optimize Memory (Y/N) __
Thousands of songs reside quite comfortably in my brain. It's rather amazing.
I can tell when a musician is lip syncing their hit song, because nobody sings a song the same way twice, and the performance exactly matched the CD version of the song.
Some of those sounds are also on his Band of Gypsy's album, most obviously the song "Machine Gun".
Well, lucky you anyway - I'd give up a lot to be able to instantly play Jimi Hendrix in my mind!
It's all tradeoffs. I can't remember names or faces even if doing so is worth money.
Instead, I can recall the complete works of Roger Waters or Nine Inch Nails, but not the names of the songs unless I really studied that part. I can recall themes from TV shows from decades ago, but be unable to place the name of the show.
At any given time, anywhere at all, I can listen to any of at least five different covers of Fat Bottomed Girls -- and have no idea who performed any of them, and therefore no ability to share them with others.
It's an interesting way to be and it is the only way I know, but there's reasons that I'm terrible at being a DJ.
Sorry (I guess) :-)
Is yan anti war, anti imperialist song.
If you listen to the Woodstock soundtrack it is clear that Hendrix was on a completely different musical level than anyone else in that scene. Ravi Shankar was probably the only person there above him from a chops perspective and possibly in the expressivity department as well. But when it came to sheer inventiveness no one was close to Hendrix. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to see and hear him. It must have felt like an alien was performing.
The Who followed him, and famously destroyed their entire set in a vain attempt to be noticed.
Like a jealous plumber, worried that Kim Kardashian's "Break the Internet" photo series will take away from his appeal, hurriedly posting photos of his plumber's crack online...
The drum solo by the Santana drummer was epic as well.
Yeah, it’s always seemed that way to me too. Like a sonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)
I've not listened to that song much at all. I am however obsessed with Machine Gun which has all those elements and more. Maybe I'll have a re-listen to SSB.
Do it; I think the political subtext of weaving an anti-war statement into the national anthem makes it both very obvious and very elegant at the same time.
The first time I had an amp distorted and loud enough to cause feedback (if I wanted to) at band practice was the most magical day of my life.
I had heard it a lot in punk and pop-punk to create swells. I improvised my still-favorite solo that day.
I wonder if tube harmonics modeled by solid state settings has shaped music. Of course it has; music from that era is instrument-oriented.
The discovery of feedback tones and the resulting incorporation in the musical experience — a three hour warm bank of tubes turned up to the limit with a maxxed out savant unlocking new realms of sound.
It's quite likely that when Hendrix went to London the first time, he was the first person ever to play a Stratocaster through a Marshall full stack at full volume.
Also maybe not until the night of his first big gig there.
Townshend had Marshall build 100 watters so he could play louder clean, Clapton had already been cranking it with a Gibson SG which is a characteristic sound all its own, he was in the audience at the gig and was blown away watching Hendrix.
Every year from at least 1964 to 1984, more advanced amps were made than ever existed before.
> The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.
One thing for me to notice is his playing does not require a rhythm guitarist. I discovered that what worked well is Mitch Mitchell as a Jazz drummer his playing was heavily influenced by classics. In a way it complemented Jimi's guitar tone so well.
While I love Mitch's drumming and Noel's bass, can you imagine if Hendrix had worked with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce - both much more confident and strident players than the Experience's rythym section.
That would have blown the doors off of everything.
I don't think there was another as "out there" guitar player as Jimi until EVH came along - a little more controlled, but just as confident and chaotic. EVH was quite the systems engineer himself (variac, Floyd Rose later on etc)
Jimmy wasn't as good as Miles at collaboration.
Miles always impressed me with his ability to pick the best to back him up, and /then/ let them take the front. Some tracks he barely plays on, waiting minutes for his entry.
Jimmy wanted the best to back him up. But I agree with you; I'm just pointing out why I think he didn't.
Agreed! Like Pharaoh's Dance on Bitch's Brew, Davis doesn't come in for like 4 minutes. Same with In A Silent Way. He just lets the band groove for a while, THEN takes the lead.
In Davis' autobiography, he mentions trying to work with Jimi. I don't think it would have worked really, but who knows. Jimi was completely self taught, while Miles went to Juliard, I don't see how they would have communicated musically, literally. Like, if Miles tells Jimi to try a diminished chord here, or some modal scale there, Miles would have ended up doing a LOT of teaching along the way. And I say this as a guitarist of 30+ years who loves both of them.
Considering that Miles was firmly in a modal music phase at that point, I don't see Jimi's lack of formal training as a hindrance at all. I think he'd be able to hang just fine with Mile's band. Even if Jimi couldn't read changes on a chart, I'm sure he'd have no problem working it out by ear.
I'd like to think that, I love this period from Davis, and love Hendrix, so it would have been great to see a collab.
In terms of communication, I am thinking of something like the musical equivalent to software design patterns, etc. I.e. imagine two devs are pair coding, one of whom has a CS degree from 2002 and one is skilled but self-taught. While working together, the first starts talking about observer or singleton patterns, which the 2nd has never heard of but has coded something 90% of the way there on intuition. There could be some friction as they establish a common language. (Yes, this is based on experience, with myself more or less on both sides of the exchange at one point or another).
Going to assume you mean Miles Davis and not Buddy Miles here! Correct me if I'm wrong.
Yeah that's a good insight.
I think I recall reading about Hendrix that he tried to emulate the sounds of cartoons with his guitar, and then when he was in the army he did the same with trying to reproduce the sounds of fighter jets. Not sure if urban legend, but cool origin story.
[flagged]
Ethically pure 60s musicians are pretty hard to come by
Ethical humans are pretty hard to come by if you put them under a microscope.
"Not beating women" doesn't require a microscope.
I agree but when you’re dealing with celebrities people sometimes lie and exaggerate, and third parties sometimes extrapolate beyond any semblance of grounded facts. So most people subject to that level of scrutiny and fame are likely to have some allegations against them whether true or not.
Hendrix’s girlfriend Kathy Etchingham claims he never abused her. Some third parties dispute her claims about her relationship.
His arrest record suggests at least some type of altercation with a previous girlfriend but it’s far from clear cut to me.
People are complex and reality is complex. I myself was subject to false accusations about abuse from a disgruntled ex girlfriend (who actually WAS in fact physically and mentally abusive to me and I have the scars to prove it).
But regardless, I have zero issues reflecting on a person’s accomplishments and talents even in the context of them being a horrible person. In fact, I find that part of the intrigue of really talented people. Reality and people are quite multi-dimensional. The only general rule I know is that nobody is perfect and holding up ANYone as some example of moral perfection is almost certainly wrong.
OT1H, yeah: angry misogynist bad.
OTOH: why does his accidental fatal pathway tarnish him morally to you?
Very mixed message: "Don't beat women nor vomit!"
This leaves me wondering what would happen if you attached a coupling to a trumpet and ran the sound through an effects/feedback box. Why should electric guitars have all the fun?
Well,i remember a performance of Jorge Lima Barreto (Portuguese electronic/free jazz) playing with a saxophonist with 2 microphones, one normal and the other with a brutal delay. He would play on the normal microphone and sometimes he directed the instrument output to the delayed microphone and it sounded monumental. Not sure what musician he was, i think is Tomas Stanko, but not sure. The performance sounded like you went through a big storm. :D
I like the thought, but trumpets require a lot of energy to excite them (i.e. you have to blow a LOT of air into a horn just to get a note. Getting an instrument like that to feedback would require a pretty radical system.
The difference with electric guitars is that guitar pickups are relatively sensitive and then go through multiple stages of amplification, which makes the system ripe for feedback loops.
Some saxophone players have been known to generate feedback through on-board microphones. Strictly speaking, this isn't exciting the horn, but it does introduce feedback that's excited BY the instrument.
People do! But you have to sit there and buzz your lips to make a trumpet make sound, but for a guitar you just have to shake the strings. And the sound coming from the amp will do this shaking, completing the feedback loop. So it's mostly portable stringed instruments that get this treatment. There are some violin players that play with feedback effects. I hear Jon Rose is one but I am not familiar with his music. Folks like Jean Luc Ponty and Jerry Goodman make ample use of guitar pedal effects in their violin. And there's a YouTuber out there who plays with them on her harp.
There are ways a trumpet could be modified to accept feedback.
P.S. I learned to play a trumpet when I was a kid. I wasn't any good at it, but I do know how it works!
Early 70s Miles Davis did that on his fusion albums and concerts. Fuzz, wah pedal, etc.
> Electric guitars attack hard, decay fast, and don’t sustain like bowed strings or organs.
Since the 1980s, we have had the "Sustainiac": an active circuit installed in the electric guitar along with a "reverse pickup" which is energized in order to excite vibration in the strings.
With this device, at the flip of a switch, you get indefinite sustain on any note on the neck, at any volume, distortion or not --- even if the electric guitar is not plugged into an amplifier at all, and just heard acoustically.
The best implementations of this have a three way harmonic switch. You can choose between excite the fretted (or open) note itself (fundamenta a.k.a first harmonic), an octave above it (second harmonic) or a higher harmonic still.
You can be sustaning the given note, and then at the flip of a switch, it will fade over to the higher harmonic.
YouTube videos of this in action are worth checking out.
Here is one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZwPPGsxY6g
If you don't want to or can't install a Sustainiac pickup, you can get a much cheaper handheld one-string "E-Bow" that does the same thing. It's not as easy to use as a Sustainiac and you can't also be playing with the whammy bar unlike with a Sustainiac, but you can get it to do tricks a Sustainiac can't do: see the "spiccato" section in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0V3pzxma-8
I've also managed to make an E-Bow work with a steel-string acoustic guitar (but only on one string IIRC).
[Nigel Tufnel is showing Marty DiBergi one of his favorite guitars]
Nigel Tufnel: The sustain, listen to it. Marty DiBergi: I don't hear anything. Nigel Tufnel: Well you would though, if it were playing.
Ed O'Brien from Radiohead worked with Fender to develop a Strat with a Fernandes Sustainer.
https://au.fender.com/products/fender-eob-sustainer-stratoca...
You might enjoy this video. He really goes deep into using the guitar to create textures and emotions. He talks about the Edge (U2) and his Infinite Guitar and that he actually calling Michael Brook to see if he could get one. Eventually Fender did a custom build on his Clapton Strat which became the Fender EOB Sustainer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK4Fmrlqz3I
This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry.
DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, 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 Animats!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.
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.
> Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads
Networking, OS, and Distributed Systems is increasingly treated as CompE or even EE nowadays in the US.
> Just because EEs are exposed...
That's the thing - I truly do not believe that EE and CS should be decoupled, and I believe ECE as a stopgap is doing a disservice to the talent pipeline we need for my verticals to remain in the US, especially when comparing target American CS and EECS programs to peer CEE, Indian, and Israeli CS programs [0].
There is no reason that a CS major should not be required to take a summary circuits, DSP, computer architecture, and OS fundamentals course when this is the norm in most CS programs abroad. Additionally, I do not see any reason for EEs and ECEs to not take Algorithms, Data Structures, and Compilers as well.
> 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
Mind you, I'm primarily in Cybersecurity, AI/ML infra, DefenseTech, and DeepTech adjacent spaces - basically, anything aligned with the "American Dynamism" or Cyberstarts thesis.
From what I've seen, the most successful founders are those who are able to adeptly reason and problem solve, but are also able to communicate to technical buyers because you are selling a technical product where those people make the decision.
Just because an approach isn't useful today doesn't necessarily imply it isn't in the future and being exposed to those kinds of knowledge and foundational principles makes it easier for one to evaluate and reason through problem spaces that are similar but not necessarily the same - for example, going to the Nagle's example - this was a bog standard networking concept that has now become critical in foundation model training because interconnect performance is a critical problem which can impact margins.
A lot of foundational knowledge is useful no matter what, and is why we fund founders and hire talent at competitive salaries.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413516
I know multiple people who went to CMU who dropped out of CS to CE because they couldn't handle the rigor of the OS fundamentals course required for the CS major, as the OS course where you had to implement large parts of a kernel was required for CS, but not for CE.
Yes, you need solid fundamentals. I am saying CE/EE is not where you get them unless you actually are designing circuits. If you're doing the hard tech like you're describing, take the more academically rigorous program of CS instead of the easy CE/EE program where you learn irrelevant skills like circuit layout (that is now done by an AI anyway!) rather than very relevant skills like OS and networking, and algorithms which is not required by EE.
I agree with that!
The issue is most CS programs in the US don't require a 15-410 style class anymore, or removed much of the more complex content within it.
There's a reason why a CS@CMU degree and a handful of other similar programs that are its peers are well regarded and continue to attract early career recruiters.
That said, I do still feel that the EE/CE/CS shouldn't be treated as different majors and should instead be treated as tracks within the same degree (yes ik what I'm describing is EECS but it ain't wrong), but that shouldn't distract from your overarching point which hits the nail on the head.
Muon is much more sophisticated than Newton's method. Neural networks have started to borrow techniques from statistical mechanics, and various branches of maths like invariant theory that were previously rarely used in engineering. CS is not dumbing down; its needs and focus are changing.
I've never needed or benefited from most of the EE curriculum. There is an opportunity cost in learning things you don't need.
I guess it depends on where you went. I was a CS student at Virginia Tech in the late 90s. The CS department wasn't even in the engineering school. We did have to take computer architechture which was the only courses other than math/physics we had in common with EE/CE
I know at MIT it was (and I think still is) one major - EECS, and students had substantial latitude on how much they wanted to concentrate into hardware or software at least after the intro courses.
I graduated in 2020 and I took a circuit design class and was taught Nagles algorithm. I guess I could have learned more but I thought the degree was packed enough with enough when you consider all the different parts of it, from the math to systems programming to ML stuff.
Hendrix and Mayer created a great sound, but I've always thought the most incredible thing about Jimi Hendrix was: he only played the guitar about 11 years. TOTAL. He picked it up around age 15, and died age 27.
That's wild to think about, I've been playing the guitar longer than that yet his are heights I'm unlikely to reach. He was such an innovative guitarist.
He played 24/24 tho, there's stories about that in his military service he was always on the guitar
It's incredible what people were able to accomplish with their free time before smartphones
In general complete devotion to the craft by constantly practicing like it is a habit and not just when inspiration strikes is essential.
One could argue this lack of devotion predates even the smartphone. Heck, I remember getting a Nintendo Entertainment System in the late '80s and then not going out biking or playing basketball as a result.
Ironically these days you might have a better chance making a living from playing video games compared to any physical activity.
???
Hendrix was a working musician who paid his dues on the chitlin' circuit with artists like The Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Ike & Tina Turner, and Sam Cooke before making it on his own. AFAIK those are pretty high-pressure assignments, and count as real work...
Just humans, living in the moment, not a phone in sight.
Part of what makes Hendrix's live performances so great is how completely unreproducible they are. Even Jimi himself could never recreate that one note sustain when he begins the solo on Machine Gun. To re-create it, you'd have to set the room up exactly the same, tune the guitar exactly the same, position the guitar relative to amps exactly the same, etc. So Hendrix being very sensitive and connected to the room was able to harness that energy into something unique that stands the test of time. Machine Gun is well known, but his Red House performance at Randall's Island also stands out to me as exceptional, those are the 2 key Hendrix performances. I read somewhere that Miles Davis was really impressed by Machine Gun and you can see why.
One thing I learned after buying some gear at home to try to record electric guitar at low volume is how important the physics of the speakers are. You can plug a tube amp into a cabinet simulator and you'll lose a lot more than using solid state electronics on a good but not great Fender amp, especially if you use fuzz / distortion pedals.
I'm not sure Hendrix was a systems engineer, but he was a transcendent blues artist, that's for sure.
Although I love Jimi Hendrix’s performances I’m not sure if not being to reproduce something necessarily makes it great. One could say the same thing about any disorganized person’s process but it doesn’t make it great. It just makes it not reproducible.
One could make a bunch of random noises with a guitar that are hard to reproduce but the music could be shit.
Interesting factoid: modern guitar effects typically have their input jacks on the right-hand side, and output jacks on the left. In this article's guitar rig diagram, the jacks are reversed, but this is accurate: back then, for whatever reason the jacks were reversed on each of these pedals. Modern reissues of the round-enclosure Fuzz Face pedals preserve this pattern despite the reversal of industry trends.
I was immediately bothered by the picture because of these facts.
It does seem weird, I’d expect signal to flow from left to right, as English is written, as a number line is drawn, from -x to 0 to +x
the ergonomic advantage of left-to-right is that most players use right-handed guitars, so the guitar's cord comes out the right side of your body, and it's most ergonomic for it to be directed straight away from you to the right side of your pedal board, not criss-crossing in front of you towards the left side of your board.
And Hendrix played the guitar left-handed, so the other way made more sense for him.
>criss-crossing in front of you towards the left side of your board. No need to criss-cross the cable in front of you, you can connect the cable to the guitar on the right side and the cable will go behind you and emerge on the left side, into the pedal board/fx processor.
With your cable in your right hand, it is easier to plug into the right side of a pedal. If you were to try to do the equivalent with your left, the guitar neck would be a little bit in the way as well.
But you have to plug cables into both sides... Also you set your pedals up before you actually start playing.
Typical modern practice would be to have a pedal board with all interconnects and power set up and fixed. Hendrix didn’t do that, but EVH did. And now the internet is full of people posting their pedalboards (P&W people especially).
But you still have to plug in from the right with the guitar cord, and from the left for the card to the amp. So I dunno, my theory may be bogus. But this pattern got established very early on, by the late 60s st the latest.
A factoid is a fact commonly thought to be true, but is actually false.
There are two definitions of the word according to Merriam-Webster. The second one is used accurately here.
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.
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.
The reverse example of this is musicians who play techno with analog instruments, like Pipe Guy, Basstong, and Meute[0][1][2].
There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.
EDIT: having said that, I don't think I would agree with your premise, because it is colored by a subtle form of survivor bias. None of us remember what it's like to not know electronic guitars or what they sound like, so claiming "the audience intuitively understands what Jimmy Hendrix is doing" is like saying everyone "intuitively understands" their native language. On top of that there's nothing about the workings of an electronic guitar that wouldn't in principle work for something like an electronic violin or whatever.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0gED3rn2Tc
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn52b-bWfFM
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYtjttnp1Rs
Legends Never Die - Leagueoflegends + Ethnic Instruments by Belle Sisoski [1]. And no, I've never played LoL, I probably never will, and I haven't seen that series based on it (Arcana or something?) either.
Also, I haven't checked what Juno Reactor do these days, but their old work is phantastic. My fav show of them is Juno Reactor – Shango Tour 2001 Tokyo [2].
For electric violin, I love Ed Alleyne-Johnson [3]. Never seen him live (I'm not from UK) but I own a couple of his earlier works. It reminds me of that time when my dad was in his final years of his lives, and when he finally passed away. Makes me cry every time.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMIL1YbUQrI
[2] https://www.discogs.com/master/782091-Juno-Reactor-Shango-To...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Alleyne-Johnson
> And no, I've never played LoL, I probably never will, and I haven't seen that series based on it (Arcana or something?) either.
Same, and I also still think that's a cool performance. Will check out the other names you mentioned, thanks for the recommendations!
You might also enjoy Beardyman, if you haven't run across him yet. Does techno and other genres with nothing but his own voice and a shedload of ipads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYVUlx7BhhI
Nathan Flutebox Lee and Beardyman @ Google, London [1] is one of my favs. At the time it was available on 'Google Video' before they acquired YouTube. So I don't have a link to the orig. post. SPOILER: especially that theme with the Godfather when he says Google is just epic and balls.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfXaL9omQPs
Hadn't seen that one before, very fun! Did not know anyone can beatbox and flute at the same time. TIL
> There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.
I guess the part people don't like hearing is the implication techno is somehow not expressive. I'm not sure that it lacks expressiveness, but it is certainly more "controlled" than traditional music. When I first heard techno as a teenager in the 90s, my mind was blown. I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard Underworld [1], Photek [2], and Autechre [3]. I think I was attracted to these sounds _because_ they were so different. I think it's hard for electronic music fans like myself to accept the idea that it isn't expressive _because_ it is so different. Isn't it just a different kind of expression?
Still, people like what they like. I'm glad you found a version of dance music that works for you. I've long since moved on being judgmental about people's musical tastes. I think it's just wonderful that music exists at all!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5GjVvlmg3o [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xl1xzSRaV0 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6zT3kVtpHc
> I guess the part people don't like hearing is the implication techno is somehow not expressive.
I think of it more like a painter's palette: every instrument and tool involved in creating music has a different set of colors to choose from, and can also filter some "colors" out if we think of things like audio processing filters.
The tools and techniques typically used to produce techno filter out "colors" that feel essential to me to connect with a song, and yeah, that "controlled" aspect of it is probably a large part of that. That doesn't mean it's not expressive, it's just expressive in a way that I struggle to connect with.
EDIT: funny enough I actually have protanomaly, so my choice of analogy is slightly ironic there. Some visual art and design out there objectively looks terrible from my subjective experience, since the colors look completely off. But that doesn't mean I'm saying the art is objectively bad.
The whole thing about people being defensive is interesting. I love techno, but anyone who has learned other styles of music recognizes the repetitiveness and quirks of a lot of techno and some other electronic genres.
They do a great job with changing their timbre and tones but often ignore a bunch of other factors that make music interesting. Whether that is the rarity of time signatures other than 4/4, the way certain rhythms are locked into certain genres, the choices of keys used, the limited or missing chords, etc.. at some point you start hearing two electronic songs that sound totally different at a superficial level and you realize they're incredibly derivative of each other.
>musicians who play techno with analog instruments
just to be clear, Moog synthesizers (and a number of other brands) are electronic yes, but they are analog electronics.
Great recommendations. Throwing Klangphonics in the ring even though they use electronic instruments as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bixtQAq2LzE
Nice addition! First time I heard of them and I'm liking what I'm hearing so far.
And just to clarify: I don't dislike electronic instruments. I just think that on some subconscious level the human brain can detect other humans playing a live instrument. Like there's something "embodied" in the sound that is likely missing from a pure electronic instrument. And I needed that element to "unlock" access to techno.
Yep, there's a reason we have the industry term "humanization" in sound design, composition and arrangement.
Tons of work has been done on various modes of humanization by trying to parameterize and modulate these aspects over time. Timing accuracy, velocity variance, chance, etc.
A well-played instrument certainly feels like someone speaking and expressing themselves to you. There are attempts to capture this with MPE instruments such as the Osmose, or Imogen Heap's MiMU gloves.
https://www.expressivee.com/2-osmose
https://mimugloves.com/
There’s a big difference between ‘electronic’ analogue instruments in music, and digital sequenced synths.
I was trying to be inclusive by treating anything that can produce music as an "instrument", but I suppose you're right.
Hmmm, I disagree, having played electric and acoustic guitars for over two decades and begun learning piano and synths for the first time in 2025.
For one, you can’t easily play two melodies simultaneously across several octaves, using both of your hands, with an electric guitar.
Stringed electronic instruments do have their advantages, but so do the others. Each music making thing has its place in the spectrum.
Two books that have helped me greatly in my musical life, in case people haven’t heard of them, are The Listening Book, and Bridge of Waves, by W.A. Mathieu.
There are certainly guitarists who can play simultaneous melodies.
If you're limiting to a 6 string guitar the distance between the two melodies would be limited compared to a piano but guitars don't have to be limited to 6 strings.
Classical guitar is full of this kind of thing.
Having taken piano lessons but being more into guitar I think the thing is almost all people who play piano are introduced to this and it is a core concept in far more piano music than guitar music. But it is not impossible on guitar, and many works for piano that get adapted to guitar require the player to do so.
E.x. there are plenty of players who have studied and played the Well Tempered Clavier on guitar.
You can play with both hands on a Chapman stick, right hand can do the bass, the left the melody/chords or vice-versa (Chapman stick is played tapping the strings with both hands)
You are completely right about the polyphonic expressivity of piano. What I lack is the intonation (bending) of tone.
Guitars certainly have a more intimate connection between the touch of fingers and the sound, including the bending of the tone, one of Hendrix’s virtuosities.
Keyboards can approach that with polyphonic touch keys like the Hydrasynth (lean into keys, pressing them harder, for bending the tone in a configured patch), sustain pedals, and pitch bend/modulation controls, but not the nuanced touch of skin on a vibrating string.
I think synth guitars exist, too, but don’t know anything about them. The pedalboards are enough, maybe :)
> I think synth guitars exist
Of course they exists, just listen to Pat Metheny. There are Midi hexapickups that can play any synth with MIDI and full expression.
> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience
Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.
Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.
They're talking about electronic instruments there. The comment is about how electronic instruments don't generally match the physical expressiveness of acoustic instruments (like the Cello).
I'm talking about electronic instruments how they are deficient in expressiveness compared to your cello example.
> Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects.
The story is not quite so simple. Your synthesizer is going to have a buffered output so it wont have the complex impedance loading interactions with the amplifier as the guitar pickup.
This is actually critical to how early distortion effects such as the classic Fuzzface work and imo is essential for the kind of complex timbres you can produce with a guitar + tube amp.
In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.
So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again?
I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups.
The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.
This won't actually work.
A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound.
If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects.
There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered).
E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.
> So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again?
That is going to be something like a transformer to step down your line level signal and some series resistance to match the load to help drive the amp.
An actual coil pickup has reactive impedance that is frequency dependent and will result in a more complex interaction between the devices.
> The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature
Sure if you think like an engineer, but everything you are complaining about is what allows someone like Jimi Hendrix to do what he did with a guitar.
>the tube amp and the guitar are seperable
Eminently separable, but it's good to be aware of the tradeoffs.
Not magic at all, physics.
It's good to understand that high-impedance is not the biggest deal, but one thing about the magnetic pickups that not everybody realizes is the way that plugging directly into a tube (pre)amp basically magnetically couples the strings to the grid of the input tube.
And that grid has no further physical connection to any other components in the circuit, not even within the same tube, except for clouds of electrons and the flow that occurs among the electrodes.
That way your music basically starts out being sprayed through space directly from the strings which create the magnetic signal.
The thing about high-impedance is the way the relatively minuscule resistor values between the amp's input jack and the input grid's tube pin are so insignificant by comparison to the pickup internal impedance, that resistance might as well be zero.
The only reason there is a resistor in between the input jack and the input grid anyway is to accommodate a high-impedance input with better stability under wider conditions than otherwise.
Now you can get a righteous sound with any number of pedals in between the guitar & amp, especially if the battery power is used to boost the signal to more than the guitar puts out magnetically, and it's been the mainstream for so long people almost never consider doing it any other way.
It's just not the same magnetic coupling from the strings to the tube, you can't have both unless it's a tube pedal.
I've designed lots of solid state circuits too and there is plenty of excellence when coupling the same magnetic pickup directly to a silicon or germanium crystal lattice and going from there. Whether it's pedals or a pure solid-state amp. Instead of using any tubes at all.
Also some people prefer having tubes only for the audio output section, coupled to the magnetic speakers through the antique-style audio output transformer the old-fashioned way.
they're comparing an electric guitar to electronic instruments, like midi keyboards. An electric cello would be the same thing as an electric guitar in this context.
> have a fundamental problem with human expression.
How up to date is this opinion of yours? Expression on guitar is pretty intuitive, but modern electronic instrument manufacturers have been working on this problem and created modes of expression that definitely solve this problem.
For example, EWIs allow you to use breath control for expression with many of the same techniques available on actual wind instruments. Also many synths now have features like polyphonic aftertouch, pitch/mod wheels, which allow you to add expression to a note while it is playing. Apps and hardware exist which allow you to use novel methods of capturing motion or other forms of expression. And most modern synths/midi controllers allow you to decide what parameters are affected.
> Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical
That's an affectation. I can stand on my tiptoes and close my eyes when bending up a note on the synth the same as I can on the guitar. Neither affects the sound, and both are a conscious decision to project an appearance of "I'm really shredding"
> 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.
That can apply to any instrument once you "electrify" it. What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect processing? I play guitar, keys and trumpet, and while I agree that a casio keyboard has limited expression options, your opinion doesn't sound researched.
> created modes of expression that definitely solve this problem.
I certainly don’t agree with this as a musician who has tried most of these attempts by electronic music manufacturers.
> What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect
The difference lies in the pickup! On those other instruments you will be using a contact mic (piezo-transducer) wheras the solid body guitar is using an inductive coil.
The contact mic is going to pickup only physical resonance whereas the the coil is measuring an electromagnetic field. Plucking the steel string induces a change in voltage in the coil. This means that the coil can pickup all sorts of interesting electromagnetic interference from the tube amplifier that is all frequency dependent and involve that in whatever feedback loops are occuring.
So the difference in expression is in the oscillator type?
Are we using the same definition of "expressive"? I play synth, guitar and trumpet, and the trumpet is by far the most expressive of the three, both musically and physically. You have basically all the same options for expression that you do with a human voice (vibrato, dynamics, glissando, etc) plus the expressive techniques offered by the instrument mechanics (for example: half-valving, trills, lip slurs, using a plunger as a LPF).
Sure you need a microphone or contact mic, but again that's just your source of your oscillator. After that, sound design is just sound design. I'm not saying everybody should play electric trumpet, but it's just absurd to make blanket statements like "electric guitar is the most expressive electronic instrument".
My whole point is about comparing electric/electronic instruments. I NEVER said that the guitar is the best acoustic instrument. I explained how there is a difference between the way a guitar works with a coil pickup versus other instruments with a contact mic but you don't care.
I don't really want to keep arguing with you. You can win the thread if you want. Congratulations!
> I NEVER said that the guitar is the best acoustic instrument.
Me neither? This thread was about expressiveness. I asked the OP why they think guitar is more expressive than anything else and you responded with information about how pickups interact with amps.
> What makes a guitar more expressive than a cello or trumpet with a pickup/mic running through effect
A whammy bar?
You can bend pitch on both trumpet and cello, it's the kind of skill you'd expect most highschooler players to have.
Great argument -- but I'd also counter that "the turntable" (i.e. in the hands of experts like Q-Bert, Craze, Rob Swift, Jazzy Jeff and others) fits this quite well -- especially re your "have the audience understand what he is doing argument"
Haha that is a great highly expressive counter example! However, as far as versatility of sound I still think the guitar+tube amp wins as you have access to all of western music theory and techniques as its still a traditional string instrument.
Oh I'll fight you there. Turntable wins because you have access to LITERALLY ALL RECORDED MUSIC EVER :)
Instantly? Out of your head? Also for something really new and creative? ;)
There have been some interesting keyboard input devices coming out which allow for more expression than normal piano keys, using a sort of hack to the MIDI system called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression. For example the Seaboard Rise or the Osmose. Depending on the instrument it's possible to do per-note pitch bends, change pressure while holding notes, perform vibrato etc. Visually the physical movement is not as interesting as electric guitar though, so yours probably still wins.
> 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.
Electric bass? Heck, even in synthesizers, you have the EWI or the Haken Continuum.
Guitar (and bass) are obviously and far and away the most successful, but it does a disservice to a number of wonderful inventions to say they're the only ones. Just look at what the Japanese band T-SQUARE does with the EWI to see people innovating at the edges.
I feel like the synthesizer--CMI Fairlight, Moog anything, Synclavier, PPG Wave, and just the general concept of modular synthesis--are pretty staunch competitors. Yours is certainly a fun and fair take, and arguably the electric guitar+tube amps birthed so many genres (blues, soul, funk, rock, punk, metal, etc) where as synthesizers remained pretty niche with their contribution to experimental music and pop music, mixing in with rock funk and disco, and the titan of EDM that grew out of that.
This comment is a love letter to electric guitar. I adore it. Consider reading “Desolation Road” by Ian McDonald. I don’t want to spoil any of it, and perhaps science fiction isn’t your cup of tea, but at one point there is a character on Mars with a 700-year-old strat, and you can tell Ian McDonald loves the guitar as much as you do.
You could argue that it's one of the most versatile instruments, sure. "Greatest" is completely subjective.
But is it one of the most versatile instruments? You can do signal transforms with any kind of audio input, although it's done more with the electric guitar than any other instruments.
I would say it in practice, it has the most versatile sonic profile.
A modular synth is more versatile in terms of enumerated signal transformations. Its the ability to be expressive with those signal transformations that makes the guitar+tube amp what it is.
I'm a guitarist, but also have a modular.
With the right interface, I think the synth can be more expressive. Look at the Haken Continuum or ExpressiveE Osmose - both can be used with something like the Expert Sleepers FH-2 to get MPE data to the modular.
I do see your point, and agree the amount of articulation you can do with guitar is hard to beat, but I do think a synth can win, if the setup is built for it.
Synths with mod wheels are the bomb, I used to have a roland that had a pitch wheel for bends and then push it for tremolos, vibratos and such, and way more voices, envelopes etc and that was a few decades ago and I'm sure that nowadays guitars are not going to compete except at one thing, making guitar sounding noises, you can get guitary sounds but somehow they come off to me to be too clean and lack the slop that various fingerings produce lol
Ahem, just two words. Yamaha DX-7.
Synth music elevated electric bound tones to anything ever heard.
I remidn you that most of the rock and roll and rock music was about speed and mimicking the sound of a rumbling car engine, as it was a symbol of the freedom in America, being able to run away from your toxic communities to find yourself better anywhere else.
That was the message for the young with rock and roll: a speedy engine for your ears.
Electronic music was like replacing a car with UFO evoking you a space travel.
With the progressive subgenre of techno music you got the same feeling, but with no subtle hints. Heck, one of the most known songs in Spain ever, "Flying Free", literally remixes the sounds of drifting cars between the melodies, making the listener really happy in a very direct way as tons of youngs in the 90's got into the outskirt night clubs... by car. So they felt as driving an infinite highway rave with no end for days.
The amusing thing (to me at least) is that while the DX7 gave users almost infinite options as to how they could create and shape sounds, if you know what to listen for you'll hear the E PIANO 1 and BASS 1 presets an about half of all mid 80s hits. Turns out when they gave musicians a tool with immense flexibility, many of them still chose to use two of the (admittedly great) preset sounds.
Apparently this happens every time. A sample disk included with tracker software was used in hundreds if not thousands of modules and pretty much defined the sound of the Amiga.
https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw
Few program synthesizers. Most just use presets. Infinite freedom is paralyzing. Building blocks are comfortable.
To be fair, a lot of that is because the DX7 (or rather, FM synthesis in general) is just absolutely arcane when it comes to programming.
Yup. FM Synthesis is challenging enough to implement, but doing so on the DX7's interface is a whole other level of frustrating. It's far from the hands-on interfaces of most subtractive or modular synthesizers.
The DX-7 FM synthesis opened the door to a pretty narrow but interesting range of sounds, bells and brass, which people loved and it was a ripsnorting success for a time, but it didn't displace subtractive analog synths and people aren't exactly playing FM synthesizers any more, while they are now heavily back into analog subtractive. of course there are also romplers and samplers etc. and those can achieve sounds that FM did, but it's hard to call the DX-7 any type of be-all end-all.
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.
Imogen Heap created a set of gloves that transform finger flexing and wrist movement into midi signals you can use in whatever way your performance software allows.
https://mimugloves.com/gloves/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq52kT6YY-0
Similar to the Theremin is the ondes Martenot. Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) describes it as a "very accurate Theremin".
You can hear it particularly on "Where I End and You Begin" from Hail to the Thief. Ed O'Brien compliments its sound using an EBow (back before he had the sustainer) in that song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondes_Martenot
Yes! I always think first of How to Disappear Completely, which I think was the first song he used it on. I remember watching some concert in college from the Kid A days, and he would have like 3 Ondes Martenot players on stage with them, crazy stuff from the band that wrote Creep like 5 years earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvWwMhRsRgo
This video might be the best explanation for Creep, which while they never wanted to record it; they do acknowledge it set them up to be able to do everything since. But a lot of Pablo Honey is mediocre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlhaJqqIfCE
This is also cool; live version of How to Disappear Completely at the start and one of the few Jonny interviews where he speaks. From a documentary on the Ondes Martinot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B92ZgRSM2tI
Very cool! I'm confused why you didn't link the video of Radiohead wearing all black and playing at MTV Spring Break :-).
I was VERY deep into Radiohead in college (early 2000s), and love all of these videos; I'm pretty sure I've seen that 2nd video footage around the time of the Kid A tour, but the dates are wrong. Kid A is probably one of my 5 deserted island albums.
I was never an MTV viewer, and came by Radiohead through JJJ radio (Australia).
My ah-ha moment was the release of Ok Computer. First heard the album driving in my car and was instantly blown away. Before that Creep, the singles from the Bends were just some of the better BritPop stuff I was into at the time.
Saw them early '98 on the tour which cemented them as my favourite band. They played Creep, but the high point was going out on Street Spirit.
>"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."
Look at Roli Seaboard, it has insane amount degrees of freedom / expression
https://youtu.be/2fQbtp2BgY4?si=S52A-22A3GlXPajU
past the middle starts solo
No two trumpet players sound the same. I know who is playing just by the tone. Listen to Herb Alpert / Al Hirt / Maurice Andre, all playing the same instrument, but wildly different.
I generally reserve the word electronic to mean something with a microcontroller or discreet logic components. Electronic guitars exist, but they're basically differently shaped keyboards.
I often lament the lack of other electric instruments.
I have come around to the idea of guitars being electronic instruments. Strings are the original oscillators. Once they become electrical signals it isn't clear to me how they differ categorically from any other electric instrument. There are an almost infinite number of pedals, many of which offer things like filters, LFOs, and other synthesis stalwarts. You could even make the guitar a controller for more traditional synthesis work.
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.
I think you misunderstand my comment entirely. I'm not comparing electric to acoustic instruments at all.
Strange article. Even though I do like music and engineering.
>Electromagnetic pickups—(...)—fixed the loudness problem. But they left a new one: the envelope
Was it really a problem to be solved? Good tube amplifiers already existed back then. Clean guiar tone was not something frowned upon.
>Hendrix’s mission was (...)
>His solution was (...)
I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.
> I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.
1,000,000%. Guitar is one of those hobbies where people mythologize and build elaborate hagiographies around players they like and the gear that they used. Hendrix was a generational talent but I highly doubt he was sitting around enumerating problem statements and systematically exploring solution spaces. The Fuzz Face was one of like four dirtboxes available during that time so he chose that one. He flipped a guitar upside down because he could source one more easily than a lefty model. He leveraged feedback because he discovered it naturally and realized that he could make it sound totally badass.
The man clearly had a vision and executed it but his decisions were pragmatic, not the product of grand technical reasoning. It reminds me of the student who wrote a bunch of authors and asked to what degree they were conscious of the themes and symbolism in their work [1]. Many were not - as it turns out English teachers often put the cart before the horse. This is the rock and roll version of that.
I can't knock the article though as it has a lot of sound (pun intended) analysis in it as opposed to typical guitar forum dreck about NOS tube and hand-wired turret board magic.
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-...
> He flipped a guitar upside down because he could source one more easily than a lefty model.
I've read that he claimed he played a right-handed guitar upside down because his father was superstitious and didn't like him doing things left-handed, so he'd play a right-handed guitar upside down most of the time and flip it over when he needed to play in front of his father. (I'm not sure why he didn't play a lefty guitar upside if that was the case, but I could imagine that the availability might be relevant like you mentioned, or maybe his father was familiar enough with guitars to be able to recognize a left-handed one and figure out what was going on, or maybe because he was better left-handed he could play it upside-down well enough but due to not being right-handed he would have found it more difficult to play it in the non-standard way).
Yes. The article had about the same effect as explaining a joke.
Titles like this just reiterate that people don’t take systems engineers/ing seriously.
It's clearly titled by someone who doesn't know what systems engineering is.
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.
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...
I took my introductory college writing classes at a college I can’t name-drop without sounding like a jerk, which also did a bunch of LLM research over the years. We used a TON of em dashes in our writing. It’s no mystery, to me, where that stylistically prevalent quirk comes from. I’ve definitely been accused of being an LLM bot.
I just wanted to relate a story.
I was speaking with my 14 year old nephew via messaging last month. It was about a deep topic, synthetic consciousness. He wrote such an intelligent reply that I asked him: hey, was this from an LLM? He was insulted. I did research with his parents and found out that 90% no, he's just a very smart kid.
Is there a name for this this mode of confusion yet?
He was insulted on two counts. Firstly doubting his intelligence. Secondly the insinuation of deception: "You aren't that smart, surely you cheated."
The insulting didn't end there. You asked his parents! Even then you only landed at 90%, yet another insult because why can't he earn 100%? Ethical dilemmas on all sides!
Strikes me as an opposite of the Uncanny Valley.
Indeed. Along the same lines, the recent "humans parading as agents" on moltbook story made me think... what is the inverse of the goal of captcha? That's impossible practically, right?
The last person who said that to me we John Klinenburg, Cornell.
Yes, suspected LLM is mimicry passing under the turning test,encheapened by poor editing, further encheapened by even poorer training. It is going to get both worse,and better at the same time. (I grew up with ELIZA.BAS, and used to easily spot fakes, and it is getting both easier and harder. ) I detest the words of LLM, but not the M. It's a statistical model. It is a very large language statistical model - that is constantly fooling slower hoomins.
That policy doesn't explicitly disallow writers from using LLMs as part of their process, nor does it mention reviewing submissions for content that could be LLM-generated.
I like some of the ideas in the article but there are some very "it wasn't just A, it was B" sentences in there. IEEE has a higher standard.
Schools have a strict Generative AI policy as well, and yet...
Even this commentary looks like it's written by an LLM.
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.
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.
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. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.
I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
Ahh... Someone well read who has taste. Thanks.
I didn't see any LLM-isms. Emdashes I guess, but I expect those in actual articles, they're only fishy in social media comments.
It doesn't read like an LLM to me. What are you seeing?
Look for a tiny mistake, like someone who is a native speaker of another language would NOT make. Eustomer. What?
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Ironic because IEEE Spectrum has an anti-LLM policy. So your complex about LLM writing styles has indirectly caused you to stop supporting genuine prose.
Seriously there's no LLM stuff in here. Only emdashed which were used in journalism decades before AI was even a thing.
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.
The way this article was written, is the standard way these kind of US pop science articles have always been written. It's LLM that absorbed that, not the opposite.
Good thing I said moving forward
The amazing thing is that Hendrix during live performances has the same wonderful effects as he got in the studio. I only saw Hendrix play live one time, that was in San Diego a few weeks before he died in England.
> I only saw Hendrix play live one time
I love how nonchalantly you threw this one in. I am proper jealous, how was it?
On your first remark, I agree. This is why I love Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler. The studio recordings are amazing, and then you listen to their live stuff and it's even better.
Interestingly, to me Hendrix and Knopfler feel kinda like creative opposites. Knopfler plays much cleaner and with much more variety, he has written many songs that are catchy in different ways (which is almost impossible for any musician), he basically achieves every goal that a beginner musician could choose to chase. And yet his stuff feels like a creative dead end, a dreary road leading to adult contemporary. While Hendrix has no songs to speak of and only one sloppy screechy sound, but it's the sound that launches a thousand bands and feels inspiring even now. Maybe the lesson we're supposed to learn is that we shouldn't choose what goal to chase, we should just feel it.
I think what you are trying to say is that Hendrix captured a specific sound and won over a generation of listeners, while Knoplfer displayed a mastery of the instrument, rarely seen in the mainstream. However, don't underestimate him, they sold out Wembley 16 nights in a row in '85, I am sure that spring some bands. It's now a bit forgotten, but for a period of few years, Dire Straits were the biggest band in the world. Knopfler is usually associated with saying "your favorite guitarist's favorite guitarist" :)
The guitarist most frequently named as favorite by famous guitarists is Hendrix, second is Van Halen. Also often named are SRV, Jimmy Page and so on. I don't know anyone famous who names Knopfler as favorite.
It's subjective, guitarists such as Knopfler, Clapton, Belew, Fripp, et al all rank highly for many.
I', m not sure I'd trust the judgement of any with a single absolute favourite <anything>, reality is generally rich with competing strengths and weaknesses.
Hendrix seemed like a really nice guy. His vibe was that he loved everyone in the audience. I was close to the stage and took some nice pictures using Anschrome 500 that I developed myself pushing it to 1000 ASA. Treasure those pictures.
Same with Pat Metheny, Al Di Meola and some others of that vintage.
If you can track it down, Hendrix's home recordings are a gem.
https://jimihendrixrecordguide.com/home-recordings/
(edit: syntax)
I like how the phone rings in the background on Gypsy Eyes. Wonder who called?
Voodoo Chile lyrics: "on the night I was born the moon turned fire red".
Poetic license? Stellarium reveals on the early evening of November 27, 1942 in Seattle, the moon was low on the horizon - just 25 degrees altitude at 5:30pm, directly East. The sun set at 5pm. While not a full moon it was 85%, so I'm calling it! The moon may have glowed a warm orange-red on the night (of the day) Hendrix was born.
https://archive.org/details/05-voodoo-chile-cherokee-mist
Thank you for this. I lost that CD years 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.
The podcast "History of Rock in 500 Songs" (full disclosure: I am a devout, slavering fan) provides these on the regular. I was actually smiling when I heard a fairly new song that attempts a really flat, fuzzed out sound because it made me think, "Buddy Holly invented that by accident with a broken speaker". One of the episodes on The Who goes into the Marshall behind Marshall amps in similar detail.
I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.
I’ve heard a few people strongly recommend that pod. I’ll check it out
What’s the newer song you mention with the flat fuzz?
I wish I could remember. I suppose if I look at Last.fm for the past weekend I might find it, but your basic Jack White-style scuzz rock.
Oh wow! This is incredible...thanks for sharing.
Ha, you won’t be thanking me once it consumes your life. Join us. We all float down here.
Omg man, thanks for ruining my life! I wish I would have this when I was obsessed with it as a teenager in 2010s, and no one else liked similar music.
It's what I am here for. Literally.
You can guess what I have been doing for the past 2 days :) Coincidentally, the last episode was about a song from my favorite album, so it was meant to be ;)
Brian May stands out even among that group (well maybe not w/ Les Paul there)
The guy built his own guitar as a teenager and has played it for the rest of his career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special
"Muddy Waters invented electricity!" -- Willie Brown, Crossroads (movie), 1986
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHMv0ORn0hg
YES! Saw this movie 40 years ago and started playing guitar the next day. Haven't stopped since. Thanks, Steve Vai!
Anyone doing something artistically great is engineering in some way. The Renaissance painter, the ableton producer. It all involves mastery of tools.
That's stretching the term to the breaking point, for me. Is there some evidence of systematic analysis of component parts? attempts to model elements of the problem? data gathering and data analysis? simulation? Intentional application of principles of physics or some other pure domain to a real world problem?
Artistic endeavors come from lots of places, not just people with an analytical mindset. Historically those two are seen as opposing tendencies, which I think is unfair, but it points to the importance of intuition and navigating perception and emotion for artists.
> Is there some evidence of systematic analysis of component parts?
Music theory, Nashville notation
> attempts to model elements of the problem?
Ditto
> data gathering and data analysis?
Listening to a wide variety of music and understanding what make a genre a genre
> simulation?
Cover songs, writing to a style
> Intentional application of principles of physics or some other pure domain to a real world problem?
Literally sound engineering
Iannis Xenakis?
quite the stretch
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 ...
The caption on the photo is clearly wrong. No way the other two are Mitch Mitchell (not "Mitchel" (sic)) or Noel Redding, not at any time when Jimi was alive.
Even after The JH Experience, Noel Redding went on to do the band Fat Mattress, and he still had big curly/wavy hair, no moustache, didn't look or dress like an Arby's manager.
I'm pretty sure that's engineer Eddie Kramer at left. https://www.google.com/search?q=eddie+kramer.
No apparent way to submit corrigenda.
Incredible article, as a lifelong Hendrix fan, nicely done.
Why is that pic labelled with the wrong names? Pretty sure that isn't Mitch and Noel.
Eddie Kramer?
I love that the AI jumped the Super Lead, but then proceeds to plug the guitar cable into the the power switch. Nice!
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.
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 :)
We should not call ourselves engineers - it's a massive insult to actual professional engineers.
Speak for yourself, some of us value and incorporate both science and methodology into our craft, and adhere to a system of ethics.
That's great, but it doesn't make you or any of us engineers.
Just because I drive my car with immense focus, make precision shifts, and hit the apex of all of my turns when getting onto and off of the freeway doesn't make me a race car driver.
Engineers don't just feel good vibes about science and mix it into their work. It is the core of their work.
Simply having a methodology absolutely is not sufficient for being an engineer.
And great, you have an arbitrary system of ethics, like everyone does I imagine. But no one holds you to these ethics.
Care to share your operational definition of the word "engineer"?
you should probably watch https://www.hillelwayne.com/talks/crossover-project/
Does this make Johnny Marr a Manc rocket scientist because he rigged a bunch of pedals together to create the tremolo effect in How Soon Is Now?
It was even crazier than that, it was four Fender Twin Reverbs!
Considering the amount of watts involved in this, it probably qualifies as rocket science haha
JM: Yeah. The tremolo sound from the intro? That was four Fender Twin Reverbs. Myself controlling the speed of two of them and the producer controlling the speed of the other two. So two amps were recorded on one side of the stereo and the other two on the other side. I recorded the part on the tape without the tremolo, and then I sent the part from tape out to four amps, and he controlled two, and I controlled the other two.
And it took a long time because inevitably the tremolo would go out of time with the track because the tremolo doesn't stay in regular clock time. Also we would go out with each other's amps, so we had to keep looking up at each other after every fifteen second bursts and kind of fess up, "Oh yeah, mine kind of went out of time." It took long time, but I'm glad we did it that way because if we had cut and pasted two seconds of audio, it wouldn't have had the same dynamic quality throughout the six minutes of the song, or however long it is.
https://www.westword.com/music/johnny-marr-on-how-he-created...
A compressor pedal was the best thing I bought when trying to imitate Mark Knopfler doing Sultans of Swing. Not only does it sound good but a fender with a compressor is also much easier to play than an acoustic guitar.
For a better example of the guitar as a synth like feedback device listen to robert fripps solo on heroes by bowie. He used markings on the studio floor to achieve the desired tone.
The more i get into electric guitar, the more i realize that i am grateful for my physics background as i try to figure out pedals lol.
Here I was thinking he was a musician all these years...
Maybe I’m falling suspect to that “everything is a LLM now”. But it feels like the author has never held a guitar.
The illustration at the top of the page has the guitar the wrong way around.
Jimi was left handed
No he wasn't. Sorry, but being a systems engineer will never be as cool as being a revolutionary musical genius. On the plus side you probably get to live 2-3 times longer.
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.
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.
I'm here for all the Jimi love. Cool read
Crazy example of when everything is AI generated, even the code referenced in git repo (refer to commit 3d733ca), and actually interesting and "new" in a way...
There’s a git repo associated with this article?
I’m curious because to tell you the truth the novelty struck me as similar to comparisons I’ve toyed with using LLMs on my own. The AI-generated logic between comparing two dissimilar things is too sterile for my liking.
I understand that this is appearing in technical publication, but for some reason that invites even further scrutiny on my behalf.
Please share more reasons behind your suspicions.
Here's the repo https://github.com/nahorov/Hendrix-Systems-Lab
Hmm. Yes. Does look like vibe work. Other comments here point to some technical inconsistencies that may support this claim further.
I guess that makes Usain Bolt a physicist?
Dumb title.
Fascinating
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.
Base 1, collector 2?
"A groove engineer baby"
Hendrix reportedly discovered feedback by walking away from a cranked amp. The guitar just kept sustaining on its own. What followed was years of empirical system identification: learning how body position, pickup selection, and guitar-to-amp distance affected feedback character. No transfer function, just iteration. That's a valid engineering methodology.
What??? Where did you get this idea?
Any guitarist in a 1940s big band would have a big hollowbody guitar and an amp. That combination is incredibly prone to feedback. Everyone worked to reduce feedback and avoid it. That's what I do with my hollowbody when I play with a big band. It's the first thing that happens when you turn up.
Hendrix did not "discover" feedback, and in fact he did not discover the musical uses of feedback - you can hear it in BB King records that predate Hendrix, where feedback makes his notes "sing."
What Hendrix did was turn feedback into an intentional musical creation that he treated as a melodic voice.
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Jimi on the radio is my shorthand for bad economic times. Happened in 2007 and he's playing on the airwaves now
Interesting economic indicator. But isn't Jimi playing on the radio all the time somewhere?
I prefer the Circle Jerks:
And God is a DJ.
This is my church.
Last night a DJ saved my life
Hang the DJ
What do we say to the DJ?