Something Rich And Strange

[David]

at this point, we can't write science fiction fast enough.

Does anyone but me find it depressing that we got to the moon in 1969, left it in the early 70's and never went back?

Completely! What's more depressing, though, is that NASA supposedly had a manned Mars program scheduled for the 1970's, but the Vietnam war ate up the funding.  I may be conservative in my politics, but not in my science.  I believe that one of the best things the U.S. government could do would be to create a Mars initiative along the lines of the moon program.  That's almost sure to spawn another technology boom -- which couldn't possibly hurt us DIY types.

<Sigh>  OK, I'm calm again.

[Doug_H]

at this point, we can't write science fiction fast enough.

Does anyone but me find it depressing that we got to the moon in 1969, left it in the early 70's and never went back?

Yes.

I was 16 in 1969...
I was also living in Dallas when they were building the super-collider --i used to drive by and watch the construction...

-Eric

I was 10. We were in a friend's backyard and watched Apollo 11 launch across the river.

IMO, over my adult life we have squandered an opportunity to inspire a generation.

Doug

[inverseroom]

at this point, we can't write science fiction fast enough.

Does anyone but me find it depressing that we got to the moon in 1969, left it in the early 70's and never went back?

It was fun getting there, but there wasn't much to do once we arrived...

BTW, I have two words that should stand as a challenge to someone out there (not me, at least not this week):

MODULAR STOMPBOX.

Can you see it?  Little mini plug patchcords trailing all over the place?  It would be awesome.

[vanhansen]

at this point, we can't write science fiction fast enough.

Does anyone but me find it depressing that we got to the moon in 1969, left it in the early 70's and never went back?

Yes.

I was 16 in 1969...
I was also living in Dallas when they were building the super-collider --i used to drive by and watch the construction...

-Eric

I was 10. We were in a friend's backyard and watched Apollo 11 launch across the river.

IMO, over my adult life we have squandered an opportunity to inspire a generation.

Doug

I wasn't born until 2 years after the landing.  I do find it pretty sad that all that NASA has done since with a manned craft is go up in orbit around Earth for a few months and come back down.  Perhaps the man on the moon doesn't want us back    Maybe it's not really made of cheese,  :shock:  

[David]

I've got some designs for light speed motors, but they're rather 'large'...
 Still I see no reasons other than the massive energies/efforts it would take to prototype, that either of them wouldn't work! [might take a few tries !!! L O L !!! Like 'anything else 'new to you'].

Pete:

What's really needed is a propulsion system for faster-than-light travel.  Stephen Hawking says he doesn't think it can be done.  I've heard that others believe it's at least theoretically possible.  Hmmm...  time will tell.

Maybe there's a Stargate buried somewhere...

[puretube]

thru-zero-lightning !  

[smashinator]

at this point, we can't write science fiction fast enough.

Does anyone but me find it depressing that we got to the moon in 1969, left it in the early 70's and never went back?

Like the ad said, we found out there wasn't any cheese.  Why SHOULD we go back?  

[RDV]

I'm just getting used to these opposable thumbs.

RDV

[NaBo]

doesn't bush have a plan to go back to the moon?  David Cross has a whole bit about it so it must be true.  

[ryanscissorhands]

at this point, we can't write science fiction fast enough.

Does anyone but me find it depressing that we got to the moon in 1969, left it in the early 70's and never went back?

Yes, because I MUST see a WWE Wrestling pay-per-view on the moon someday.

I don't particularly like wrestling anymore, but I do want to see someone get thrown  from an 80' cage, and jump back up to the top to continue the match.

Someday. . .

[ryanscissorhands]

Remember folks, we are still early on in guitar effects history. (Although history has accelerated this century, but humor me. . .). Think about it--the world of electric guitar is less than a century old. I think. Or close to it. Although we think it's all been done, it's just gotten started. Think about how many hundreds of years of craftsmanship have gone keyboard instruments. THAT is a well-developed craft. Electric guitars? Not so much.

Guitar effects are so incredibly young, when you think about the history of music. I certainly hope it hasn't all been done.

[Mark Hammer]

Around 1977 or 78 or so, I went to this guy's house regarding some transaction involving audio equipment.  I think I was either selling him or buying from him some Dynaco stuff.  Anyways, the guy was a certified dyed in the wool audiophile.  The kind of guy that "Absolute Sound" relies on for subscribers.  For his woofers he had sunk concrete pipes THROUGH the floor of the living room extending to the floor of his basement, so that his speakers would have, as "cabinets" a pure cylinder of matching diameter and of suitable length.

I thought him a bit...."extreme".  In conversation, though, he said to me, waving with one arm to all his audio equipment sitting on the shelves of his living room, "One day, all this stuff, or most of it, will be obsolete.  You'll get your music digitally.  It'll just be digital information that you'll either get on a chip or load into RAM.  No discs.  No tape."  My initial response was "Yeah, right.  Best move to the side because monkeys are about to fly out of my butt any moment now and you wouldn't want to get hurt."

Sometimes, just sometimes, the weirdos are more right than you'd like to think or expect.

[bwanasonic]

BTW, I have two words that should stand as a challenge to someone out there (not me, at least not this week):

MODULAR STOMPBOX.

Some crazy guy here has plans for it.  Remember that Guy?:wink:

Craig Anderton had plans for a switching system that would allow flexible routing/re-routing of effects. The Blue Ringer has got me interested in CV control, and I've done some work with strange feedback loops in audiomulch.

My short list of desired features:

-A fuzz/OD/square wave type section
-envelope control
-A couple of LFOs
-VCF section(s)
-configurable phase shifter
-Pitch control/ harmonizer/octave up-down, etc.
-Ring Mod
-Feedback loop
-multiple delay sections
-virtual patch cords
-a full-time tech to keep it working :wink:

Kerry M

[Doug_H]

Sometimes, just sometimes, the weirdos are more right than you'd like to think or expect.

When it comes to predicting new trends or innovating new ways of doing things, I think they are right more often than not.

I had a supervisor once who had been to a "management psychology" kind of class. He was kind of a knucklehead, but he related all these categories of people that typically worked on engineering development teams. I'm sure you're familiar with this kind of thing, Mark, but one category was "the innovators". Supposedly these people were way out there ahead of everyone else in coming up with new ideas.  They weren't always necessarily able to apply the ideas in a pragmatic way or make them useful (coincidentally, many times they had difficulty tying their own shoes, holding normal conversations, or wearing glasses without tape on them, but I digress...)  Nevertheless, the ideas were usually very sound and they could fairly accurately predict what technological trends would catch on in the future.

FWIW, he claimed that my cronies and I were what they called "early adopters". Supposedly, these were people who could take what "the innovators" came up with and apply it pragmatically. I don't know... I don't put a lot of creedence into this kind of thinking. IMO people are too complex to boil down to a few categories (Sorry, Mark...     ).

It's interesting though.

Doug

[mat]

Remember folks, we are still early on in guitar effects history. (Although history has accelerated this century, but humor me. . .). Think about it--the world of electric guitar is less than a century old. I think. Or close to it. Although we think it's all been done, it's just gotten started. Think about how many hundreds of years of craftsmanship have gone keyboard instruments. THAT is a well-developed craft. Electric guitars? Not so much.

Guitar effects are so incredibly young, when you think about the history of music. I certainly hope it hasn't all been done.

Here in Finland some students developed air-guitar that has sound  :shock: It includes a gloves and their movements that computer  and camera records and calculates a sound depending of their placement/movement  

mat

[Mark Hammer]

Sometimes, just sometimes, the weirdos are more right than you'd like to think or expect.

When it comes to predicting new trends or innovating new ways of doing things, I think they are right more often than not.

I had a supervisor once who had been to a "management psychology" kind of class. He was kind of a knucklehead, but he related all these categories of people that typically worked on engineering development teams. I'm sure you're familiar with this kind of thing, Mark, but one category was "the innovators". Supposedly these people were way out there ahead of everyone else in coming up with new ideas.  They weren't always necessarily able to apply the ideas in a pragmatic way or make them useful (coincidentally, many times they had difficulty tying their own shoes, holding normal conversations, or wearing glasses without tape on them, but I digress...)  Nevertheless, the ideas were usually very sound and they could fairly accurately predict what technological trends would catch on in the future.

FWIW, he claimed that my cronies and I were what they called "early adopters". Supposedly, these were people who could take what "the innovators" came up with and apply it pragmatically. I don't know... I don't put a lot of creedence into this kind of thinking. IMO people are too complex to boil down to a few categories (Sorry, Mark...     ).

It's interesting though.

Doug

No apologies needed.  I agree with you, and when I have the opportunity to teach, that's exactly what I teach.

To the extent that I personally come up with "good ideas", I find it often comes from having looked at enough examples of something to be able to view it in the abstract.  Oft-times, we get too attached to something and are too close to it, because we are smitten with only one or two implementations of a much broader idea.  One of those can't-see-the-forest kind of things.

Though it is certainly not the only source of inspiration, one very deep well of ideas for musical effects is the human voice.  Often, what we want from our effects is the capacity to do the kind of "tricks" with instruments that we already know how to do with our mouths, tongues, and voicebox.  A couple of months ago, there was a thread concerning the PWM sound of the old Cars' song "Let's go".  Hell, who *hasn't* made that sound themselves?  So, what is currently sitting in YOUR voicebox?  What sound that drives your better half absolutely nuts might sound a little more interesting when it comes out of your guitar amp?

Another very deep well is psychoacoustics and human perception.  Once you have some understanding of how human audio perception works, and the sorts of things we rely on for intelligent hearing, it provokes thinking about how to trick or play with those capacities.  Indeed, from the emergence of linear perspective in Egyptian wall-paintings, to pointillism and fauvism, a huge chunk of the history of the visual arts is essentially a description of our emerging understanding of how human vision works, and attempts by painters to play with the principles of human vision...to effect.

Case in point to get you thinking.  One of the quirks of flangers and chorusses is that as the delay time changes, human attention gets shifted from the number of notches to the degree of pitch distortion and "stagger".  Realistically, the difference between flanging and chorus is merely one of time-delay *range*.  Shorter delays result notches being situated higher up in the spectrum, and less perceptible pitch change and dry/wet stagger.  As the delay time/range increases, the number of notches introduced by mixing dry/wet reaches, if not asymptote, at least a sufficiently high enough number that we direct our attention away from that.  Moreover, as the amount of time delay increases, it starts to become feasible to detect the amount of delay between wet and dry, and the amount of pitch alteration becomes more noticeable.

Okay, let's apply this exploration of human attention to a novel effect.  Imagine you have a delay-line being modulated at something like, say 0.8hz (so a little slower than one sweep per second; more of a "throb" than bubbly or slow-creep-up-on-you).  Now, imagine that this modulation source sits atop a much slower-changing DC voltage such that the clock it drives gradually moves the sweep range from flanging to chorus or vice versa.  What would that sound like to have your attention ever so slowly directed away from one set of sonic characteristics to another set?  Would there be a moment of confusion at some changeover transitional point, and is that confusion something one could integrate into a planned musical statement?

Here we start to get into the realm of analog modular synthesis.  I think it is no surprise to anyone that some of the niftiest and most fresh-sounding sonic ideas often come out of this domain, simply because it tends to provoke thinking about how things change over time and "What would happen if...".  Often, synthesists think in terms of not just "how would it sound?", but "How would it sound...to the listener?".  Embedded in that second approach is an awareness of human perception and expectation, and a desire to take those rules-of-thumb and play with them.

[Nasse]

http://www.mtv3.fi/uutiset/kevennykset/arkisto.shtml?2005/03/355952

I saw and heard that on TV, I think there is video clip on mtv3 link
Cooler playing but much duller idea was on Finland tv news many years ago when one computer student demoed his musical instrument keyboard made from ordinary PC. He played it just like accordion, performed "Säkkijärven polkka"

How about simple voltage controlled fuzz with presets...

[David]

How about simple voltage controlled fuzz with presets...

Yeah, like controlling the Hollis Omnidrive with R.G.'s ASMOP!

Man, I gotta stop thinking about effects and get some work done...

[Ge_Whiz]

1. There are only 26 letters (at least, in English). And there are only 12 notes in an octave. We could have more, but microtonal music just doesn't sell unless it's labelled 'the blues'.

2. We could go back to the moon. But, unfortunately, it was just well-baked rock. Near-earth orbit is far more useful, and just as interesting.

3. You don't need all 12 notes to play "Fly Me To The Moon".

4. Your descriptions of a modular stompbox sound like a synthesizer. There are more versatile ways to play a synthesizer than with a guitar. However, we love guitars and accept their limitations.

5. We are all discussing what sounds we would like to make. We all like making sounds or we wouldn't be here. But there's more to making music, even though music may be less dependent on sounds.

6. Life is not a dress rehearsal (thanks, Marty). Let's get doin'.

7. Digital music sucks (or does it? Discuss).

[Ge_Whiz]

8. Ban hence and forthwith, with immediate effect, the statement, "How do I get to sound exactly like...?"

9. ...and let us not forget that this thread was born out of yesterday's strife and torment.

PS How do I get my guitar to sound exactly like the wailing and gnashing of teeth?