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Sincerely,
– The YouTube Team
If I’m reading that right, they’re saying that if I don’t do anything, the guys at Spinnin’ Records can hijack and monetize my video, and start making money from my work. Niiiiice!
I’m generally very careful in my videos to avoid copyright issues. My intro/outro music is all composed and performed by me. And the guitar riffs I play are usually just improvisations or noodling, or perhaps inspired by another song (as with the riff inspired by Faces’ Had Me A Real Good Time at the beginning of my K-Tone Travel Guitar review).
There’s nothing quite like the experience of hearing the individual source tracks from a song you’ve known and loved all your life.
My first such experience was around the year 2000, while working at Thomas Dolby’s company Beatnik. I developed the mobile Beatnik Player (shown at right) and the Beatnik Editor which was used to produce a web-remix version of David Bowie’s Fame. This was waaay before the days of Rock Band and downloadable “stems” of Radiohead songs. It was mind-blowing to be able to solo the individual guitar riffs and drum tracks, and hear Bowie’s and Lennon’s voices isolated.
When iconic songs are so deeply internalized from a lifetime of listening- as is the case for me with most of the Beatles’ catalog- it’s almost surreal to hear the individual tracks. When listening to Beatles recordings in stereo, I often can’t resist adjusting the balance all the way to the left or right, to isolate the drums and guitars away from the voices, etc. You can get a bigger taste of this with Beatles Rock Band, if you have the patience to play a plastic guitar.
Recently my daughter Emily has fallen in love with Here Comes The Sun. I think they had her at “little darling”, but it’s easy to see how a six year old can be swept away by such an unabashedly optimistic and joyful song. This morning, I happened to come across this video, in which Beatles producer George Martin and his son Giles, as well as George Harrison’s son Dhani, are listening to the source tracks from this wonderful song, and unexpectedly discover a take of George’s guitar that never made it into the final mix. The look of on Dhani’s face is exactly what I’m talking about. Magic. Take a look:
This interface connects to the 30-pin dock, which as I described in my DIY iOS interface project, is the higher-fidelity lower-noise way to get audio into your iPhone/iPad. This is because there is a high-quality 24-bit 48kHz D/A in the interface itself, and the signal is transferred digitally into the iDevice.
Again, my main concern with this type of device is that it hangs off the bottom of your iPhone/iPad on that delicate dock connector, with the guitar cable plugged into that. It makes me nervous that the inevitable kick-the-cord accident will brick your $600 iPad. Also, the iPhone/iPad can’t charge while this is plugged in, so you have to make sure you’re fully charged up.
At $79.99, this is cheaper than the other digital guitar interfaces (Apogee Jam, Sonoma GuitarJack, etc). The iOS app is free, but is tied to the hardware. You currently can’t use the app with another interface.
Intriguing, but I’m not rushing out immediately to get one. Are you?
This unique pedal combines a looper with a nice delay modeler. It doesn’t do everything my old Echoplex did, but it’s a nice leap forward in technology- with stereo recording, tons of memory (and SD card expansion), stereo recording, USB connectivity and software librarian, not to mention some really nice delays.
But before we get to happiness, let’s first talk about a major manufacturing issue, nearly a total deal-breaker. If I hadn’t figured out a solution, I would have had to return the JamMan Delay and seek looper nirvana elsewhere. More
Here’s a great reference image, which clearly shows the differences between the typical A (audio/log), C (reverse audio/log), B (linear), and W (s curve) tapers. Less common are the K, D, and G tapers.
Here’s another excellent article on guitar pickups, courtesy of Pete Biltoft at Vintage Vibe Guitars. Thanks Pete for the permission to post this here!
August 2011
DC resistance measurements are widely used as a gauge of the “output” of passive magnetic pickups. This use of DC resistance is both technically incorrect and often misleading; to find out why, read on…More
A reader recently asked me a question about the low pass filter in a guitar tone circuit:
Will a 250k tone pot with a .02uF capacitor sound the same as a 500k pot with a .01uF capacitor (all else being equal)?
This is an interesting thought experiment, and the answer is simultaneously obvious and non-intuitive.
At first glance, you might be tempted to look at this standard low-pass filter schematic (borrowed from the LPF wiki), and the associated formula for cutoff frequency as 1/2piRC, and conclude that the two circuits would behave identically (since 250k*.02uF is the same as 500k*.01uF). However, the problem there is that the R in the formula is not the tone pot! That R is really the internal resistance of the guitar, or the resistance of the pickup.
In the tone circuit, the pot actually sits above the capacitor C, but below the branch to the output Vout, as shown at left. So, the formula for the cutoff frequency is more complex. In this analysis by a guitarist/mathematician named Bill, he suggests a formula for the cutoff frequency as follows:
How’s that for insanely non-intuitive?! Bill points out that the lower square root term only works with tone resistances less than about 20k (since otherwise the value would go negative producing imaginary numbers in the square root), thus explaining the often limited useful range of tone pots, and why log taper pots are more useful for tone than linear. Nevertheless, this seems to be an over-idealized formula, since in practice, I do see more variation in the tone pot even at higher resistances. This formula doesn’t seem to capture the full complexity of the reactive network made up of pickup inductor, and overall circuit resistance and capacitance (including cable capacitance).
Ok, so math is clearly the wrong way to think about this!! Too complicated! Back to the original question. Let’s think of it more simply. Imagine you turn both pots down to zero- you’re basically eliminating the variable resistance pot and wiring the cap directly to ground. Of course, the larger capacitance .02uF will sound darker than the .01uF. So they’re obviously not equivalent circuits.
Next up, experiment! Grab a couple pots, caps and some alligator leads and try it out! You’ll find that they do indeed sound quite different. The larger capacitance with the smaller pot resistance sounds darker, no matter how you slice it, when compared to the 500k pot and .01uF cap. Even with both pots up full, the larger capacitance with the smaller pot sounds a bit darker.
This all begs the question, why do guitar manufacturers often pair a 250k tone pot with a .047uF cap, versus the .022uF cap with 500k pots? The former will produce a darker sound both because of the larger capacitance but also because of the increased load on the pickup from the smaller resistance. “Double whammy” as Bill points out at the end of his paper.
Following last year’s All About Pickup Magnets, here’s another excellent article on guitar pickup magnets, courtesy of Pete Biltoft at Vintage Vibe Guitars. Thanks Pete for the permission to post this here!
In this article, Pete consolidates his own expert research on pickups, along with a bunch of information from the Wikipedia magnet entries and Magnet Kingdom, to give us an overview of magnets in general, as well an in-depth look at AlNiCo magnets for guitar pickups.More
I recently unveiled a new planetz logo in the intro of my AC15 Comparison video. Here’s the story.
In January 1999, when I launched my original website at planetz, I asked a brilliant digital artist friend, John Weir, to make a logo for me. He used a Mac and an SGI workstation, with programs like Adobe Photoshop and Fractal Design’s Painter, and produced a really interesting and unique piece of artwork for me:
Years later, when I asked him how he had produced it, he couldn’t really remember all the details other than “massive amounts of layers, filtering, distortion, plugins, etc”. And unfortunately the original file was lost, so he couldn’t give me a higher resolution version of it.
I really liked the rich colors, the cool “bubbles” and raking effects, and low-fi distortion of the characters making up the word “planet”. But, I always wished I had a larger, higher resolution version of it, especially as I started to get into high definition video. Also motivated by the shift to high definition video, I needed an image that didn’t crop so closely to the letters. And I kinda wished the Z was a bit curvier too.
So I recently set out to reproduce the logo from scratch, in a larger high resolution format. There’s no way I could make it identical, but I wanted to make something new, inspired by the original.
Using the free open source graphics editor GIMP (which has a lot in common with Photoshop), I spent countless hours experimenting and tweaking. I learned a lot, and made some interesting discoveries along the way. Here’s the finished result:
What follows is a detailed step-by-step guide for making this logo. More
I’m generally very careful in my videos to avoid copyright issues. My intro/outro music is all composed and performed by me. And the guitar riffs I play are usually just improvisations or noodling, or perhaps inspired by another song (as with the riff inspired by Faces’ Had Me A Real Good Time at the beginning of my K-Tone Travel Guitar review).
As I was initiating the dispute process,
