An evening off...

Not much of an evening off, really. I will, however, elbow some room into my schedule to read a little Thomas Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been sitting next to my bed for a few months now. I did take the car and drive to Guitar Center tonight to look at pedals, you know, for fun. I have $100 to spend on pedals today, and I spent it on a used Boss Flanger (BF-3). I love that store, what with all the guitars and the sound effects and everyone treating you like you are sooooo cool. I believe the proper form of address there is "man," as in, "Hey, man, can I help you?" or, "If there's any pedal you want to hear, I'm right here, man," or, "That will be $65, man." It's like a verbal tick, almost.

I did not play my future Gibson while I was there. It would only have broken my heart. There is exactly the guitar I want up on craigslist right now for $500, but that's cash, dang it.

I have been trying to figure out exactly what the mechanics of my guitar set up are. I get the whole "vibrating string in the general area of a magnet (the pick-up) generates an electrical current" thing. I think I even understand why humbuckers, uh, buck hum (it has to do with destructive interference, I think). I would like to know why the tone that I hear when a string is plucked but the guitar is not plugged in is the same as the tone that comes out of the amp when it is. The other things that intrigues me is what the effects pedals are doing to the sine wave (does that make sense? if not, then, "doing to the signal"). It seems that realistically, there are only so many things that you can do to a sine wave. You can fiddle with the wavelength, changing the frequency, jack up the highs and lows (or just the high or just the lows), zoom in on just one part at a time (wah sweeps from high frequency to low to high, making that porno sound), you can delay and double the signal a little bit (reverb, digital delay/decay), you can alter the shape of the curve dramatically (so instead of a curve you get basically slopes that come to points), you can step up and down through the frequencies sharply, and you can cut off the highs and lows (distortion). You can make them louder and softer. You can shave off fuzzy bits, accenting the highs and lows, I suppose (compression)...what else? How many aspects are there to the signal that can be manipulated? The nice thing, however, is that you can mix and match signals. Say you want to play a jangly Edge-style thingy. Well, compression gives you clear(er) tones, chorus gives you an eighties sound (I think by creating slightly detuned echoes), digital delay gives you the repeat and decay that you want. (I hear that he actually runs digital delay twice for extra Edgy goodness.) But you don't have to stop there! You can add or subtract sounds to your little heart's delight. Of course, if you get to wacky, you end up just making noise, which can be fun.

Oh, feedback. Forgot about feedback. I can't control feedback only because I would have to play very very loudly. There are reportedly pedals out there that can give you feedback and other sound effects, but I've never tried them. Oh, another nifty thing that is out there is use one aspect, say, the strength of the signal as determined by how hard you hit the string to trigger a wah sound. This way, you can play a single notes quietly without extra distortion, but when you start really smashing the suckers, your wah/phaser effect comes on. I guess you can split signals (well, other people can) and then run them through different effects chains. I would have to think about that to figure out how that might be different from running it through a series of effects in parallel. Ok, I thought about it. It would be different, depending on the order and type of effects.

Anyway, that's me thinking out loud about pedals.

Now, what about autotune?



HJ