The Real Pat Blair

For all you guitar-playing calculator-toting nerd-rock types out there… or really, for anyone who cares… or, for that matter, who doesn’t… here is the best explanation I have ever read for how sound/music - a guitar, specifically - works.

Most(not all, with the advent of CMI’s) musical instruments, and the poor bastards cursed with playing them, are integrated human controlled sound pressure transduction systems. That is, some guy stands in a room, straps on a guitar, picks up a plectrum, strikes a string(or 2 or 6), the string resonates in response to the applied mechanical energy at a frequency determined by a combination of it’s tension, it’s length, and it’s diameter(which partially facilitates it’s range of frequency vs. total tension)a pickup converts that mechanical energy into electrical current containing both frequency and amplitude, it passes down a guitar cable, into a pre-amplifier/Eq, onto an amplifier(these two are often an integrated system, as we know), and out to a speaker(or often a number of speakers in an enclosure) which excurse and create sound pressure changes at the same frequency(s) in the acoustic environ that those speakers are located in.
Those sound pressure changes contract and expand(the actual terms are compression and rarefaction) the air in the room, this energy zips into our eardrums, our eardrums resonate in sympathy and in turn convert these pulses into human electrical energy that gets loaded onto the ‘hellbound express’ and shipped right into the brain.
That’s when we go…. “Dude……YOU ROCK!!”.
Or maybe. “Doooooode…. YOU SUCK!”
Anyways.

I didn’t include a link because even the URL was somewhat vulgar, and also because it is a 79-page, 25,934-word text-file rant on how to record heavy electric guitars, which most of you probably aren’t interested in checking out. The whole mess started out as a post on a message board, grew out of control over the course of several months of questions, long recording sessions, and hallucinogens, and then went downhill from there, most likely because the writer has a tendency, much like my own, to wander aimlessly, like a unicorn through piranha infested waters. Or a top.
Oh, yeah, I didn’t even try to fix the spelling/grammar/typos.
I hope you enjoy this tidbit. I did. And if you don’t, well, doooode…

For quite a while, now, I have been an advocate of Pandora, free online streaming radio station that allows you to build your own “stations” based on artists/songs that you like. As part of the “Music Genome Project,” it keeps tracks of the songs that you (and other users) skip, and builds up a database of songs that it thinks you will like. It is a great way to discover new music without having to do a bunch of leg-work to sift through, erm, garbage.
I may have a new favorite, though: Musicovery. The player has a “mood grid” with the y-axis ranging from Calm to Energetic and x-axis ranging from Dark to Positive. You select the mood you are in (or the mood that want to be in), and Musicovery provides the tunes. The music is also sorted into 18 genres, which allows you to, for example, not listen to any rap after you request mostly Calm and slightly Positive. Not that I would ever do that.
You can also choose if you want to hear only Hits or non-Hits, and specify the decade of release for the songs.
I have a couple CDs mentally archived for specific moods, but Musicovery is broadening my horizons. As a bonus, it will also save me from burning out specific albums and/or totally ruining good songs via bad associations.
Also, if I want to listen to hit disco from the 90’s that is dark and calm, I can.

***

Correction, I CANNOT listen to dark, calm hit disco from the 90’s because the player is smart enough to realize that it doesn’t exist. I wish there was a “good” button as well, so I could see how it reacted to rap.

So, Apple unveiled their new iPhone today (don’t ask me how I managed to post about this before Mac… er, I mean Matt), and I must say that it looks pretty sweet.
In addition to doing everything that you’d expect from a $500 (yikes!) phone (email, WiFi, launch nuclear missiles, etc.), the new iPhone is also a wide-screen 4GB iPod (if you want 8GB, it’s $600 (double yikes!)). This means that you can watch all of your downloaded shows in 320×480 resolution. OR you could buy a (comparatively) enormous 13″ TV at a pawnshop for $20, but that might not fit in your pocket.
The iPhone is small, sleek-looking, and even button-less. It features a stylus-free touch-screen, allegedly designed from some new space-age material that will not get all finger-printed and nasty. This is where I think they will have a problem. There is simply no way that you can thumb-type on a digital Qwerty keyboard that is less than 2.4 inches wide, unless, of course, you have fingers the size of ants. Or styluses. Styli? Regardless, I think it will be tough to get Treo owners to switch over, especially since the phone runs OS X (overkill?), and syncs up via iTunes.
Have I mentioned that iTunes has officially become the most bloated, unwieldy, ridiculous software ever? Download mp3s, organize music, watch movies and TV shows, use your telephone, design websites, screen-print t-shirts… I think it’s safe to say that it’s now worse than Windows Media Player.
Of course, that’s just the opinion of a dedicated PC user running WinAmp v2.91.

I just installed Internet Explorer, version 7, also known as IE7, on my computer.  I did this because Windows told me to, and, in spite of years of evidence to the contrary, I tend to believe that one should do as one’s operating system suggests (especially if one’s operating system is Windows XP Pro).  Since my operating system, anticipating my desire to get the latest technology, had already downloaded the file for me, it was an easy process.  Click “OK” a couple of times, “Accept” once, and I’m good to go.  Right?
Right.  I had no problems with the install.  This is not a horror story.  It was flawless.  And, really, since I don’t actually USE Internet Explorer (ahem), the changes don’t really affect me.  It’s nice to see that Microsoft has integrated tabbed browsing, about 2 years too late.  Presumably this signals the end of the gosh-awful “group similar items” feature in the taskbar.  The anti-phishing filter also seems like a good idea, though I will never actually get the chance to see it in action.
The reason for this blog, though, is something called ClearType for HTML, which Microsoft strongly recommended that I turn on in order to make text look way betterer.  I turned it on, and immediately all the text in all of my web-browsers, email, and documents turned to bolded mush.  What, what, what?  Then I remembered - I had been fooled by this before.
ClearType is designed to remove aliasing (if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry) from text on LCD, or “flat-panel,” monitors.  If you have a laptop or a flat-panel monitor, you should turn this on.  Microsoft is right - things look much better.  What they DON’T tell you is that if you have a CRT, or “big ugly box,” monitor, ClearType will make things look roughly like “poop.”  They also don’t tell you how to de-turd your computer.
So, for the zero of you reading this blog that may still have a big ol’ CRT monitor, here is how:

1. Open IE7
2. Open the “Tools” (on the far right)
3. Choose “Internet Options” from the drop-down menu
4. Select the “Advanced” tab
5. Scroll down to the “Multimedia” category
6. Uncheck the box that says “Always use ClearType for HTML”
7. Click “OK”
8. Close and restart IE, and all programs where the text looks funny

Incidentally, if you have a LCD monitor, you can follow these steps to make sure that ClearType is turned on, making this NERDblog 2-for-1 helpful.  I believe that ClearType is available on older versions of Explorer as well, so even if you haven’t updated, you can still turn it on (or off).