Andy Updegrove is a computer standards lawyer. This is about as far from rocknerdery as you get. But I deeply appreciated his piece from 2005 on the Hammond B-3 Organ and how it has “has received recognition as an instrument in its own right — something even Stradivarius failed to achieve.”
You can’t figure that chord out, can you? Turns out there wasn’t just guitars in the studio, but a piano as well — as determined by mathematical analysis of the recording.
Solid body electric guitars are only shaped like an acoustic for reasons of familiarity — get the neck right and you can do anything else. Unfortunately, there are those who fail to recognise the difference between “can” and “should.” The Lego one is way cool, though.
From Jed: Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips has a double-necked guitar where one neck is a Guitar Hero controller. “He went with the Guitar Hero controller because he feels that it’s replacing regular guitars in childrens’ perception of how guitar is played.” Oh dear.
Never mind. How about a few rounds of Guitar Praise? Shred with the sounds of Contemporary Christian Music! All praise!
When building MusicSeer (now inactive) in 2002, Brian Whitman needed a way to ferret out bad user information. So he wrote something to generate 10,000 nonexistent band names. Many of which of course now exist. See how you go.
Oasis are giving away three songs from their forthcoming album, Meet The Beatles. Not as downloads — as sheet music. With Arts Council funding, no less.
Andrew C. Bulhak buys a drum machine program. He uses it for years. He discovers his stuff is stuck inside it and he can’t get it out. What does he do? Reverse engineers it, of course. (Slides from Dorkbot talk.) Possibly the obscure format is commercial secrecy, but more likely (as is usual in these cases) it’s just appropriate shame. Binary-coded centimal?
