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Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer
- downrightmike 8mo agoJimi on the radio is my shorthand for bad economic times. Happened in 2007 and he's playing on the airwaves now
- UncleOxidant 8mo agoInteresting economic indicator. But isn't Jimi playing on the radio all the time somewhere?
- mlhpdx 8mo agoI prefer the Circle Jerks: In a sluggish economy Inflation, recession Hits the land of the free Standing in unemployment lines Blame the government for hard time We just get by However we can We all gotta duck When the shit hits the fan
- weinzierl 8mo agoNice article, but that the signal chain in the top image doesn't match the signal chain described in the text annoys me more than it should.
- threetonesun 8mo agoIt's also a standard right handed strat, which seems like an oversight for a guy famous for playing with a right handed strat flipped upside down.
- themafia 8mo agoThe original title: "Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardy Explained." > and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.
- btown 8mo agoArt and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology! And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians? We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)
- dajt 8mo agoWe should not call ourselves engineers - it's a massive insult to actual professional engineers.
- soulofmischief 8mo agoSpeak for yourself, some of us value and incorporate both science and methodology into our craft, and adhere to a system of ethics.
- spiralcoaster 8mo agoThat's great, but it doesn't make you or any of us engineers. Just because I drive my car with immense focus, make precision shifts, and hit the apex of all of my turns when getting onto and off of the freeway doesn't make me a race car driver. Engineers don't just feel good vibes about science and mix it into their work. It is the core of their work. Simply having a methodology absolutely is not sufficient for being an engineer. And great, you have an arbitrary system of ethics, like everyone does I imagine. But no one holds you to these ethics.
- soulofmischief 8mo agoCare to share your operational definition of the word "engineer"?
- 8mo ago
- actionfromafar 8mo agoAnd God is a DJ.
- yayitswei 8mo agoThis is one of the few articles where I noticed a bunch of LLM-isms and still read to the end because it was interesting.
- post-it 8mo agoIt's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.
- 0x1ch 8mo agoProbably similar to what I do with my papers and resumes, I write them myself then throw them through LLMs for suggestions and corrections, manually reviewing the output.
- nerdsniper 8mo agoLLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms. I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
- ForOldHack 8mo agoAhh... Someone well read who has taste. Thanks.
- evilos 8mo ago[flagged]
- gchamonlive 8mo agoI feel for you, because moving forward more and more interesting and substantious articles will be written with llm-isms, either because LLM was used directly in writing or because the authors absorbed the style.
- alephnerd 8mo agoThis is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry. DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class). The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers. And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Animats!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.
- jmalicki 8mo agoI came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work, not because people aren't aware (Adam and Muon can be seen as approximations to second-order methods, though, so it is useful to be aware of that structure). Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads? Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.
- esafak 8mo agoMuon is much more sophisticated than Newton's method. Neural networks have started to borrow techniques from statistical mechanics, and various branches of maths like invariant theory that were previously rarely used in engineering. CS is not dumbing down; its needs and focus are changing. I've never needed or benefited from most of the EE curriculum. There is an opportunity cost in learning things you don't need.
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- ozim 8mo agoThere is art in engineering that we cannot deny. While some try to make it as exact science, it is not, there are things you still cannot put a number on and it works ...
- RyanOD 8mo agoI've often marveled at the success many guitar players had with experimental electronics - Hendrix, EVH, Les Paul, Brian May, Jack White, and Tom Scholz (special case, of course) are just a few examples.
- tclancy 8mo agoThe podcast "History of Rock in 500 Songs" (full disclosure: I am a devout, slavering fan) provides these on the regular. I was actually smiling when I heard a fairly new song that attempts a really flat, fuzzed out sound because it made me think, "Buddy Holly invented that by accident with a broken speaker". One of the episodes on The Who goes into the Marshall behind Marshall amps in similar detail. I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-the-beach-boys/ https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.
- BrokenCogs 8mo agoThis is a terrible article. In the first subplot, there is no explanation of what v(b1) and v(c2) are. The -8 on the on y axis (amplitude) looks like an upside down 8. Further down there is a sentence: "First, the Fuzz Face is a two-transistor feedback amplifier that turns a gentle sinusoid signal into an almost binary “fuzzy” output." But the figure does not match this - there is no "gentle sinusoid" wave shown on the first fuzz face plot.
- dvh 8mo agoBase 1, collector 2?
- solomonb 8mo agoI strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created. All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience. See: https://www.scribd.com/document/55134776/48787070-Bob-Ostertag-Why-Computer-Music-Sucks https://www.scribd.com/document/55134776/48787070-Bob-Ostert... With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument. There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup). Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre. Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.
- deafpolygon 8mo agoI suppose you haven’t heard some really talented sitar players out there. For a traditionally non-electronic instrument, it’s got some crazy sounds.
- solomonb 8mo agoI think you misunderstand my comment entirely. I'm not comparing electric to acoustic instruments at all.
- gwbas1c 8mo agoI watched Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips do something similar with some kind of "I don't know what" controller, it was some kind of input in his microphone stand. As he moved it around, the sound and projection changed. I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.
- newzino 8mo ago[flagged]
- shermantanktop 8mo agoWhat??? Where did you get this idea? Any guitarist in a 1940s big band would have a big hollowbody guitar and an amp. That combination is incredibly prone to feedback. Everyone worked to reduce feedback and avoid it. That's what I do with my hollowbody when I play with a big band. It's the first thing that happens when you turn up. Hendrix did not "discover" feedback, and in fact he did not discover the musical uses of feedback - you can hear it in BB King records that predate Hendrix, where feedback makes his notes "sing." What Hendrix did was turn feedback into an intentional musical creation that he treated as a melodic voice.
- jonnypotty 8mo agoWhy is that pic labelled with the wrong names? Pretty sure that isn't Mitch and Noel.
- harry8 8mo agoEddie Kramer?
- EdPoincare 8mo agoCrazy example of when everything is AI generated, even the code referenced in git repo (refer to commit 3d733ca), and actually interesting and "new" in a way...
- tolerance 8mo agoThere’s a git repo associated with this article? I’m curious because to tell you the truth the novelty struck me as similar to comparisons I’ve toyed with using LLMs on my own. The AI-generated logic between comparing two dissimilar things is too sterile for my liking. I understand that this is appearing in technical publication, but for some reason that invites even further scrutiny on my behalf. Please share more reasons behind your suspicions.
- prima-facie 8mo agoHere's the repo https://github.com/nahorov/Hendrix-Systems-Lab https://github.com/nahorov/Hendrix-Systems-Lab
- tolerance 8mo agoHmm. Yes. Does look like vibe work. Other comments here point to some technical inconsistencies that may support this claim further.
- Slow_Hand 8mo agoNice article for engineers to understand something that most guitar players will intuitively know. One of the great things about a hi-gain setup like Hendrix's is how the feedback loop will inject an element of controlled chaos into the sound. It allows for emergent fluctuations in timbre that Hendrix can wrangle, but never fully control. It's the squealing, chaotic element in something like his 'Star Spangled Banner'. It's a positive feedback loop that can run away from the player and create all kinds of unexpected elements. The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so. A great place to hear artful feedback would be the intro to Prince's 'Computer Blue'. It's the squealing "birdsong" at the beginning and ending of the record. You can hear it particularly well if you search for 'Computer Blue - Hallway Speech Version' with the extended intro.
- 9dev 8mo agoStar Spangled Banner was incredible. The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony… that was a masterpiece.
- ssl-3 8mo ago> The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony… You know, I've heard that performance so many times over so many decades that I don't have to hit a play button or even close my eyes in order to hear it. It's there inside my head when I want it to be. And somehow I never interpreted it in that way (sirens, screaming, etc) until just a moment ago. I thought it was just a quirky little early-morning break in the familiar tune from someone who had been up way too long by that point. And now instead of just being the quirky sounds of an impromptu guitar solo that I can recall whenever I wish, it now has unpleasant pictures to go with it. Thanks (I think).
- skhr0680 8mo agoMaggot Brain begins with on-the-nose apocalyptic imagery, but ends with a release and rebirth. One day, the fighting stops.
- maximgeorge 8mo ago[dead]
- Obscura- 8mo agoFascinating
- brcmthrowaway 8mo agoAnyone doing something artistically great is engineering in some way. The Renaissance painter, the ableton producer. It all involves mastery of tools.
- shermantanktop 8mo agoThat's stretching the term to the breaking point, for me. Is there some evidence of systematic analysis of component parts? attempts to model elements of the problem? data gathering and data analysis? simulation? Intentional application of principles of physics or some other pure domain to a real world problem? Artistic endeavors come from lots of places, not just people with an analytical mindset. Historically those two are seen as opposing tendencies, which I think is unfair, but it points to the importance of intuition and navigating perception and emotion for artists.
- tempaccount5050 8mo ago> Is there some evidence of systematic analysis of component parts? Music theory, Nashville notation > attempts to model elements of the problem? Ditto > data gathering and data analysis? Listening to a wide variety of music and understanding what make a genre a genre > simulation? Cover songs, writing to a style > Intentional application of principles of physics or some other pure domain to a real world problem? Literally sound engineering
- jatora 8mo agoquite the stretch
- xcf_seetan 8mo agoIannis Xenakis?
- highspeedbus 8mo agoStrange article. Even though I do like music and engineering. >Electromagnetic pickups—(...)—fixed the loudness problem. But they left a new one: the envelope Was it really a problem to be solved? Good tube amplifiers already existed back then. Clean guiar tone was not something frowned upon. >Hendrix’s mission was (...) >His solution was (...) I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.
- alexjplant 8mo ago> I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist. 1,000,000%. Guitar is one of those hobbies where people mythologize and build elaborate hagiographies around players they like and the gear that they used. Hendrix was a generational talent but I highly doubt he was sitting around enumerating problem statements and systematically exploring solution spaces. The Fuzz Face was one of like four dirtboxes available during that time so he chose that one. He flipped a guitar upside down because he could source one more easily than a lefty model. He leveraged feedback because he discovered it naturally and realized that he could make it sound totally badass. The man clearly had a vision and executed it but his decisions were pragmatic, not the product of grand technical reasoning. It reminds me of the student who wrote a bunch of authors and asked to what degree they were conscious of the themes and symbolism in their work [1]. Many were not - as it turns out English teachers often put the cart before the horse. This is the rock and roll version of that. I can't knock the article though as it has a lot of sound (pun intended) analysis in it as opposed to typical guitar forum dreck about NOS tube and hand-wired turret board magic. [1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-...
- saghm 8mo ago> He flipped a guitar upside down because he could source one more easily than a lefty model. I've read that he claimed he played a right-handed guitar upside down because his father was superstitious and didn't like him doing things left-handed, so he'd play a right-handed guitar upside down most of the time and flip it over when he needed to play in front of his father. (I'm not sure why he didn't play a lefty guitar upside if that was the case, but I could imagine that the availability might be relevant like you mentioned, or maybe his father was familiar enough with guitars to be able to recognize a left-handed one and figure out what was going on, or maybe because he was better left-handed he could play it upside-down well enough but due to not being right-handed he would have found it more difficult to play it in the non-standard way).
- buredoranna 8mo agoIf you can track it down, Hendrix's home recordings are a gem. https://jimihendrixrecordguide.com/home-recordings/ https://jimihendrixrecordguide.com/home-recordings/ (edit: syntax)
- ipmb 8mo agohttps://archive.org/details/05-voodoo-chile-cherokee-mist https://archive.org/details/05-voodoo-chile-cherokee-mist
- buredoranna 8mo agoThank you for this. I lost that CD years ago.
- exodust 8mo agoI like how the phone rings in the background on Gypsy Eyes. Wonder who called? Voodoo Chile lyrics: "on the night I was born the moon turned fire red". Poetic license? Stellarium reveals on the early evening of November 27, 1942 in Seattle, the moon was low on the horizon - just 25 degrees altitude at 5:30pm, directly East. The sun set at 5pm. While not a full moon it was 85%, so I'm calling it! The moon may have glowed a warm orange-red on the night (of the day) Hendrix was born.
- bttf 8mo agoIncredible article, as a lifelong Hendrix fan, nicely done.
- JumpinJack_Cash 8mo ago"A groove engineer baby"
- olelele 8mo agoFor a better example of the guitar as a synth like feedback device listen to robert fripps solo on heroes by bowie. He used markings on the studio floor to achieve the desired tone.
- kazinator 8mo ago> Electric guitars attack hard, decay fast, and don’t sustain like bowed strings or organs. Since the 1980s, we have had the "Sustainiac": an active circuit installed in the electric guitar along with a "reverse pickup" which is energized in order to excite vibration in the strings. With this device, at the flip of a switch, you get indefinite sustain on any note on the neck, at any volume, distortion or not --- even if the electric guitar is not plugged into an amplifier at all, and just heard acoustically. The best implementations of this have a three way harmonic switch. You can choose between excite the fretted (or open) note itself (fundamenta a.k.a first harmonic), an octave above it (second harmonic) or a higher harmonic still. You can be sustaning the given note, and then at the flip of a switch, it will fade over to the higher harmonic. YouTube videos of this in action are worth checking out. Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZwPPGsxY6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZwPPGsxY6g
- kranner 8mo agoIf you don't want to or can't install a Sustainiac pickup, you can get a much cheaper handheld one-string "E-Bow" that does the same thing. It's not as easy to use as a Sustainiac and you can't also be playing with the whammy bar unlike with a Sustainiac, but you can get it to do tricks a Sustainiac can't do: see the "spiccato" section in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0V3pzxma-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0V3pzxma-8 I've also managed to make an E-Bow work with a steel-string acoustic guitar (but only on one string IIRC).
- dwd 8mo agoEd O'Brien from Radiohead worked with Fender to develop a Strat with a Fernandes Sustainer. https://au.fender.com/products/fender-eob-sustainer-stratocaster https://au.fender.com/products/fender-eob-sustainer-stratoca... You might enjoy this video. He really goes deep into using the guitar to create textures and emotions. He talks about the Edge (U2) and his Infinite Guitar and that he actually calling Michael Brook to see if he could get one. Eventually Fender did a custom build on his Clapton Strat which became the Fender EOB Sustainer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK4Fmrlqz3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK4Fmrlqz3I
- WalterBright 8mo ago
- phronimos 8mo agoInteresting factoid: modern guitar effects typically have their input jacks on the right-hand side, and output jacks on the left. In this article's guitar rig diagram, the jacks are reversed, but this is accurate: back then, for whatever reason the jacks were reversed on each of these pedals. Modern reissues of the round-enclosure Fuzz Face pedals preserve this pattern despite the reversal of industry trends.
- mock-possum 8mo agoIt does seem weird, I’d expect signal to flow from left to right, as English is written, as a number line is drawn, from -x to 0 to +x
- shermantanktop 8mo agoWith your cable in your right hand, it is easier to plug into the right side of a pedal. If you were to try to do the equivalent with your left, the guitar neck would be a little bit in the way as well.
- schwartzworld 8mo agoBut you have to plug cables into both sides... Also you set your pedals up before you actually start playing.
- shermantanktop 8mo agoTypical modern practice would be to have a pedal board with all interconnects and power set up and fixed. Hendrix didn’t do that, but EVH did. And now the internet is full of people posting their pedalboards (P&W people especially). But you still have to plug in from the right with the guitar cord, and from the left for the card to the amp. So I dunno, my theory may be bogus. But this pattern got established very early on, by the late 60s st the latest.
- john-radio 8mo agothe ergonomic advantage of left-to-right is that most players use right-handed guitars, so the guitar's cord comes out the right side of your body, and it's most ergonomic for it to be directed straight away from you to the right side of your pedal board, not criss-crossing in front of you towards the left side of your board.
- mark_l_watson 8mo agoThe amazing thing is that Hendrix during live performances has the same wonderful effects as he got in the studio. I only saw Hendrix play live one time, that was in San Diego a few weeks before he died in England.
- zigman1 8mo ago> I only saw Hendrix play live one time I love how nonchalantly you threw this one in. I am proper jealous, how was it? On your first remark, I agree. This is why I love Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler. The studio recordings are amazing, and then you listen to their live stuff and it's even better.
- cousin_it 8mo agoInterestingly, to me Hendrix and Knopfler feel kinda like creative opposites. Knopfler plays much cleaner and with much more variety, he has written many songs that are catchy in different ways (which is almost impossible for any musician), he basically achieves every goal that a beginner musician could choose to chase. And yet his stuff feels like a creative dead end, a dreary road leading to adult contemporary. While Hendrix has no songs to speak of and only one sloppy screechy sound, but it's the sound that launches a thousand bands and feels inspiring even now. Maybe the lesson we're supposed to learn is that we shouldn't choose what goal to chase, we should just feel it.
- zigman1 8mo agoI think what you are trying to say is that Hendrix captured a specific sound and won over a generation of listeners, while Knoplfer displayed a mastery of the instrument, rarely seen in the mainstream. However, don't underestimate him, they sold out Wembley 16 nights in a row in '85, I am sure that spring some bands. It's now a bit forgotten, but for a period of few years, Dire Straits were the biggest band in the world. Knopfler is usually associated with saying "your favorite guitarist's favorite guitarist" :)
- 8mo ago
- jamesgill 8mo agoHendrix and Mayer created a great sound, but I've always thought the most incredible thing about Jimi Hendrix was: he only played the guitar about 11 years. TOTAL. He picked it up around age 15, and died age 27.
- BoxOfRain 8mo agoThat's wild to think about, I've been playing the guitar longer than that yet his are heights I'm unlikely to reach. He was such an innovative guitarist.
- davidguetta 8mo agoHe played 24/24 tho, there's stories about that in his military service he was always on the guitar
- arrowsmith 8mo agoIt's incredible what people were able to accomplish with their free time before smartphones
- jawilson2 8mo agoJust humans, living in the moment, not a phone in sight.
- racl101 8mo agoIn general complete devotion to the craft by constantly practicing like it is a habit and not just when inspiration strikes is essential. One could argue this lack of devotion predates even the smartphone. Heck, I remember getting a Nintendo Entertainment System in the late '80s and then not going out biking or playing basketball as a result.
- ikety 8mo agoIronically these days you might have a better chance making a living from playing video games compared to any physical activity.
- aetherspawn 8mo agoTitles like this just reiterate that people don’t take systems engineers/ing seriously.
- angry_octet 8mo agoIt's clearly titled by someone who doesn't know what systems engineering is.
- padjo 8mo agoNo he wasn't. Sorry, but being a systems engineer will never be as cool as being a revolutionary musical genius. On the plus side you probably get to live 2-3 times longer.
- nxpnsv 8mo agoHere I was thinking he was a musician all these years...
- tokyobreakfast 8mo agoDoes this make Johnny Marr a Manc rocket scientist because he rigged a bunch of pedals together to create the tremolo effect in How Soon Is Now?
- whstl 8mo agoIt was even crazier than that, it was four Fender Twin Reverbs! Considering the amount of watts involved in this, it probably qualifies as rocket science haha JM: Yeah. The tremolo sound from the intro? That was four Fender Twin Reverbs. Myself controlling the speed of two of them and the producer controlling the speed of the other two. So two amps were recorded on one side of the stereo and the other two on the other side. I recorded the part on the tape without the tremolo, and then I sent the part from tape out to four amps, and he controlled two, and I controlled the other two. And it took a long time because inevitably the tremolo would go out of time with the track because the tremolo doesn't stay in regular clock time. Also we would go out with each other's amps, so we had to keep looking up at each other after every fifteen second bursts and kind of fess up, "Oh yeah, mine kind of went out of time." It took long time, but I'm glad we did it that way because if we had cut and pasted two seconds of audio, it wouldn't have had the same dynamic quality throughout the six minutes of the song, or however long it is. https://www.westword.com/music/johnny-marr-on-how-he-created-the-sound-for-how-soon-is-now-without-effects-pedals-5704969/ https://www.westword.com/music/johnny-marr-on-how-he-created...
- kennyloginz 8mo agoMaybe I’m falling suspect to that “everything is a LLM now”. But it feels like the author has never held a guitar.
- qmr 8mo agoDumb title.
- nickcageinacage 8mo agoI'm here for all the Jimi love. Cool read
- hyperbolablabla 8mo agoI guess that makes Usain Bolt a physicist?
- dominicrose 8mo agoA compressor pedal was the best thing I bought when trying to imitate Mark Knopfler doing Sultans of Swing. Not only does it sound good but a fender with a compressor is also much easier to play than an acoustic guitar.
- nicodjimenez 8mo agoPart of what makes Hendrix's live performances so great is how completely unreproducible they are. Even Jimi himself could never recreate that one note sustain when he begins the solo on Machine Gun. To re-create it, you'd have to set the room up exactly the same, tune the guitar exactly the same, position the guitar relative to amps exactly the same, etc. So Hendrix being very sensitive and connected to the room was able to harness that energy into something unique that stands the test of time. Machine Gun is well known, but his Red House performance at Randall's Island also stands out to me as exceptional, those are the 2 key Hendrix performances. I read somewhere that Miles Davis was really impressed by Machine Gun and you can see why. One thing I learned after buying some gear at home to try to record electric guitar at low volume is how important the physics of the speakers are. You can plug a tube amp into a cabinet simulator and you'll lose a lot more than using solid state electronics on a good but not great Fender amp, especially if you use fuzz / distortion pedals. I'm not sure Hendrix was a systems engineer, but he was a transcendent blues artist, that's for sure.
- thr0waway001 8mo agoAlthough I love Jimi Hendrix’s performances I’m not sure if not being to reproduce something necessarily makes it great. One could say the same thing about any disorganized person’s process but it doesn’t make it great. It just makes it not reproducible. One could make a bunch of random noises with a guitar that are hard to reproduce but the music could be shit.
- clawbertct 8mo ago[dead]
- worik 8mo agoThe illustration at the top of the page has the guitar the wrong way around. Jimi was left handed
- SpaceManNabs 8mo agoThe more i get into electric guitar, the more i realize that i am grateful for my physics background as i try to figure out pedals lol.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- twangist 8mo agoThe caption on the photo is clearly wrong. No way the other two are Mitch Mitchell (not "Mitchel" (sic)) or Noel Redding, not at any time when Jimi was alive. Even after The JH Experience, Noel Redding went on to do the band Fat Mattress, and he still had big curly/wavy hair, no moustache, didn't look or dress like an Arby's manager. I'm pretty sure that's engineer Eddie Kramer at left. https://www.google.com/search?q=eddie+kramer https://www.google.com/search?q=eddie+kramer. No apparent way to submit corrigenda.
- gtrplyrjimi 8mo agoI love that the AI jumped the Super Lead, but then proceeds to plug the guitar cable into the the power switch. Nice!