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> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty

by pdntspa 8mo ago

> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound. Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.

dec0dedab0de 8mo ago
they're comparing an electric guitar to electronic instruments, like midi keyboards. An electric cello would be the same thing as an electric guitar in this context.
Nition 8mo ago
They're talking about electronic instruments there. The comment is about how electronic instruments don't generally match the physical expressiveness of acoustic instruments (like the Cello).
solomonb 8mo ago
I'm talking about electronic instruments how they are deficient in expressiveness compared to your cello example. > Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. The story is not quite so simple. Your synthesizer is going to have a buffered output so it wont have the complex impedance loading interactions with the amplifier as the guitar pickup. This is actually critical to how early distortion effects such as the classic Fuzzface work and imo is essential for the kind of complex timbres you can produce with a guitar + tube amp. In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.
- vegadw 8mo ago
  So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again? I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups. The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.
  - solomonb 8mo ago
    > So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again? That is going to be something like a transformer to step down your line level signal and some series resistance to match the load to help drive the amp. An actual coil pickup has reactive impedance that is frequency dependent and will result in a more complex interaction between the devices. > The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature Sure if you think like an engineer, but everything you are complaining about is what allows someone like Jimi Hendrix to do what he did with a guitar.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ben7799 8mo ago
    This won't actually work. A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound. If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects. There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered). E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.
fuzzfactor 7mo ago
>the tube amp and the guitar are seperable Eminently separable, but it's good to be aware of the tradeoffs. Not magic at all, physics. It's good to understand that high-impedance is not the biggest deal, but one thing about the magnetic pickups that not everybody realizes is the way that plugging directly into a tube (pre)amp basically magnetically couples the strings to the grid of the input tube. And that grid has no further physical connection to any other components in the circuit, not even within the same tube, except for clouds of electrons and the flow that occurs among the electrodes. That way your music basically starts out being sprayed through space directly from the strings which create the magnetic signal. The thing about high-impedance is the way the relatively minuscule resistor values between the amp's input jack and the input grid's tube pin are so insignificant by comparison to the pickup internal impedance, that resistance might as well be zero. The only reason there is a resistor in between the input jack and the input grid anyway is to accommodate a high-impedance input with better stability under wider conditions than otherwise. Now you can get a righteous sound with any number of pedals in between the guitar & amp, especially if the battery power is used to boost the signal to more than the guitar puts out magnetically, and it's been the mainstream for so long people almost never consider doing it any other way. It's just not the same magnetic coupling from the strings to the tube, you can't have both unless it's a tube pedal. I've designed lots of solid state circuits too and there is plenty of excellence when coupling the same magnetic pickup directly to a silicon or germanium crystal lattice and going from there. Whether it's pedals or a pure solid-state amp. Instead of using any tubes at all. Also some people prefer having tubes only for the audio output section, coupled to the magnetic speakers through the antique-style audio output transformer the old-fashioned way.

by pdntspa 8mo ago

dec0dedab0de 8mo ago

they're comparing an electric guitar to electronic instruments, like midi keyboards. An electric cello would be the same thing as an electric guitar in this context.

Nition 8mo ago

They're talking about electronic instruments there. The comment is about how electronic instruments don't generally match the physical expressiveness of acoustic instruments (like the Cello).

solomonb 8mo ago

I'm talking about electronic instruments how they are deficient in expressiveness compared to your cello example. > Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. The story is not quite so simple. Your synthesizer is going to have a buffered output so it wont have the complex impedance loading interactions with the amplifier as the guitar pickup. This is actually critical to how early distortion effects such as the classic Fuzzface work and imo is essential for the kind of complex timbres you can produce with a guitar + tube amp. In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.

vegadw 8mo ago
So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again? I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups. The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.
- solomonb 8mo ago
  > So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again? That is going to be something like a transformer to step down your line level signal and some series resistance to match the load to help drive the amp. An actual coil pickup has reactive impedance that is frequency dependent and will result in a more complex interaction between the devices. > The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature Sure if you think like an engineer, but everything you are complaining about is what allows someone like Jimi Hendrix to do what he did with a guitar.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- ben7799 8mo ago
  This won't actually work. A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound. If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects. There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered). E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.

fuzzfactor 7mo ago

>the tube amp and the guitar are seperable Eminently separable, but it's good to be aware of the tradeoffs. Not magic at all, physics. It's good to understand that high-impedance is not the biggest deal, but one thing about the magnetic pickups that not everybody realizes is the way that plugging directly into a tube (pre)amp basically magnetically couples the strings to the grid of the input tube. And that grid has no further physical connection to any other components in the circuit, not even within the same tube, except for clouds of electrons and the flow that occurs among the electrodes. That way your music basically starts out being sprayed through space directly from the strings which create the magnetic signal. The thing about high-impedance is the way the relatively minuscule resistor values between the amp's input jack and the input grid's tube pin are so insignificant by comparison to the pickup internal impedance, that resistance might as well be zero. The only reason there is a resistor in between the input jack and the input grid anyway is to accommodate a high-impedance input with better stability under wider conditions than otherwise. Now you can get a righteous sound with any number of pedals in between the guitar & amp, especially if the battery power is used to boost the signal to more than the guitar puts out magnetically, and it's been the mainstream for so long people almost never consider doing it any other way. It's just not the same magnetic coupling from the strings to the tube, you can't have both unless it's a tube pedal. I've designed lots of solid state circuits too and there is plenty of excellence when coupling the same magnetic pickup directly to a silicon or germanium crystal lattice and going from there. Whether it's pedals or a pure solid-state amp. Instead of using any tubes at all. Also some people prefer having tubes only for the audio output section, coupled to the magnetic speakers through the antique-style audio output transformer the old-fashioned way.