11 hours ago
Steve Martin in conversation, 2002. 34:20 to 36:00 is this exact question.
Later, Robin Williams joins him on stage. My cameo starts at 1:01:40, inaudible and off-camera, because I'd traded a seat up close for two in the balcony so my future wife could join me.
6 hours ago
This is fantastic! What a find.
2 hours ago
Regarding how people figured out the positions of the frets:
Frets used to just be thick material (wire, strips of flexible wood or treated cord) tied around the neck of the instrument. They were added, moved and removed for different scales, and "tuning" might have involved choosing fret positions that sat well with other instruments that could not be tuned, etc.
They were inherently movable. Sitar frets still are tied to the neck this way.
You can do this yourself with cable ties which make tolerable frets for experimental purposes.
So this would have allowed the knowledge of precise tuning to evolve over time.
9 hours ago
Hard to believe that article doesn't contain the phrase "slide guitar".
an hour ago
This is not a case of maths giving you the Blues.
11 hours ago
This post is by the same author as the Lost Art of Logarithms. https://www.lostartoflogarithms.com/
Discussed about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356314 (196 comments)
9 hours ago
I threw together a logarithmic slider for HTML (when I knew little about JavaScript and HTML). I hoped someone would take it and run with it and we would see more logarithmic slide rule calculators on the web.
(Top, yellow slider, cannot be interacted with):
https://www.engineersneedart.com/ohmslaw/index.html
Sources (such as they are):
3 hours ago
> How did people figure out the positions of the frets without calculators and precision measuring instruments?
If you had perfect pitch (maybe relative pitch is enough) then couldn't you just make marks in each position on the fretboard where it sounds like a new full note, and then go back and listen for the half-notes and do the same thing?
3 hours ago
Take a guitar. Very gently put finger on string. Start sliding finger while continuously strumming with other hand. On some places (usually 3rd 5th 12th fret) the string will produce clean sounds, that's where the frets should be.
11 hours ago
I'm blocked for some reason, probably too much HN referred requests...
11 hours ago
Enable JavaScript and let the site issue a “not an AI” cookie and it should then be usable. (I have a JS button for this on my toolbar and it’s come in handy a lot recently..)
10 hours ago
Loved the article. Didn't love being blue-balled by the conclusion but still great stuff.
12 hours ago
Vibrating strings are Turing-complete
9 hours ago
That just reminded ne of something from here I had completely forgotten about. Someone had posted making sort of dubious claim of guitar power chords being Turing complete. I made some small improvements (as I saw it, chiefly around how they had implemented their clock) to the code they posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42294766 which lead me down a rabbit hole of guitar tab as opcodes, which eventually lead to something useful after throwing away the silly guitar virtual machine, since I had now done the work of implementing far more than the simple tablature parsing code I intended. That project that resulted from the silly toying around with tab notation as machine code lead to a midi-to-tab generator, which lead to audio to midi to tab, and a bunch more.
That project, for anyone interested in such things, is today https://github.com/scottvr/gtrsnipe There are useful demonstrations in the repo's wiki.
9 hours ago
Now they need templates
7 hours ago
Is just 1? If so dildos certainly are
10 hours ago
The question is can those frets run Doom
7 hours ago