When he was about 13, he played at a barbecue stand outside Milwaukee. By then he had found a way of rigging up his mother’s telephone, singing into it to the speakers of the family radio. “People loved it. Except one guy at the back of the crowd who wrote to me to say: ‘Red [his nickname], your voice and your jokes and your singing were fine, but your guitar wasn’t loud enough.”
That began a search for the perfect amplification. Early experiments involved putting a needle from the family phonograph under the strings of a guitar. He also stuffed the guitar’s hollow box with sheets and rags, and then plaster of Paris, in an attempt to muffle the feedback, but in vain.
He had a breakthrough when he tried the most dense piece of material he could find, a piece of railtrack, attaching it to a guitar string and a telephone receiver wired up to a radio. “It sounded great! I ran to my Mum and shouted ‘I’ve got the answer!’ And she replied: ‘Did you ever see a cowboy on a horse playing a railroad track?’ So that put that idea right out of the window.”
It took many more years of tinkering before he made his first solid-wood guitar, in 1941; he had to wait another 10 years before Gibson finally embraced the idea, in 1951. “The electric guitar was laughed at! They called me the character with the broomstick with pick-ups on it. It was terrible. Before we came along the guitar was an apologetic wimp - the weakest, most unimportant guy in the band. As soon as we put a pick-up on him, and a volume control, he became the king.”
The world’s smallest guitar is 10 micrometers long — about the size of a single cell — with six strings each about 50 nanometers, or 100 atoms, wide. Made by Cornell University researchers from crystalline silicon, it demonstrates a new technology for a new generation of electromechanical devices.
The guitar has six strings, each string about 50 nanometers wide, the width of about 100 atoms. If plucked — by an atomic force microscope, for example — the strings would resonate, but at inaudible frequencies.
Steve Albini, audio engineer, musician, songwriter and all around bad ass, talks about how bands in the market for a major record deal tend to think they can somehow “outsmart the system.”
Embrace was a short-lived Post-hardcore band from Washington, D.C., which lasted from the summer of 1985 to the spring of 1986 and was one of the first bands to be dubbed in the press as Emo, though the members had rejected the term since its creation. The band included Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat with three former members of his brother Alec’s band The Faith: guitarist Michael Hampton, drummer Ivor Hanson, and bassist Chris Bald. The only recording released by the quartet was their self-titled album Embrace.
Yesterday we wrote about Trent Reznor launching his new Nine Inch Nails album online with a variety of interesting options that people could choose to buy. The top of the list, for $300, was a “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition Package” that included all the high quality downloads, two CDs, a data DVD, a Blu-ray high def DVD and assorted extras, all in a nice package signed by Reznor. This was only limited to the first 2,500 people. While some scoffed at the price of this package, it was clearly designed for NIN’s biggest fans — and they ate it up. Mike Linksvayer points out that this option is now sold out, meaning that Reznor grossed $750,000 in just a couple of days on that package alone, not taking into account any of the other packages that many more people likely bought into.
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