What have you pioneered ?

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grimtraveller

grimtraveller

If only for a moment.....
Last week I was playing bass at this function and one of the people playing the songs called out for this song which I knew but in a different key to the one she called. She said we’d do it in B flat which kind of stumped me as I know it in A. I have little trouble transposing up or down a tone, but some semitones leave me flapping and 3 or 5 and my mind goes blank ! Anyway, I stuck a capo on at the third fret and played it in G. As I was sticking the capo on, the guy playing drums burst out laughing and said “I’ve never seen that before !”, which is the usual reaction I get when I put a capo on the bass. Some actively dislike it even. It got me to thinking, what unusual or innovative ideas have people used on recordings or playing live ? Things that were out of the blue or totally off the wall ? Experiments that you could say you pioneered, even if it later turned out that someone had already done it?
 
Well............... you've got me confused.

A to Bb is one semitone (up one fret).

How you put a capo on the third fret & played it in G is totally beyond me.

Maybe what you pioneered is a totally new system of music ??????


[insert appropriate smiley here]
 
If I'm playing guitar and a song is in B flat, I'll put a capo on at first fret and play in A or at third fret and play in G. So a few years back I figured that if I put a capo at the third fret of the bass, I can play like I was playing in G. Ordinarilly I'll play in whatever key is prescribed but sometimes, people just kick off a song without telling you or they'll whisper the key coz there's no chords or music scribbled down and if it's one that I find awkward to work out in my head on the fly, out comes Da Capo ! OK, you lose some of the low low notes but a fairly OK player can work around that.
 
i don't think i've ever done anything different, but when i play accoustic sometimes i like to lay my ear on it by the hole because i like the sound of what's inside, so i was wondering if anyone has ever mic'd in the guitar before? i'm sure its been done a billion times, and probably doesn't even sound good, but was just wondering once.

this sounds dumb but when i was a kid i was always wondering what was going on in there lol (aside from picks and other things that have fallen inside and can't get out loloof
 
I don't think that sounds dumb at all. Some years back, I was always breaking G strings on my guitar so my friend gave me a big stack of cash to buy a new one so I bought an acoustic 12 string and got a pick up fitted. The "luthier" {that makes it sound good ! :laughings:} fitted the pickup inside the hole. I'm not sure of the practicalities of an actual mic inside or if it would be too bassy {I'm largely ignorant of these things} but it would be interesting to at least try it.......
 
When I was about 12, I figured out the song "Obla-di, Obla-da" and noticed that if you held down a "C", an "E", and a "G" together that they made an interesting sound. I ended up figuring out that combination of notes on every place on the keyboard and for awhile thought that I'd invented the major triad. :rolleyes:

I've learned a lot from knowledgeable, kind and generous people... man I've been lucky. But the vast, vast majority of what I know has been from self-discovery, and we all do things a bit differently.

I've noticed the pattern that pretty much every time I do something for the first time I screw it up. :)
 
dintymoore said:
When I was about 12, I figured out the song "Obla-di, Obla-da" and noticed that if you held down a "C", an "E", and a "G" together that they made an interesting sound. I ended up figuring out that combination of notes on every place on the keyboard and for awhile thought that I'd invented the major triad. :rolleyes:
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Hahaha that's actually quite funny :)
 
Seeing from how amazed some of my bandmates have been, you'd think that I invented the idea of a self-oscillating delay. Or feedback. I do pride myself in my feedback techniques, though. :D
 
Well. first of all there are plenty of pickup systems that mount a mic inside the guitar, such as a Fishman stereo blender, and Triad.

OK Grim- here's my contribution. I'm really a singer-songwriter that plays mostly acoustic, but I play one electric set when I'm playing live, and my first album had three songs that called for electric. Not having any badass boutique amps, I was screwing around with a POD Pro 2.0. I could get some approximation of the sound I was looking for, but it just had no balls. Somebody suggested that we are used to the sound of speakers moving air, which hits a microphone. That seemed reasonable, so first I plugged the POD into a Carver PM125 power amp, and then into a 1X12 Marshall cab, and stuck an SM57 in front of it. Big improvement.

But, I still had 2 problems. First, the power amp had a minor, but nonetheless annoying hum. I had put the POD in live mode, which disables the cabinet model, so the cab model wouldn't be fighting with the real cab, which had a Celestion vintage 30 in it. That speaker has quite a bit of character, and the sound wasn't ideal for everything I needed to do. And that hum was still there. Next, I switched out the cab to a Fender 1X10 wedge monitor, and switched the POD to studio mode, engaging the cab model. Considerable improvement- broad spectrum speaker cab with no character at all, let the cab model come through. But that damned hum was still there.

Well I got to thinking, "Gee, I need a power amp and speaker combination that reproduces what it's given (flat response), produces virtually no self noise, and which can accept a +4 line input." And of course, there was no way I had the money to buy it, even if I found it. Well, I looked across the room, and the light bulb just came on over my head. I plugged the line out from the POD into the +4 line in on my active studio monitors, in this case, 2 M-Audio SP5b's and an M-Audio SBX subwoofer! HUGE improvement, and that damned hum was gone. But- I still had a couple of issues. The monitor array consisted of 3 speakers, and the sub was producing a whole different frequency band. The SM57 just wasn't going to cut it.

I wound up putting an AKG D112 right on the sub, and a condenser on one satellite, and turned the other satellite off. I got my best results using an AKG C414 or a B.L.U.E. Kiwi. (OK, I didn't have amps, but I did have mics). Result? After a bit of tweaking, I could get a whole array of very good recorded sounds out of a POD. Does it sound like the amp that's being modeled? Not really , but it's *a lot* closer than a POD going direct. More importantly, if you get it dialed in right, it sounds *good*, and that matters a hell of a lot more to me than whether it sounds exactly like a Soldano VLO superlead, or whatever. We wound up using variations of the same system on the lead guitarist, guitar god Christopher Woitach, who declared it the only POD recording he had ever heard that didn't suck.

One key point- when I got it just right, it sounded like total shit in the room, until I moved into the near field. Oh yeah! It sounded just fine as long as you were 18" or so from the monitors. When you put on the headphones, the world gets OK, but if the guitarist hears this sound in the room without cans, he'll think you are out of your mind. I still use this technique today, along with mic'ing up real amps. I think this is just what Grim was looking for- the weird things we are often forced to do in project studios because of the gear we *don't* have. If I had had a nice old Roland tube amp, there's no way I would have ever figured this out.-Richie
 
Seafroggys said:
Hahaha that's actually quite funny :)
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Ya, I thought it was too! And it was for quite awhile, at least a year that I thought I was the discoverer of the C chord, all triads actually. Brilliant!:cool:

And that's been a pattern, when I was maybe 15 I thought I was pretty good and by 19 thought I'd figured out most drum beats.

And the older you get and the more you know, the more you realize you don't know shit, and there will never be enough time to listen to everyone you should and you end up focusing on whatever it is you need to get done.

It really comes down to getting enough of what you need to get your music out. Some people only need a cheap guitar and some people need the whole parade, a recording studio with the best everything, and both are fine.
 
Well, I'm not going to claim to be a "pioneer" of anything except the course of my own life, but two of the things I liked playing with back in my early days that I've never come across anybody else doing were in the area of analog synthesis, which I was pretty big into way back when.

First was the use of a feedback loop through the tape monitor section of n analog graphic equalizer as the source for using the equalizer as a kind of rough analog synthesizer to get some very spacey synth effects. Most of us have seen a video version of it when we have pointed a camera at a video screen displaying the output of a camera, and getting all sorts of video feedback effects. Well, I did kind of the same thing with audio, but by a combination of modulation or other changing the source signal I actually sent through the EQ, and then actually "playing the EQ" like an instrument by pushing and pulling the different frequency band sliders, one can get some kind of interesting vintage analog-style "spacey" sounds from it that are actually somewhat playable and controllable.

Second was a homebrew setup we had in our first home studio back in '79 that was centered around an ARP 2600 analog synth. We (a friend and I who co-built the studio) jerry-rigged a system where we wrote a little program on a classic TRS-80 microcomputer (remember those?) for sending timed voltages out of the output pin of the computer's RS-232 serial port, and ran those signals through various patch cords plugged into the various components of the 2600, and in that way devised some very early (and crude) digital computer control of our analog synth.

G.
 
Richard Monroe said:
the weird things we are often forced to do in project studios because of the gear we *don't* have. If I had had a nice old Roland tube amp, there's no way I would have ever figured this out.-Richie
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We learn so much from one another and various pros that perhaps we undervalue our 'necesities that were the mother of invention'. Before I ever owned a reverb unit, I'd put the mic behind a bass drum and sing into the bass drum. Interesting sound, serious body contortions. Cut out all the plosives !!
 
cantthinkofname said:
so i was wondering if anyone has ever mic'd in the guitar before? i'm sure its been done a billion times, and probably doesn't even sound good, but was just wondering once.
Click to expand...

Buddy Holly had a microphone put inside an acoustic in 1957/8 when he recorded 'Well Alright' - Sounded pretty damn good for it's day. Check it out!
 
Hmm . . . I discovered that if you introduce DC offset to a signal before feeding it to most of the UAD compressors, you can generate a fair helping of even-order harmonic distortion . . . I described an improved method for wiring guitars for balanced output and improved isolation between controls, and also advocated step-down output transformers built into guitars . . .

I think I am most proud of my VSTi MIDI multiplexer app that allows addressing of a single rank of organ pipes as a dynamically-controlled mixture, and allows use of a single MIDI controller as multiple virtual manuals :) I spent over 100 hours writing that thing . . . :o
 
One of my latest things was this, a knee operated pitch controller so you don't have to take your left hand off of the keyboard:
http://musicmusicmusic.cn/wheelelectronicp.html
It actually works great and I've used it a lot.

I'd like to remake it with bendable rubber levers which you wouldn't run into like I have by mistake. But it's part of my regular thing now.

I want to add a pedal for control #74 on it which you use for wah wah effects.
 
Using varispeed on my reel recorder to record at different speeds and keys. Slow it down and tune down the guitar to make that part a little easier. Of course, this is the oldest trick in the book, but I figured it out without knowing about it beforehand. I also figured out how to flip a track onto itself (excuse my lack of technical description) canceling out the unpanned frequencys. I did this with a broken ipod headphone jack, one time i was taking the bus, and my ipod started screwing up, I noticed that it would remove the vocals from every song, and make other things really loud, i thought it was amazing, I didn't understand it at the time (and still dont, as you can see).
 
Hey Mr. Clean.

I'd like to know the source of this little rock trivia statement!
thanks.
 
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Capo in the 3rd fret?
You would be playing in the key of G major if the chord forms were fingered as if you were playing in E maj.
If you fingered the chords as if you were in A, with the capo in the 3rd fret, you would be playing in C.
Perhaps I don't know enough chords but, unless you had invented some exotic tuning, I don't see how you could have been in B flat?
 
Sorry South Side Glen, I meant the one by Mr. Clean about Buddy Holly.
 
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