Guitars for Geeks

Go to any rock concert and you'll find the guitar geeks standing in front of where the guitar player of their favorite band will be standing.

It's important that you get there early and stake a claim as close to the guitarist's position as possible, yet outside the mosh pit.

Moshers don't care about the concert, they just want to show off their bruises later to their friends.

The bassist ususally has bass geeks camping out where he will be playing.

For example, for a King's X concert, you'd want to stand in front of the the right side of the stage (from the perspective of facing the stage) to be able to watch Ty Tabor play during the concert. If you're a bass player, you'd want to stand on the left to watch Dug, King's X's bassist/singer perform.

If you're just there to listen, then any good spot will do, but as a sucky guitar player, I like to watch guitarist's hands during a concert.

By far my favorite guitar tones come from a combination of a Gibson Les Paul guitar playing through a Marshall Amplifier. Pure magic.

If you watch what happens during a concert, you'll see that guitar and bass players ususally use any time that the singer talks to the audience to retune their instruments. Especially during a rock concert, they tend to play harder and thus knock the strings out of tune over the course of a few songs.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, upsets fellow band members like somone's instrument being out of tune, so they take advantage of down time when the singer is yakking at the audience to retune.

Guitarists also many times play certain songs in what are known as alternate tunings. Standard guitar tuning, from big E to little E is E-A-D-G-B-E.

But if you want to have a deeper, darker sound from your guitar, you might tune as C-G-C-F-A-D, like Brad Noah, my favorite guitarist from the band Disciple.

If you see a guitarist take his guitar off and someone hand him a different one to play during a concert, that typically means that the upcoming song is one he will play in an alternate tuning. (unless he broke a string)

Anyhoo, Gibson USA has recently announced that this week, on December 7, they will release for sale a guitar that tunes itself, called the Robot Guitar.

Now this isn't a totally new concept, there have been various after-market modifications that one could pay to have installed into their guitar at a huge price in years past, but none that came standard on a production model guitar.

The machine heads, or tuners, at the head of the guitar have little servo motors in them. At the bridge end of the guitar are sensors for each of the six strings.

You tell the guitar that you want to retune and then strum the strings and a microprocessor decides which strings to retune using the servo motors in the machine heads.

The guitar has several popular alternate tunings programmed into it already, and has the capability for the user to custom program in tunings.

So a band memeber playing the Robot Guitar, still a Les Paul despite the new and smart hardware, can save time in a concert and just let the guitar tune itself instead of worrying about taking as much time as would normally take.

The guitar also intonates itself, if you know what that is. Intonation is setting up the adjustable parameters of the guitar strings such that the guitar plays in tune at every point up and down the guitar's neck. The Robot Guitar does this for you too.

Pretty neat in my book.

My Les Paul doesn't have this feature, it was made in the mid 1990s, so I'll just have to keep using my ear or electronic tuner to get back in tune after rocking out.

I've been reading about this Les Paul Robot Guitar as it's debut approaches and thought I would share my excitement.

Some day this technology will trickle down to cheaper guitars. I hope so anyway.

The first ones they are selling with the automatic tuning and intonation list price at $2499, which should translate into a street price of about $1700. A little too steep for me right now.

Here's the link again to Gibson's web site regarding this nifty guitar: Gibson Les Paul Robot Guitar.

Boring Computer Stuff / Ty Tabor of King's X

The computer we use at our home is a four year old Dell. It does it's job well, but it's a bit long in the tooth for handling the massive files generated when I scan 35mm slides. In other words, my computer does what I want it to, it's just old and slow by computer time.

The computer came with a 120GibaByte hard drive.

When I started scanning my slides in earnest over a year ago, I quickly started to fill that up.

I got another hard drive for Christmas 2006, a 160GigaByte internal one that I added into the computer. But it being an older computer, not top of the line, the two hard drives were on the same internal cable to the motherboard.

In other words, the computer had much more room for my slide scanning and digital photos, but it was now slower due to two hard drives trying to use the same "highway."

And recently, I saw that I had almost filled both the 120GB and 160GB hard drives with my stuff. And to add insult to injury, most of my photos were not backed up. Anywhere.

So I was just trucking along with my head in the sand, ignoring the fact that computers eventually break down, they are ultimately mechanical devices, and that I was way past the point of buying a ton of blank DVDs to back up roughly 270GB of photos. That would take about 70 DVDs holding 4GB each.

I started looking at external hard drives, expecting that a 500GB external hard drive would cost me about $100 per 100GigaByte.

I found an external, 500GB, USB 2.0, hard drive at Best Buy on sale for $150!

Yeah, I can hear the sharp intakes of breath, the hands placed over the mouths, OMG (Oh My Goodness) being wispered aloud. "A 500GB external hard drive for a mere $150? Why that's, that's, that's, HALF A TERRABYTE!"

I hear the scratching around as you pull a solar calculator out of the computer's desk drawer, or as you pull up the Windows XP calculizer. I hear the click of the buttons as you divide 150/500 and look up at the wall, stunned at the realization that your old internet pal John, of Least Significant Bits fame, just paid a mere $30 per 100GB for a brand new, 7200rpm, 16MB cache, USB 2.0, external hard drive.

I hear the wind wistle past your nose as you shake your head back and forth in absolute disbelief/wonder.

"Hey! Wait a minute. Who makes this hard drive? Probably some cheap piece of garbage, made by somebody I've never heard of and that will break down two days after the warranty expires and leaves you worse off than when you started. Ha! See!? It's NOT such a great deal after all!"

"Oh contrare," says I. "This, my too quick to disbelieve me friends, is a Western Digital MyBook hard drive. And if you have any computer knowledge at all, you know that Western Digital is a well-known and well-accepted brand of computer hard drive. And though it's impossible for you to know this, one of my friends that I went through Louisiana Tech's electical engineering program with went to work for Western Digital in the Dallas area after we graduated. I'm also helping a friend by buying a Western Digital hard drive. It's a Win-Win situation like that 7 Habits of Highly Successful People book writer likes to go on about."

It' OK. I'm not offended, I almost didn't believe it myself until I had that hard drive in my hot little hand and then hooked that baby up to my computer last night.

It's a real deal, I tell ya.

So, after reformatting it from FAT32 file scheme to NTFS, I was left with 465 glorious GigaBytes of free hard drive space. As I left for work this morning, my computer's new symbiote was busilly (is that a word? well, it is now) accepting the 270GB or so of digital images. So when I get home this evening, I'll have a back up to each and every digital photo, PLUS a couple hundred more GigaBytes for more!

My back hurts, but life is good!

And to place a cherry on top of this sweet deal, Best Buy had a copy of Ty Tabor's latest CD, Rock Garden.

"Who the heck is Ty Tabor, you ask?"

Ty Tabor is none other than one of the two guitarists whose work inspired me to pick up a guitar and begin to learn to play several years ago. Ty Tabor is the long-time guitarist for the rock group King's X, one of my top three all-time favorite bands.

Ty also puts out solo ablums, as do the other members of King's X, and the one I bought yesterday, Rock Garden is his third solo CD, and it is very, very good.

Lots and lots of tasty guitar playing and SOLOs thoughout.

Modern rock music guitarists don't play guitar leads any more. I don't know if they're all sucky players like me, or if they think themselves above playing guitar solos.

But I for one LOVE guitar solos, and think that almost every rock song could be bettered by a soulful guitar lead.

Again, through all the pain, life is good. A massive hard drive for my peace of mind and some unexpected new rock from one of my favorite musicians.

Yesterday wasn't a bad day at all.

(Note: Despite the photo of Ty on the front of the CD, he's right handed, it's a reversed photo. That drives me nuts when they do that. Unless of course he's even more talented than I thought and can play left handed too. Now that I think of it, the bassist and lead singer for King's X is left handed and Ty might be playing one of Doug's guitars in the photo. Hmmm. A mystery.)