alt Hacker NewsStrange article. Even though I do like music and engineering.
>Electromagnetic pickups—(...)—fixed the loudness problem. But they left a new one: the envelope
Was it really a problem to be solved? Good tube amplifiers already existed back then. Clean guiar tone was not something frowned upon.
>Hendrix’s mission was (...)
>His solution was (...)
I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.
Replies
LastTrain • today at 2:04 AM
Yes. The article had about the same effect as explaining a joke.
> I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.
1,000,000%. Guitar is one of those hobbies where people mythologize and build elaborate hagiographies around players they like and the gear that they used. Hendrix was a generational talent but I highly doubt he was sitting around enumerating problem statements and systematically exploring solution spaces. The Fuzz Face was one of like four dirtboxes available during that time so he chose that one. He flipped a guitar upside down because he could source one more easily than a lefty model. He leveraged feedback because he discovered it naturally and realized that he could make it sound totally badass.
The man clearly had a vision and executed it but his decisions were pragmatic, not the product of grand technical reasoning. It reminds me of the student who wrote a bunch of authors and asked to what degree they were conscious of the themes and symbolism in their work [1]. Many were not - as it turns out English teachers often put the cart before the horse. This is the rock and roll version of that.
I can't knock the article though as it has a lot of sound (pun intended) analysis in it as opposed to typical guitar forum dreck about NOS tube and hand-wired turret board magic.
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-...