Nice article for engineers to understand something that most guitar players will intuitively know.

One of the great things about a hi-gain setup like Hendrix's is how the feedback loop will inject an element of controlled chaos into the sound. It allows for emergent fluctuations in timbre that Hendrix can wrangle, but never fully control. It's the squealing, chaotic element in something like his 'Star Spangled Banner'. It's a positive feedback loop that can run away from the player and create all kinds of unexpected elements.

The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.

A great place to hear artful feedback would be the intro to Prince's 'Computer Blue'. It's the squealing "birdsong" at the beginning and ending of the record. You can hear it particularly well if you search for 'Computer Blue - Hallway Speech Version' with the extended intro.

• 9dev

  today at 10:03 PM

  Star Spangled Banner was incredible. The way you can hear the machine guns, choppers, sirens, screaming in agony… that was a masterpiece.

I strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created.

All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.

See: https://www.scribd.com/document/55134776/48787070-Bob-Ostert...

With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.

There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup).

Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre.

Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.

• vanderZwan

  today at 9:55 PM

  The reverse example of this is musicians who play techno with analog instruments, like Pipe Guy, Basstong, and Meute[0][1][2].

  There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.

  EDIT: having said that, I don't think I would agree with your premise, because it is colored by a subtle form of survivor bias. None of us remember what it's like to not know electronic guitars or what they sound like, so claiming "the audience intuitively understands what Jimmy Hendrix is doing" is like saying everyone "intuitively understands" their native language. On top of that there's nothing about the workings of an electronic guitar that wouldn't in principle work for something like an electronic violin or whatever.

  [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0gED3rn2Tc

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn52b-bWfFM

  [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYtjttnp1Rs

  • soulofmischief

    today at 9:59 PM

    Great recommendations. Throwing Klangphonics in the ring even though they use electronic instruments as well

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bixtQAq2LzE

    • vanderZwan

      today at 10:30 PM

      Nice addition! First time I heard of them and I'm liking what I'm hearing so far.

      And just to clarify: I don't dislike electronic instruments. I just think that on some subconscious level the human brain can detect other humans playing a live instrument. Like there's something "embodied" in the sound that is likely missing from a pure electronic instrument. And I needed that element to "unlock" access to techno.

• pdntspa

  today at 9:40 PM

  > There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience

  Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.

  Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.

  • solomonb

    today at 9:58 PM

    I'm talking about electronic instruments how they are deficient in expressiveness compared to your cello example.

    > Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects.

    The story is not quite so simple. Your synthesizer is going to have a buffered output so it wont have the complex impedance loading interactions with the amplifier as the guitar pickup.

    This is actually critical to how early distortion effects such as the classic Fuzzface work and imo is essential for the kind of complex timbres you can produce with a guitar + tube amp.

    In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.

    • cowboylowrez

      today at 10:26 PM

      >In fact you can take an electric guitar, put a buffer pedal in the chain between your fuzz pedal and amp and completely destroy the ability to produce wild feedback and distortion.

      I don't buy it, especially as you didn't explain the "destroy" aspect, because put enough gain, get the right phase shift and something will probably go unstable, the feedback happens between the speaker and strings (best case) or pickup (not so great)

      I never minded transistor guitar amps, because for the overdrive part we would probably use something like back to back diodes to simulate the smooth rolloff of overdrive / compression of tube amp distortion.

    • vegadw

      today at 10:14 PM

      So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again?

      I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups.

      The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.

      • solomonb

        today at 10:30 PM

        > So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again?

        That is going to be something like a transformer to step down your line level signal and some series resistance to match the load to help drive the amp.

        An actual coil pickup has reactive impedance that is frequency dependent and will result in a more complex interaction between the devices.

        > The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature

        Sure if you think like an engineer, but everything you are complaining about is what allows someone like Jimi Hendrix to do what he did with a guitar.

  • Nition

    today at 9:50 PM

    They're talking about electronic instruments there. The comment is about how electronic instruments don't generally match the physical expressiveness of acoustic instruments (like the Cello).

  • dec0dedab0de

    today at 9:50 PM

    they're comparing an electric guitar to electronic instruments, like midi keyboards. An electric cello would be the same thing as an electric guitar in this context.

• gnarlouse

  today at 10:10 PM

  I feel like the synthesizer--CMI Fairlight, Moog anything, Synclavier, PPG Wave, and just the general concept of modular synthesis--are pretty staunch competitors. Yours is certainly a fun and fair take, and arguably the electric guitar+tube amps birthed so many genres (blues, soul, funk, rock, punk, metal, etc) where as synthesizers remained pretty niche with their contribution to experimental music and pop music, mixing in with rock funk and disco, and the titan of EDM that grew out of that.

• asdfman123

  today at 9:49 PM

  You could argue that it's one of the most versatile instruments, sure. "Greatest" is completely subjective.

  But is it one of the most versatile instruments? You can do signal transforms with any kind of audio input, although it's done more with the electric guitar than any other instruments.

  I would say it in practice, it has the most versatile sonic profile.

  • solomonb

    today at 10:02 PM

    A modular synth is more versatile in terms of enumerated signal transformations. Its the ability to be expressive with those signal transformations that makes the guitar+tube amp what it is.

    • vegadw

      today at 10:17 PM

      I'm a guitarist, but also have a modular.

      With the right interface, I think the synth can be more expressive. Look at the Haken Continuum or ExpressiveE Osmose - both can be used with something like the Expert Sleepers FH-2 to get MPE data to the modular.

      I do see your point, and agree the amount of articulation you can do with guitar is hard to beat, but I do think a synth can win, if the setup is built for it.

• jrm4

  today at 10:13 PM

  Great argument -- but I'd also counter that "the turntable" (i.e. in the hands of experts like Q-Bert, Craze, Rob Swift, Jazzy Jeff and others) fits this quite well -- especially re your "have the audience understand what he is doing argument"

• Nition

  today at 9:34 PM

  There have been some interesting keyboard input devices coming out which allow for more expression than normal piano keys, using a sort of hack to the MIDI system called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression. For example the Seaboard Rise or the Osmose. Depending on the instrument it's possible to do per-note pitch bends, change pressure while holding notes, perform vibrato etc. Visually the physical movement is not as interesting as electric guitar though, so yours probably still wins.

  • today at 9:40 PM

• gwbas1c

  today at 9:33 PM

  I watched Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips do something similar with some kind of "I don't know what" controller, it was some kind of input in his microphone stand. As he moved it around, the sound and projection changed.

  I remembered learning about similar MIDI controllers when I was in school.

  • bigiain

    today at 10:07 PM

    Imogen Heap created a set of gloves that transform finger flexing and wrist movement into midi signals you can use in whatever way your performance software allows.

    https://mimugloves.com/gloves/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq52kT6YY-0

• dec0dedab0de

  today at 9:47 PM

  I generally reserve the word electronic to mean something with a microcontroller or discreet logic components. Electronic guitars exist, but they're basically differently shaped keyboards.

  I often lament the lack of other electric instruments.

• anthk

  today at 9:43 PM

  Ahem, just two words. Yamaha DX-7.

  Synth music elevated electric bound tones to anything ever heard.

  I remidn you that most of the rock and roll and rock music was about speed and mimicking the sound of a rumbling car engine, as it was a symbol of the freedom in America, being able to run away from your toxic communities to find yourself better anywhere else.

  That was the message for the young with rock and roll: a speedy engine for your ears.

  Electronic music was like replacing a car with UFO evoking you a space travel.

  With the progressive subgenre of techno music you got the same feeling, but with no subtle hints. Heck, one of the most known songs in Spain ever, "Flying Free", literally remixes the sounds of drifting cars between the melodies, making the listener really happy in a very direct way as tons of youngs in the 90's got into the outskirt night clubs... by car. So they felt as driving an infinite highway rave with no end for days.

  • bigiain

    today at 10:14 PM

    The amusing thing (to me at least) is that while the DX7 gave users almost infinite options as to how they could create and shape sounds, if you know what to listen for you'll hear the E PIANO 1 and BASS 1 presets an about half of all mid 80s hits. Turns out when they gave musicians a tool with immense flexibility, many of them still chose to use two of the (admittedly great) preset sounds.

• deafpolygon

  today at 9:32 PM

  I suppose you haven’t heard some really talented sitar players out there. For a traditionally non-electronic instrument, it’s got some crazy sounds.

  • solomonb

    today at 9:32 PM

    I think you misunderstand my comment entirely. I'm not comparing electric to acoustic instruments at all.

This is one of the few articles where I noticed a bunch of LLM-isms and still read to the end because it was interesting.

• purplekohav

  today at 9:31 PM

  Hi! I work at IEEE Spectrum and there's no way an LLM wrote this. We have a pretty strict Generative AI use policy (bottom of this page https://spectrum.ieee.org/about). I'm guessing this is from writers using actual writing techniques that Gen AI stole from...

  • DrewADesign

    today at 10:13 PM

    I took my introductory college writing classes at a college I can’t name-drop without sounding like a jerk, which also did a bunch of LLM research over the years. We used a TON of em dashes in our writing. It’s no mystery, to me, where that stylistically prevalent quirk comes from. I’ve definitely been accused of being an LLM bot.

  • consumer451

    today at 10:01 PM

    I just wanted to relate a story.

    I was speaking with my 14 year old nephew via messaging last month. It was about a deep topic, synthetic consciousness. He wrote such an intelligent reply that I asked him: hey, was this from an LLM? He was insulted. I did research with his parents and found out that 99% no, he's just a very smart kid.

    Is there a name for this this mode of confusion yet?

    • stewarts

      today at 10:27 PM

      Strikes me as an opposite of the Uncanny Valley.

  • EnPissant

    today at 10:07 PM

    Schools have a strict Generative AI policy as well, and yet...

• post-it

  today at 8:51 PM

  It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.

  • 0x1ch

    today at 9:00 PM

    Probably similar to what I do with my papers and resumes, I write them myself then throw them through LLMs for suggestions and corrections, manually reviewing the output.

• nerdsniper

  today at 9:11 PM

  LLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.

  I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.

• mkehrt

  today at 10:17 PM

  It doesn't read like an LLM to me. What are you seeing?

• squeaky-clean

  today at 9:42 PM

  I didn't see any LLM-isms. Emdashes I guess, but I expect those in actual articles, they're only fishy in social media comments.

• evilos

  today at 9:13 PM

  I bailed, it just really kills my desire to keep reading.

  • gchamonlive

    today at 9:29 PM

    I feel for you, because moving forward more and more interesting and substantious articles will be written with llm-isms, either because LLM was used directly in writing or because the authors absorbed the style.

I've often marveled at the success many guitar players had with experimental electronics - Hendrix, EVH, Les Paul, Brian May, Jack White, and Tom Scholz (special case, of course) are just a few examples.

• nervousvarun

  today at 9:54 PM

  Brian May stands out even among that group (well maybe not w/ Les Paul there)

  The guy built his own guitar as a teenager and has played it for the rest of his career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special

• tclancy

  today at 9:37 PM

  The podcast "History of Rock in 500 Songs" (full disclosure: I am a devout, slavering fan) provides these on the regular. I was actually smiling when I heard a fairly new song that attempts a really flat, fuzzed out sound because it made me think, "Buddy Holly invented that by accident with a broken speaker". One of the episodes on The Who goes into the Marshall behind Marshall amps in similar detail.

  I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.

  • RyanOD

    today at 9:54 PM

    Oh wow! This is incredible...thanks for sharing.

• bigiain

  today at 10:19 PM

  "Muddy Waters invented electricity!" -- Willie Brown, Crossroads (movie), 1986

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHMv0ORn0hg

Why is that pic labelled with the wrong names? Pretty sure that isn't Mitch and Noel.

• harry8

  today at 9:43 PM

  Eddie Kramer?

There is art in engineering that we cannot deny.

While some try to make it as exact science, it is not, there are things you still cannot put a number on and it works ...

This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry.

DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class).

The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers.

And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Animats!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.

• jmalicki

  today at 9:07 PM

  I came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work, not because people aren't aware (Adam and Muon can be seen as approximations to second-order methods, though, so it is useful to be aware of that structure).

  Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads?

  Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.

  • alephnerd

    today at 10:09 PM

    > Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads

    Networking, OS, and Distributed Systems is increasingly treated as CompE or even EE nowadays in the US.

    > Just because EEs are exposed...

    That's the thing - I truly do not believe that EE and CS should be decoupled, and I believe ECE as a stopgap is doing a disservice to the talent pipeline we need for my verticals to remain in the US, especially when comparing target American CS and EECS programs to peer CEE, Indian, and Israeli CS programs [0].

    There is no reason that a CS major should not be required to take a summary circuits, DSP, computer architecture, and OS fundamentals course when this is the norm in most CS programs abroad. Additionally, I do not see any reason for EEs and ECEs to not take Algorithms, Data Structures, and Compilers as well.

    > Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path

    Mind you, I'm primarily in Cybersecurity, AI/ML infra, DefenseTech, and DeepTech adjacent spaces - basically, anything aligned with the "American Dynamism" or Cyberstarts thesis.

    From what I've seen, the most successful founders are those who are able to adeptly reason and problem solve, but are also able to communicate to technical buyers because you are selling a technical product where those people make the decision.

    Just because an approach isn't useful today doesn't necessarily imply it isn't in the future and being exposed to those kinds of knowledge and foundational principles makes it easier for one to evaluate and reason through problem spaces that are similar but not necessarily the same - for example, going to the Nagle's example - this was a bog standard networking concept that has now become critical in foundation model training because interconnect performance is a critical problem which can impact margins.

    A lot of foundational knowledge is useful no matter what, and is why we fund founders and hire talent at competitive salaries.

    [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413516

  • esafak

    today at 9:35 PM

    Muon is much more sophisticated than Newton's method. Neural networks have started to borrow techniques from statistical mechanics, and various branches of maths like invariant theory that were previously rarely used in engineering. CS is not dumbing down; its needs and focus are changing.

    I've never needed or benefited from most of the EE curriculum. There is an opportunity cost in learning things you don't need.

This is a terrible article. In the first subplot, there is no explanation of what v(b1) and v(c2) are. The -8 on the on y axis (amplitude) looks like an upside down 8.

Further down there is a sentence: "First, the Fuzz Face is a two-transistor feedback amplifier that turns a gentle sinusoid signal into an almost binary “fuzzy” output." But the figure does not match this - there is no "gentle sinusoid" wave shown on the first fuzz face plot.

The original title: "Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardy Explained."

> and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer.

So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.

• btown

  today at 9:05 PM

  Art and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology!

  And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians?

  We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)

  • dajt

    today at 9:11 PM

    We should not call ourselves engineers - it's a massive insult to actual professional engineers.

    • soulofmischief

      today at 10:18 PM

      Speak for yourself, some of us value and incorporate both science and methodology into our craft, and adhere to a system of ethics.

Nice article, but that the signal chain in the top image doesn't match the signal chain described in the text annoys me more than it should.

• threetonesun

  today at 8:55 PM

  It's also a standard right handed strat, which seems like an oversight for a guy famous for playing with a right handed strat flipped upside down.

Fascinating

[dead]

Hendrix reportedly discovered feedback by walking away from a cranked amp. The guitar just kept sustaining on its own. What followed was years of empirical system identification: learning how body position, pickup selection, and guitar-to-amp distance affected feedback character. No transfer function, just iteration. That's a valid engineering methodology.

Jimi on the radio is my shorthand for bad economic times. Happened in 2007 and he's playing on the airwaves now

• UncleOxidant

  today at 8:31 PM

  Interesting economic indicator. But isn't Jimi playing on the radio all the time somewhere?

• mlhpdx

  today at 8:38 PM

  I prefer the Circle Jerks:

    In a sluggish economy
    Inflation, recession
    Hits the land of the free
    Standing in unemployment lines
    Blame the government for hard time
    
    We just get by
    However we can
    We all gotta duck
    When the shit hits the fan

And God is a DJ.

• tclancy

  today at 9:38 PM

  This is my church.

  • bigiain

    today at 10:21 PM

    Last night a DJ saved my life

Crazy example of when everything is AI generated, even the code referenced in git repo (refer to commit 3d733ca), and actually interesting and "new" in a way...