The $20 Vocoder

I bought this old Casiotone CT-360 keyboard at a yard sale in Garberville, for $5, with the express purpose of bending it. That is, hacking the circuit-board to exploit whatever glitches, distortion and weirdness I could coax out of it. So, the first thing I did when I got it home was take the back off of it, exposing the circuit-board, turned it on, and started one of those cheesy rhythms playing while I probed the circuit. All weekend I kept playing those incessant mechanical rhythms. I even put a block of wood under one of the keys, so notes kept bleating for hours. I found quite a few interesting short-circuits on the board, but the noise almost drove me crazy.

As those canned rhythms churned on and on and random notes screamed away for hours on end, the internal speaker impressed me with its brightness, and overall volume. In other words, it was F-ing loud. The speaker made bending convenient, but I didn’t imagine I would use it much, since I usually plug electronic instruments directly into a mixer or recorder, and listen to it on my studio monitors. In fact, when I needed a place to mount the knobs and switches that trigger the glitches and malfunctions I found on the circuit-board, the speaker grill, located directly to the left of the keys seemed the perfect location.

I removed the speaker, cut a hole in the speaker grill, and mounted all of the switches and knobs on a wooden disc I recycled from a round box that originally contained a small wheel of goat-milk brie cheese. It fit perfectly. I added a quarter-inch phone jack, and a switch that allows you to turn the internal speaker, a smaller, quieter speaker that I added, and placed elsewhere in the device. When I finally put the whole thing back together, it all malfunctioned perfectly.

But I had this speaker left over, this loud, bright, 3W 4Ohm 5” Samsung driver. Then I had an idea. It wasn’t an original idea, and it wasn’t the first time I’d thought of it, but clearly its time had come. Joe Walsh and Bob Heil put this idea in my head a long time ago with the guitar solo to “Rocky Mountain Way.” I loved that song when I was a kid. Heil and Walsh worked together to build a device that works on this principle for the vocalized guitar solo in that song. Heil went into production with the device, dubbing it the “Talk Box” and gave one of the very first production models to Peter Frampton who famously used it on “Do You Feel Like We Do?” David Guilmore used one on “Pigs” on the Pink Floyd album “Animals” and many other artists found use for this device as well.

I believe Heil still makes some version of the Talk Box. Craig Anderton, in his book “Electronic Projects for Musicians” tells you how to build something like Heil’s Talk Box, but he recommends using the driver from a horn speaker, so his design requires no funnel. However, I once interviewed Bob Heil for my radio show, and I asked him about the Talk Box and how they created that sound. In that interview, Bob Heil told me that they set out to recreate an old blues trick of putting a funnel with a piece of hose attached to it, over the speaker of a guitar amplifier. By putting the other end of the hose in his mouth, a player could appear to “sing” guitar notes by silently moving his mouth.

None of the modern designs for this kind of effect use a funnel with a conventional paper cone driver. Instead, they all use a more specialized driver, but I knew about the funnel from talking to Bob Heil, and it works well. I’m sure it helps that it is such a loud and bright little speaker, and such a loud and bright little synthesizer. They work marvelously together, but the device will work with any audio source loud enough to drive the speaker without burning it out. I really love the way this device allows you to sculpt sound, turning relatively flat electronic signals into full bodied musical expressions. I’m completely hooked on it and I expect to use it quite a bit in the future. I’m sure a lot of musicians would have use for a device like this, and I hope this encourages some of them to build one for themselves.

Thanksgiving, a Lovely Afternoon, and Some Music

Once again, Thanksgiving time has arrived. Despite the current national political disaster, I have a lot to be thankful for this year. My partner Amy, our health, and our cozy little home in the woods tops my list, but we also took a real vacation this year, our first in many years, and my first ever trip overseas. We enjoyed a lot of lovely afternoons this year, and this little video documents one of the loveliest, the evening we went for a stroll along the Dordogne river between Le Roque Gageac and Castle Beynac in Perigord, France.

The music to this video is called “Amy’s Piece”. It started as something I used to play as a warm-up exercise on acoustic guitar. Amy and I have lived together, in the same room, for more than twenty years. I cannot begin to calculate how many thousands of hours of my musical noodling she has endured. She always particularly liked this little exercise.

 

Eventually, I recorded it, added an E-Bow electric guitar melody line, named it after her, and it became part of my 2007 album: Hand Made. The same piece also appears on the Humboldt Council of the Blind Benefit CD titled: “Making Blindness Fashionable” (2008 Meth Bog Records) as the final cut on the album, where they list it as, “Army’s Peace.”

Stand Up for the Stratocaster

When you see something you know is wrong, sometimes you have to say something about it. Here’s a letter I wrote recently, and another that I encourage you to write as well.

To the good folks at Sweetwater Musical Instruments and Pro Audio,

I am deeply offended, upset and disturbed by an image that appeared on the cover of the most recent edition of “SweetNotes” supplemental circular. I’ve been a customer of yours for years, and I always appreciate receiving your catalogs in the mail, but the image I saw on the cover of SweetNotes shocked me to my core.

Who thought this was a good idea? What possessed them to do such a thing? How dare you put it on the cover of your publication where anyone could see it, including innocent children, who have no idea what they are looking at. A Stratocaster with an F-hole!?!?

What were they thinking? What were you thinking? This is wrong! This is offensive! This is mutilation, humiliation and degradation! Whoever did this should be charged with Stratuatory Rape. We should lock him up in a room with an arch-top guitar and throw away the key. At the very least, he should never be allowed within 100 yards of a solid body electric guitar ever again.

It was bad enough when Fender put F-holes on Telecasters, but that didn’t bother me because Telecasters are for country music. Country music is songs about people who do stupid things, sung by people who dress like cowboys but have no cows. In other words, country music is all about being stupid and phony, so a phony F-hole on a solid-body Telecaster in a country band just fits right in.

That’s not OK for a Stratocaster. The Stratocaster was built for Rock-n-Roll and christened by Jimi Hendrix himself. Rock-n-Roll is solid and heavy. It requires a heavy, solid-bodied electric guitar. The Stratocaster just barely weighs enough as it is. Gibson’s Les Paul model, another iconic Rock-n-Roll guitar, weighs a ton, but you don’t see them routing fucking F-holes into it, do you? No. If Gibson wants to make F-holes, they build a nice arch-top guitar and put the F-holes where they belong. If Fender wants to cut F-Holes so bad, they should learn to make an arch-top guitar themselves instead of defacing a classic Rock-n-Roll legend.

You folks at Sweetwater should not encourage Fender to continue the practice of scarring these beautiful instruments with those ugly gouges, nor should you lead your customers to believe that you abide by such violence. We all deserve at least a modicum of decency and respect, including and especially the Fender Stratocaster. I was deeply offended by the disrespectful and exploitative image that appeared on the cover of SweetNotes and I believe that it is exactly this kind of smut that contributes to the aesthetic insensitivity of society at large.

Sincerely yours,

John Hardin

Sweetwater Responds:

My assistant didn’t know how to take this.  I would have to assume this is just a phase that Fender is going through like weird body piercing.  I also don’t expect this to become a classic.

Thank you,

Matt Kreager, Sweetwater Sound

That’s Not Good Enough!!

Obviously, Sweetwater does not take this issue seriously enough. That is why I ask all guitar players of good taste, everywhere in the world, to please write to Fender Musical Instrument Company directly and demand an end to this needless violence against innocent solid-bodied electric guitars. If enough of us stand up for the Stratocaster, we can stop this butchery today and forever. Here’s their email address:

consumerrelations@fender.com

(Here’s a sample letter)

Dear Leo, (I know he’s dead, but why not)

Recently I saw one of your classic instruments, the Fender Stratocaster horribly defaced. Some idiot had gauged an F-hole into it! Then I realized that this mutilated and deformed instrument appeared on the cover of a new instrument catalog, meaning that someone at Fender intentionally did this to a Stratocaster. The classic Stratocaster sound is not enhanced by the addition of an F-hole, because the Stratocaster is a solid-bodied electric guitar. But of course you would know this, at least you did when you were alive, and I’m sure that while you were alive, you would never have let such a thing happen. Today, things have gone haywire and the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. I can see where people might find it hard to tell right from wrong, so sometimes we just have to spell it out. It’s wrong to put an F-hole on a Stratocaster. It’s just wrong, and you should stop doing it now.

Sincerely, (Insert your name here)

PLEASE SHARE WITH ALL OF YOUR GUITAR PLAYING FRIENDS!!!

Hard Interpretace live at Club Azyl

My Recycled Rock-n-Roll Rhythm Section

…and while we’re at it. Here’s another new music video I made:

Crash! features a didgeridoo driven rhythm section that includes two homemade instruments that I’ve written about before: the Record Breaking Guitar, and the Spring Bass. On this track I distorted the sound of the Spring Bass to make it more percussive, and it functions more like a snare drum.  Here’s the video I made of the Spring Bass back when I first created it

The Record Breaking Guitar sounds just as jangly and twangy as it did in the video I made about it when I first built it.

Speaking of video from back then, I extracted all of the video images in Crash! from old silent films and home movies, now in the public domain, and cataloged for your convenience in the Prelinger Archive.

I hope you’ll check out all of my music and music videos at my music blog:  http://www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com

An Open Letter to Willie Nelson

Dear Willie,

I write to you today on behalf of marijuana smokers across the US, of which I am one, and on behalf of my community here in Humboldt County, California. I write to you because I read recently that you intend to market, or at least license your name to, a brand of cannabis products. I’m glad to hear it. I wish you enormous success on your new endeavor, and look forward to trying your weed.

I know that you’ve been working for legalization since at least the Carter administration.

I’ve been working for it for a long time too.

Now that it looks like we have finally done it, here in California, the people who profited so much from marijuana prohibition, politicians and black market drug dealers, are working together to keep marijuana expensive through excessive regulation and taxation.

This policy of high taxes and anti-competitive regulation insures that the black market for cannabis remains strong because cannabis in the legal market stills costs more than it does on the street. The black market for cannabis is destroying my community, not to mention some of the last great forests in the lower 48. We have grown pot for a long time here in Humboldt County. However, the recent dramatic expansion in cannabis cultivation here, has had serious impacts on spotted owl habitat, endangered Coho salmon and the Pacific fisher, not to mention the quality of life for the people who live here.

The black market economy has had a corrosive effect on my community. The black market for marijuana has the effect of devaluing all other forms of work. Kids here expect to grow up to become drug dealers, like their parents, and they start young. This creates special challenges for our public school systems. Violent crimes, like home invasion robbery, murder, and violent assault have become commonplace in our small rural community, and we have some of the highest suicide and drug overdose rates in the state. Despite the supposed “economic benefit”of the black market marijuana industry, it produces a very deep kind of poverty in this community.

Sure, there’s more money around town, thanks to the black market, but that money mostly goes into the pockets of the very worst people, and the promise of black market money brings more of these greedy bottom-feeders to Humboldt County every day, where they chop down trees, poison wildlife and convert local housing into grow operations in order to coldly exploit marijuana prohibition in the rest of the country. Believe me, the money that the War on Drugs has brought to Humboldt County has done more harm than good, and the harm the black market marijuana industry does to this community is expanding at an astronomical rate.

 

Humboldt County became a popular place to grow marijuana because of its remoteness, and because of the cover the forest provided. Today, drug dealers from all over the country come here to grow weed, but thanks to our work to legalize cannabis, they no longer need to hide under the forest canopy. They know that here, the county government loves their money, the Sheriff will ignore them, and that we have the infrastructure to supply them with all of the soil, fertilizer and grow supplies they need. However, the land here is steep, heavily forested and very poorly suited to agriculture. Marijuana farmers use incredibly wasteful production methods, and our remote location makes everything here more expensive. There’s no reason you couldn’t grow pot that was every bit as good as we grow here, for a hell of a lot less money, somewhere else.

That’s why I’m writing to you today, Willie. We have turned the tide in the War on Drugs, and we have forced the politicians to change the laws, but politicians and drug dealers remain as greedy as ever. We can’t let them continue to rip-off pot smokers. Pot smokers deserve deserve a break after all of these years, and it’s time for the legal business community to serve cannabis consumers with safe, reliable cannabis products at prices that put black market dealers out-of-business.

Pot is not difficult to grow. I’ll bet you could grow a hell of a lot of it in Texas, and I’ll bet you could grow it cheaper there, than we can here, even if you have to haul your water all the way from Louisiana. This nation needs weed, Willie, and Americans need reliable cannabis that they can afford. Thus far, the licensed legal growers in Washington, Colorado and Oregon have not begun to quench this nations’ thirst for cannabis. As cannabis becomes more reliable and accepted, the demand will likely rise as well. Also, as the price of cannabis falls, the demand will increase as people devise imaginative new ways to use cannabis. What that means, Mr. Nelson, is that this nation needs an enormous amount of weed, and we are counting on you and your company to produce it for us.

I know that you might feel tempted to smoke another joint and think about this for a while, but my community needs relief today. We need to stop this disease now, before it wipes out the last wild salmon, before it drives the spotted owl to extinction and before the last Pacific fisher dies of rodenticide poison. What’s more, we need to drive this insatiable greed out of our midst before we lose any more of our community to the War on Drugs.

You have the opportunity to make a LOT of money for you and your investors, create jobs for American workers, and make marijuana affordable for the people who need it most. At the same time, you would save our environment, my community, and put violent drug cartels and greedy criminal gangs out of business. We should have done this back when Carter was president, but we absolutely need this ASAP, PDQ and NOW!

It shouldn’t cost as much to sit on the front porch and smoke a doobie while you strum your old guitar, as it does to go out to a bar and have a couple of beers. American workers should not have to work an extra day each week, just to pay for the pot it takes for them to enjoy a joint at the end of a long day at work. Americans need the stress relief that cannabis provides, and they don’t need the extra stress of ridiculously high, prohibition-era prices, when they can barely keep a roof over their head and food on their plate as it is.

When we started fighting for the legalization of marijuana, it wasn’t because we wanted drug dealers to be able to legitimize their illegal profits. We worked to legalize marijuana because we love marijuana and we don’t think that anyone should go to jail for it. The American people deserve marijuana, and after all that marijuana smokers have been through because of prohibition, we deserve safe, reliable, high-quality marijuana at a price we can afford. I hope you can make that happen, Willie, before it’s too late for my community.

Sincerely, John Hardin

 

Free the Weed, Screw the Economy

In the current debate over how to regulate cannabis in a legal environment, I hear an inordinate amount of concern about the possible economic effects of disrupting the current black-market. I mean, we didn’t mind when Amazon drove brick-and-mortar bookstores out of business. We didn’t care when itunes destroyed the record industry. “That’s progress,” and “You’ve got to stay ahead of the curve if you want to compete.” we said. It seems to me, that this whole internet revolution, that turned our economy upside-down, and ruined a whole lot of honest hard-working people’s lives in the process, remains hugely popular, despite the casualties.

But I guess it’s a different story when it comes to drug dealers and the legalization of marijuana. That’s what they’re telling us, right? They are telling us that we need to regulate marijuana very carefully so that the price remains high enough to preserve the drug-gangster lifestyle. The recently passed CA state medical marijuana regulations will dramatically slow the development of new, legal, cannabis related business opportunities. Instead, they create a whole bunch of totally unnecessary, regulatory jobs for people who do nothing, except consume tax dollars and keep marijuana expensive. It’s appalling!

For decades, we’ve paid exorbitant black-market prices for pot. We’ve lost jobs, been denied jobs, paid fines and legal fees, and spent time in jail, as veterans of the War on Drugs. We’ve paid excessive taxes, suffered indescribable social injustice, and lost civil rights, to pay for the cruel, misguided, and completely unnecessary, War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has claimed millions of casualties. We’ve been through hell in the War on Drugs. We’ve paid enough for marijuana. After what we’ve been through, no one should ever have to pay for marijuana, ever again. Never.

We really shouldn’t worry so much about the effect the collapse of the marijuana black-market will have on our local economy. I know that the prospect of shrinkage in our local economy frightens people, but we should embrace it. What good does the economy do, if it destroys the environment, works us to death, and makes the things we need ridiculously expensive? The truth is, the marijuana economy does a lot more harm than good, and we’d be better off without it than you think.

It is important to remember that he economy is not one of those “more is better” kind of things. If you haven’t read my book, On the Money, Economics for the 99%, you owe it to yourself to do so. In it, I explain, in detail, how the economy works against you, and why making the economy larger, inevitably makes your life worse,. Consider this example:

Imagine a businessman, running his own small business, but business is slow. He’s just scraping by, economically. He goes to work at 9:00am, where he has a few orders to fill, and the phone rings once in a while. He makes a few calls himself, to drum up some new business. His customers like him because he gives them excellent service, and he’s built a personal relationship with most of them, but business is slow all around, so they don’t have much work to send his way. By 3pm he’s got his work squared away for the day, so he decides to knock off early. Of course he’s got his phone on, in case he gets a new order, but he’s out the door at 3pm.

Since it is such a lovely afternoon, he decides to take a walk in the park, and stop at the library on the way home. He arrives home around 5pm, with a stack of library books, and cooks his own dinner. Nothing fancy, but he makes it the way he likes it. After dinner, he doesn’t go out to a nightclub, because he can’t afford it. Instead, he picks up his old guitar, which he enjoys playing, when he has the time and energy. Since it was an easy day at work, he has some time and energy, so he has a good time playing the guitar, forgets about his money problems for a while, and maybe even teaches himself a new song. Then he relaxes a bit, reads one of the books he checked-out of the library, until he gets too tired to read, and then goes to bed.

The next day, he wakes up, makes his own breakfast, and goes back to work, hoping he’ll have a little more business. Let’s imagine that on this particular day, he gets a big contract. I mean, an enormous new contract. Suddenly, this businessman is swamped with work, but his money problems are over.

He realizes he needs help. That means he needs to put up a sign, place some want ads, answer calls, conduct interviews, file paperwork, set up accounts, buy a time-clock, and train new workers. Then he needs to order more stock, buy new machines, and put an addition on his shop. So he gets right to work, and by the time he finishes working for the day, it’s already 9:00pm. He goes home, exhausted, orders a pizza, and falls asleep in front of the TV. He feels a little queezy after that pizza, but he chalks it up to the excitement of this life changing day.

The next morning, he gets up early, grabs a breakfast sandwich and coffee, which he consumes at his desk. It’s not great, but he ignores his disappointment because he’s got more important things to think about. Instead of lunch, he grabs a candy bar from a vending machine, and again, eats it at his desk, between interviews. His phone never stops ringing, and instead of knocking off at 3pm, he doesn’t get out of the office until 9. When he gets home, he orders another pizza, and eats it in front of the tube.

After a few weeks of this, he realizes that he’s drinking four cups of coffee a day instead of one, because he constantly feels run-down, but the caffeine makes it hard for him to get to sleep at night, so he has a few beers with his pizza. After a few months, he realizes he’s gaining weight, so he joins a gym, and orders some home exercise equipment he saw advertised on TV, but he’s too exhausted to exercise or go to the gym, and instead, decides that he needs to improve his diet.

He starts looking for restaurants that serve healthier food. Turns out they charge more money for it too, but he happily pays it. Instead of drinking four cups of drip coffee, he has a vente double cappuccino. He stops drinking beer, and becomes a fine wine enthusiast. Still, the money comes in faster than he can spend it. He commissions a master luthier to build him the guitar of his dreams. When it arrives, he realizes that he no longer has callouses on his fingertips, and he doesn’t have time to play it.

He still feels run-down, and has a vague sense that he’s not taking very good care of himself, so he buys himself a brand new luxury car with all of the amenities. This makes his employees jealous, because they cannot afford such extravagant wheels. They now feel exploited, and so they start asking for raises. They no longer see him as the hardest working member of the team, but as the boss who gets rich off of their hard work.

Do you see a pattern here? Obviously this successful man deserves the money he’s making. He’s sacrificing his life for it. Clearly, we should view this successful businessman as a role model for the kind of job creator and consumer who drives economic growth That doesn’t mean he’s doing himself, or anyone else, any favors. In fact, he’s killing himself, and he’s killing himself, in part, because it’s the only relief he now sees from a life of too much work.

That’s what economic growth does to us. For the economy to grow, we have to work more, and spend more, every year. Believe it or not, we’ve got better things to do. You might not remember what they are, because you’ve been a slave for so long, but really, you’ve got better things to do than feed your one lifetime to the goddamn economy.

Too much money and too much work are much worse for people than too little. The black-market marijuana industry may have solved our money problems, but it has ruined the quality of our lives, weakened our community, and it continues to consume people, littering our streets with more of their broken husks every day. We don’t owe drug dealers anything, and we owe the economy even less. We deserve better, and it’s time we demanded it.

The HARP Project

Many Americans, as well as millions of people around the globe have expressed their outrage at the top-secret experiments taking place at a US military base in Alaska. This nefarious program, code-named “The HARP Project,” builds on the groundbreaking work of Nicola Tesla, and seeks nothing less than complete control of global weather patterns through the use of high-frequency electromagnetic fields.

The HARP Project utilizes an enormous antenna array, and transmitters capable of pumping millions of watts of radio-frequency energy into the stratosphere. These transmissions create changes in the Earth’s ionosphere that extend around the globe, and the amplitude of these signals distort the shape of the atmosphere, and effect the Earth’s magnetic field.

The HARP Project remains shrouded in secrecy,

…but this week, the LYGSBTD Center for Investigative Reporting acquired exclusive, TOP-SECRET video footage that reveals, for the first time, exactly how it really works. This video reveals the exact frequencies of operation, resonance gradients, harmonic characteristics, and radiation patterns of the energy field transmissions. This video allows viewers to see, and hear for themselves, the effect these energy fields have on the atmosphere. WARNING: This two-and-a-half minute video will change your life FOREVER!!!!!!

See, you are now two-and-a-half minutes older, and you’ve seen the newest addition to my growing collection of crude musical instruments made out of junk: The HARP Project. Technically, a musicologist would remind us, this instrument is a lyre, but I’ve called this instrument “the HARP Project” from the moment I conceived of this contraption, and I’ve only subsequently learned of the subtle difference between the two. For the record, a harp has only three sides, while a lyre has four.

The voice of this instrument emanates from an aluminum bundt cake pan I found lying in the mud while cleaning up a property in Ettersburg. I knocked the mud out of it and tapped it a couple of times to listen to its ring. I thought it had a pleasant ring, and considered using it as a resonator on the guitar I recently built, but the geometry of the guitar just didn’t work that way.

Still, I thought this bundt cake pan had a nice ring to it, and realized it would be easy to attach a piezoelectric pickup to it as well, so I started to look at it, and think about how I could best harness its acoustic properties. I checked a few books out of the library, and I looked up some stuff on-line. At some point, I found a picture of a harp made out of a roasting pan. I took note of how it was constructed.

created by Bart Hopkins to see more of Bart’s amazing instruments click this pic

Zither pins. Until this point, my collection of homemade string instruments has been limited by the availability of tuning mechanisms. I once got a music store to sell me a few old guitar tuning machines for a dollar each, but I haven’t come across a deal like that since. Zither pins sell for about a dollar each, new. With zither pins, I could build an instrument with 20 tuned strings, and stay within my budget of $30.

I built the frame of the instrument from an old shipping pallet, and I found a piece of copper pipe just the right length for the bridge.

You already know about the bundt cake pan.

I made the strings out of a spool of stainless steel wire I’ve been carrying around for over a decade.

The piezoelectric pickup came out of my Bratz brand toy drum machine that worked long enough that you can hear it on my last album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh?, but died shortly thereafter.

I got eight great sounding piezoelectric pickups out of that toy, including this one, and the one in my record breaking guitar.

I paid one dollar for it. A quarter-inch phone jack and a volume pot with a brushed aluminum knob complete the Harp Project, and make it convenient to amplify or record.

I really like the way it sounds. Now I have to learn to play it.

My Record-Breaking New Guitar

I just finished building myself a new guitar. In itself, I don’t think that sets any new records, except perhaps for some personal records for myself. For instance: This new guitar, with four strings, has more strings than any instrument I’ve built so far. I don’t expect that record to last long, because I’ve already begun work on a crude electric harp. This is also the first stringed instrument I’ve built that has a fret-board, although I didn’t set the frets, and it’s the first electric stringed instrument I’ve built that has a built-in amplifier.

Aside from these personal records, I can’t even claim to have recorded any new records with this guitar. I just finished building it, after all. I’m just getting to know the instrument. I wanted to build an instrument with a unique sound, and I’ve achieved that, but I expect it will take a while before I learn to speak its language fluently enough to compose music for it. Although it has a unique sound, I can’t say it’s uniqueness breaks any records.

You could see my new guitar as a kind of phoenix, rising from the ashes of an older, if not unique, at least unusual guitar. My new guitar began with an listing on the SoHum Buy-Sell-Trade Facebook page where I let people know that I was looking for junk guitar parts, especially tuning machines. Felix Omai responded to my ad by generously offering to give me the remains of an old Harmony brand arch-top, four-string, tenor guitar. I was delighted to receive it.

The guitar was in pretty sad shape. It’s arch had fallen, the back of the body had come off, the front of the body detached from the sides, and the fret-board fell off of the neck. One of the tuning pegs turned to dust between my fingers as I tried, for obviously the first time in many years, to turn it.

I googled the guitar online, and found a nice picture of what it must have looked like in its heyday, and I have to admit that it was a pretty sharp-looking guitar, considering that it retailed for $79.00 in the Sears and Roebuck Catalog. Even in 1962, that was a pretty cheap guitar.

The online reviews, however, all panned the guitar’s sound as “muddy,” “undefined,” and “bottom-heavy,” so I didn’t feel bad about salvaging the parts I could use to make a new and unique instrument. After I reattached the fret-board to the neck, and replaced the broken tuning peg with a little slab of deer antler, I salvaged the whole neck assembly, as well as the tailpiece and part of the rosewood bridge.

I replaced the body with a crude rectangle of wood I salvaged from a shipping pallet.  I built an electric pickup of my own design using an upcycled mint tin, a piezoelectric disc I salvaged from an electronic toy, some compression springs I got at Scrap Humboldt, and the rosewood string saddles from the bridge of the old Harmony. This unique acoustic-electric bridge pickup, with built-in spring reverb gives the guitar its unique sound, at least partially.

My new guitar’s other secret weapon is its on-board amplifier, with a speaker mounted directly beneath the strings. I built the amplifier around an LM386 8-pin amplifier chip, and powered it with a 9-volt battery.

The amplifier has an on-off switch, input volume, and gain control, which allows me to play it as an “acoustic’ instrument, that is, without plugging it into an external amplifiers, and to overdrive the amplifier producing distortion and feedback, whether it is plugged into an external amplifier or not.

Still, I did have to break two records to build this guitar, and no one will ever listen to this copy of Iron Butterfly’s 1960’s rock anthem, Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida,

or Billy Crystal’s hit single You Look Marvelous again.

Instead, you can listen to to me play them like this:

Why Guitar Players Have Better Love Lives

Why Guitar Players Have Better Love Lives

 

Ever since the heyday of rock music, when throngs on eager nubile young groupies swarmed guitarists like Frank Zappa, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, most folks have assumed that the only reason young men learn to play the guitar, is to score with women. This is true, but only because the only reason men do anything, besides drink and fart, is to score with women.

Is that Robert Fripp on the right?

From the quarterback on the high-school football team, to the class clown, to the most studious bookworm to the biggest burnout, the only reason a guy exerts any effort at anything, is to impress women, starting with his mother. Unfortunately, most of the things that guys do to impress women, completely fail to do so.

 

How often have you heard women complain about the stupid things men do, that they hate, and all the things they wish men would do, but they don’t? What causes this disconnect between the stupid things men do to impress women, and the stupid things women want men to do?

A large part of this problem stems from the fact that men, especially young men, do not understand how women think. Men cannot fathom why women dress the way they do, why they concern themselves with their appearance, why they like colors, why they think a movie needs more than boobs and explosions to be good, and why they would hesitate, for even a second, at any opportunity to have consensual sex. Men cannot comprehend any of this.

Further, men don’t want to comprehend any of this. Its not that we don’t care, we are actively, fingers stuffed in our ears, la, la, la, la, Not Listening. We don’t want to understand why women worry about their appearance because we don’t want to worry about our appearance. We like black. We like boobs, and we like explosions.

Most of all, we don’t ever want to pause and reflect on whether sex is a good idea under any circumstance. We want to find new ways to overcome women’s objections to sex under any circumstance. Men know that women are smarter. Men also know that men are stronger. Men think that the extra knowledge that women have, makes women weak, and gives men an edge. So, men do not want to know what women think, or how women think. The idea that women think at all still frightens us.

So, how do men decide what they will do to impress the women around them? They certainly will not ask the women around them. No, instead they will look within themselves. A man looks at what impresses him; professional athletes, Green Berets, NASCAR Drivers, Hollywood stunt men, comedians, and the guy who plays lead guitar in his favorite band.

Men seek to impress the women around them by emulating the people that impress them Men play sports, or engage in other silly behavior like driving too fast, doing skateboard tricks, telling stupid jokes, joining the Marines, or learning to play the guitar. Men exert tremendous time, money and energy, learn to discipline themselves, and risk injury or death in these activities, to impress women who, by and large, don’t care about sports, NASCAR, war, action movies, or heavy metal music.

A few men have an exceptional natural talent in these areas, and among them a few even manage to make a career for themselves, simply with their flawless execution of these otherwise stupid, fruitless, and dangerous activities. The rest of us, even though we completely fail to to achieve our own goals, come out of the experience shaken, wounded, and broke, but more or less satisfied that we’ve given it our best shot.

Whether it was the one season you won the pennant, that 1^st tour in Afghanistan, or the night your band rocked the house, these events define us, shape our lives, and make us who we are. What finally succeeds in making us attractive to women, is that we are satisfied with ourselves, even when we fail.

Women are never satisfied with themselves. They envy our self-satisfaction, and like being around someone who isn’t always worried about how they look, or what people say about them. Ultimately that’s why women love us.

However, some of the stupid things we do to impress women in our youth, don’t leave us in very good shape for building relationships with the women who actually love us. For instance; many servicemen returning from combat find it very difficult to readjust to civilian life. War injuries, combat related stress, and military experience in general can have a deleterious effect on a man’s ability to enjoy, and fully participate in a relationship.

Sports fosters competitiveness. Competitiveness does not necessarily help in a relationship, either.

Guitar players, on the other hand, develop strong, sensitive fingers. A guitar player knows how to listen. A guitar player can work with others without competing. A guitar player can tell when a relationship is working, and when it isn’t, and a guitar player knows how to express emotion.

For these reasons, of all of the stupid things that men do to impress women, learning to play the guitar turns out to be very effective in the long run.