The Tao of Walking Ridge

I liked my Fernandez with three single coils.  It sounded good when played through my Trace Elliot Velocette.  And it sounded good with my Aqua Fuzz pedal.  But since I know Smit, and I kept hearing how great his humbucker sounded, kept reading about how others liked the tone, I had had to see if a set of SHGP single coils would inspire me.

The pickups are vintage inspired.  Cloth wire, fiberboard plates.  Unlike the originals, these have 6 individual magnets.  The originals had a bar magnet with 6 steel posts.  Add in the tweaks that Smit makes to the bridge, middle, and neck position and even before I heard them, I was getting enthusiastic.  Smit has years of experience playing strats, and has a great feel for how to make the most of every pickup position.  Smit made the neck 6.2k, the middle pickup reverse polarity 6k, and the bridge 6.5k.

The installation was a piece of cake, and the original pickups covers fit the SHGP pickups just fine.  Though a set of covers were included just in case.

Wow.  Was I blown away.  I’m a basic blues tone, classic rock (mostly 60s rock) kind of guy.  I use one clean tone, one dirty tone with my Aqua Fuzz pedal mostly.  Sometimes I use my Boss DS-1.  With my old pickups, I found I mostly used the neck position, or sometimes the neck/mid position and pretty much left it.  The bridge was too thin.

Well, with these SHGP pickups, I now have an entirely new axe.  Every pickup postion has a different quality, and each one is musical.  The neck postition has noteable low end.  The bridge has a fat quality that, when put through my fuzz pedal, just said “60s fuzz”.  One chord, 60s tone.  I don’t know how else to put it into words.  And the middle position had its own character.  There is now a palette of five distinct musical tones to use.  These pickups exceeded my expectations.

The pickups are worthy of far better quality than the audio on my Canon G9, but FLAC files and inspired music will be coming as the muse finds time to noodle with the old familiar axe now loaded with new tones.

SHGP single coil pickups, Fernandez guitar, Trace Elliot Velocette amp, Aqua Fuzz fuzz pedal, Canon G9 video

Act without doing; work without effort - Tao Te Ching

Don’t force it, get a bigger hammer.

Though the storm caused quite a cleanup here at Walking Ridge, and preventive removal of dead trees before the next storm, the boulders were like diamonds in the rough.  Really, really, really, really big diamonds.

Part of living simply is making use of what is available.  While cleaning up storm damage, these boulders were found hidden from sight.  What a waste.  Now they enhance the view.

George Carlin had a funny routine about it.  The need for a place for your stuff.  I once sailed on a schooner with a crewman who made the profound statement “Do you own your stuff, or does your stuff own you?”.  This after a visitor was trying to imagine how we lived in bunks that were four by seven feet or so.  The visitor was quite sure “not all of his stuff would fit in there”.

Not only did we store all of your clothes and gear, we slept in the space.  It was quite comfortable, actually.

The shed, a place for more stuff:

No shed, no stuff!

Simplify, simplify, simplify - Henry David Thoreau

Barn’s burnt down -

now

I can see the moon. - Masahide

There is no more enduring beauty than nature itself.

Persistance pays off.  I tried many things and finally got Audacity to work!  Like a few others who tried many things, it is hard to say exactly which ones were required.  For ease of reading, I’ll summarize what I tried.

Remove jackd

stop all other devices using ALSA by running lsof | grep ‘/dev/snd/’ in terminal and killing any process found.  The alsa mixer (volume control on taskbar) was removed.  In my default installation of the Gnome desktop, I can remove the volume control with a right click on the task bar, and add again when I’m done with Audacity.  Running the terminal command will make sure there are no other apps using ALSA.

Disable ESD mixing in System >> Sound panel

remove and reinstall

I’m recording through USB with a preamp, so record was set to USB audio.

Output only worked when set to ALSA default.  I think this might be OSS emulation, but I’m not sure.  I only know it worked!  So far, it works in 16 and 24 bit.  In the preferences panel, you can correct for the latency that occurs during playback!

There are more “professional” multitrack DAWs (digital audio workstation) out there, but they use jack, and I was unable to get that to work.  Audacity is “right sized”.  Automatically adds a track when you hit record, adjusts for latency, just the thing for an impulse recording.

Audacity is a multi track recording application.  It is easy to install from Ubuntu.  However, getting sound to run in Linux can present challenges as the number of soundcards vary so greatly.  Trying to get Audacity to work on my 3000 N200 Lenovo I finally found a trick that worked - almost.
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If you are used to Winamp in Windows, you will be right at home with Audacious.  It even uses Winamp skins should you wish to customize the look.  After much fun playing with skins, I return to a basic default as the most functional.

Audacious plays MP3 files but also can play the lossless compression FLAC format.  If you have the hard drive space, you can definitely hear the difference between MP3 or ogg formats and FLAC.  Of course, FLAC files are 5x larger than MP3 or ogg Vorbis formats, so they make more sense for local applications or broadband.

On my new Lenovo laptop loaded with Ubuntu I now fire up Audacious and have great quality tunes playing while I email, surf, and keep up The Tao of Walking Ridge.

My new Lenovo PC has such a great sounding sound card, that I decided to upgrade what I used to listen to it.  The PC speakers are OK, but not really music quality.  I must have a half dozen sets of buds and headphones around.  One set of headphones is a pair of Sony MDR-7502 Professional.  I also have IPod ear buds, which I was quite impressed with when I first got my IPod.

At a major retailer I found a display and put on the Bose around hear (full) headphones.  Not the noise cancelling headphones, just regular headphones.  Wow.  The clarity was really amazing.  Now other brands may have been great too, but only the Bose were there for demos.  I liked the around ear better than the on ear.  It was a little less expensive (all VERY relative) but less compact.

The ear buds were not available for demo for obvious reasons.  I went home, checked out my Sony headphones and found that, indeed, the clarity of stuff made in this decade is better.  Heading to a Bose store I found earbuds that you can demo!  I stared at them for a bit, and the fellow said “we do clean them after anyone tries them out.”

A little detail.  Nice.

I tried the ear buds, and indeed their sound was great.  Unlike other buds I’ve used, you don’t have to put them far in to have them stay in place.  They rest easily just inside the ear.  And a neck cord holds the weight of the cord, rather than your ears.

A little detail.  Nice.

Many buds are marketed as “extra bass”.  I prefer a flatter more natural reproduction.  I prefer clarity over volume.  So when you turn the volume down and still hear the fingers slide in the guitar strings in the music, that’s inspiring stuff.  Bose even specifically says to turn off bass boost settings on your music player.  They designed it to sound natural, and I think they got it right.

The connector is not inline, which would be pulled at an angle in the side of my PC.  And it isn’t a right angle, it is at a perfect angle.

A little detail.  Nice.

The cord is just longer than arms reach.  Just right.

These buds were about $100.  There are others in that price range.  I tried Shures some time ago, and they sounded good but were not as comfortable as these Bose.  Great sound and clarity is expected in this price range, but I was also impressed with these small details.  I forget I have these buds in your ears.  The music sounds natural and balanced song to song, I have no impulse to add bass to one song and remove it from the next.  I’m sure I’ve wasted more on cheap buds.  These are an investment in listening to your music collection again for the first time.

You don’t see many yellow birds in Michigan.  I don’t ever recall seeing one before.  I don’t mean a bit yellow, I mean bright safety yellow with just a touch of dark.  I went into the next room for my camera and was two seconds late.  The bird flew around the corner.  I saw it from another window, but was again just slow with my camera.  Eventually it flew away, but I left my camera on the dining room table.

The next day I see a fairly large white bird on my railing.  A pigeon perhaps?  I don’t recall ever seeing one of these in Michigan before either.  But today, I had my camera handy and was able to capture it.

Easy to use applciations to do video editing are hard to find.  Full function packages are hard to learn.  And many video editors I’ve used are very slow to load (in Windows).  There are four alternatives in the software repository of Ubuntu.  I wanted to see how quickly I could edit a short video created with my Canon G9.  The .avi created by the G9 would not play in my media player in Windows.  But two of the editors I looked at opened the file.  One was very simple, but I struggled getting to to do what I wanted.

Then I opened PiTiVi and saw a screen that said “drag clip here”.  Once I did that it said “drag clips to timeline”.  I did, and quickly was able to edit and “render” a compressed video.  There are plugins to expand functionality.  But trimming a video in a matter of minutes was quite impressive.  That’s not to say that the editors did not hang or sometimes did unexpected things, but I hadn’t paid $100 for the them either!  Overall, Linux ran snappier than editors in Windows and when it did hang up cntl-alt-backspace rebooted the system and returned to the desktop in about 10 seconds.  Cool.