giovedì, 30 novembre 2006 | in :

Guitar-like instruments with specially made pickup systems

Three Guitar-Like Instruments

Each of these three guitar-like instruments uses its own unusual and specially made pickup system.
1) The one on the left has a banjo-like goatskin soundboard. It functions well without amplicifation, but it also has a dual electric pickup system. A homemade magnetic pickup (the sort that electric guitars normally use) is located under the strings. A tiny condenser microphone, wired up from inexpensively purchased components, is located inside the wooden bowls that form the shell of the body. The two are blended in a compact onboard dual pre-amp (not visible in the picture). The amplified instrument has a distinctive sound, not banjo-like and not exactly guitar-like either, but definitely more “acoustic” sounding than a regular electric guitar. You can hear it by playing the "Skye Boat" MP3 on the left.

2) The instreument on the right in the photo uses a special design for the magnetic pickup that allows it to function as a contact pickup – that is, responding to the vibration of whatever it’s physically attached to, rather than to the movement of steel strings nearby. In this case it’s attached directly to the strings, as if riding on them in mid-air; thus it functions as both pickup and bridge. Since steel strings are not required (as they would be with a regular electric guitar pickup), the guitar is strung with a mixture of brass and steel strings. This pickup system produces particularly deep, bassy, warm tones, and to take advantage of this, the tuning of the instrument is set a fourth below standard tuning. You can hear this guitar by playing the "Capriccio" MP3 on the left.

3) The instrument in the bottom of the picture is more conventional, but with a homemade pickup designed to bring out the sparkly high end of the string tone.

These pickup ideas, and many more, are featured in the book Getting a Bigger Sound: Pickups and Microphones for Your Musical Instrument, by Bart Hopkin.

MarkHamn @ 13:11 | commenti (2)(popup) | commenti (2)

domenica, 12 novembre 2006 | in :

FScape -- v0.70 (built 04-oct-06) --

statement

FScape is a standalone, cross-platform audio rendering software.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

To contact the author, send an email to contact at sciss.de. For project status, API and current version, visit www.sciss.de/fscape.

For OSC communication, FScape uses the NetUtil library, which is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The compiled library is included, for sourcecode and details visit www.sciss.de/netutil.

FScape happily uses Steve Roy's MRJAdapter which is published under the Artistic License.

Please note that you are not allowed to use this software if you are a member of a military or pharmaceutical or governmental institution (excluding public service in general and civil science/education). if you have sympathies for bad governments (applies to most countries), you should also opt to not use this software. Thank you.

Although not explicitely mentioned in the manual and help pages, referred products are usually registered trademarks of companies. For example Mac OS X is a trademark of Apple Computers Inc., Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc., Jever (the best German beer) is trademark of Brau und Brunnen Brauereien GmbH (also responsible for Sternburg(tm), the worst German beer) etc.

requirements / installation

Note: when you are updating from a previous version of FScape, it is advised to trash the old preferences. The preferences file's location depends on your platform. On Mac OS X, this file is ~/Library/Preferences/de.sciss.fscape.plist.

When you are reading this document, you have already successfully installed FScape. Congratulations, get yourself a cooled Jever and double click on the appropriate icon:

FScape[.app] on Mac OS X
FScape.sh on Linux
FScape.bat on Windows

FScape requires a Java(tm) 1.4 runtime environment. It has been successfully tested with Sun's VM 1.5.0 on Linux and Windows, and Apple's VMs 1.4.2 and 1.5.0 on Mac Panther and Tiger. It will not work with GCJ whose GUI functionality is incomplete. The Eisenkraut installer you downloaded likewise requires a Java runtime to be launched.

compilation / usage

Please read the DevelopersNeeded note.

The source code can be compiled on Mac OS X 10.4 using the accompanied Xcode 2 document. The next version will include scripts that can be used for compilation without Xcode.

download

The current version can be downloaded here:

sourceforge.net/projects/fscape

documentation

there's no real manual, but a basic online help system. this help is accessible from the help menu within the app.

to-do's

A lot.

change history

v0.70 (oct 2006)

integrates OSC server. very basic functionality for now, but already usefull for running fscape in installations for example
updated application framework classes from eisenkraut
new window management allows to switch to internal-frames mode on windows systems
new modules: splice, makeloop
fixes: convolution (echoes in minimum phase mode), probably others

MarkHamn @ 17:22 | commenti (popup) | commenti