Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech are You? So I'm working on an episode about stage lighting systems, specifically systems designed to move lights around in specific ways, because I went to a rock and or Roll show last night and was thinking about that as I was watching the show. However, this is a
topic that is fairly complicated and complex. It's got a lot of moving parts, as it turns out. So I am still working on that, and I hope to bring you that show on Wednesday, but I still owe you a show today, and I've been spending all my time working on this other show that's not ready. So instead we're gonna listen to a very much classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally came out September twenty first,
two thousand and nine. It also relates to rock and or Roll because the title of the show is tech Stuff Shreds on the Electric Guitar. So you're gonna hear me and my co host at the time and my editor at the time over at house. Stuff works because that's back in the house. Stuff works days, Chris Pollette. So Chris Pollette and I sat down to talk about
the history and the operation of electric guitars. I listened back to this episode and it was so nice to go down memory lane and to listen to the chemistry between me and Chris. I loved him as a co host and editor. As a person, I also loved him. He's a great guy. Like I wish I could really talk smack about Chris, but I can't because he's super cool.
So anyway, I thought it'd be nice to bring back this blast from the past while we are waiting for my episode about stage lighting, which I know doesn't sound like it's super interesting, But if you go to one of these shows and you see like all these lights that end up really elevating the experience, you know it's more than just highlighting the performers themselves. Literally, it's all
about evoking a mood. Right Like at a particular part of a song, there might suddenly be an incredible moment where all the lights sweep out over the audience just as the music is crescendoing. So how does that work? That's what I'm working on now and what I will bring to you on Wednesday, But for the moment, let's go back and listen to this very much classic episode of tech Stuff from two thousand and nine, and I
hope you enjoy. The world lost a great inventor, Les Paul, who was one of the people instrumental to use a pun in creating the electric guitar. He was not the first person to combine electricity with guitars, but we'll get to his contribution shortly. So why would you want to create an electric guitar in the first place.
There are a couple of reasons, the most I would say, in my opinion, obvious of which is that if you want your guitar to be heard by people more than a few feet away, you're going to need to find some way to amplify it. That's a good point, and so you would want to be able to plug it into an amplifier so that the amplifier would project the sound farther. That's a good point too, which is you know why you have those giant speaker cabinets on the side of rock stages.
Right, because the only real alternative, if we're talking about the earlier stages, is to put a microphone directly in front of the guitar and hopefully pick up the sound and transmit it that way, which is not the best way to get a clean sound out of your guitar.
It's inefficient, right to be honest, because the the sound is not the sound waves are traveling from the guitar to the microphone. And of course, anytime sound travels through the air, there is the possibility that will become distorted.
Yes, which sometimes is something you want, but you want to be able to control it. You don't want uncontrolled distortion. Although uncontrolled distortion a would be an awesome name for a rock band, it probably is one already could be if not patent pending.
Okay, so uh, let's file for these patents. Yeah, I guess, I guess we do.
We have a whole bunch of them pending, now, don't we at least three? So the way sound works, you've got something vibrating, right, and then that causes other molecules to vibrate. Eventually, these vibrating molecules hit our ears, causing little hairs to vibrate, sends little vibrations down to our ear drums, and that's what we interpret as sound.
Excellent. You've got to have.
Some sort of molecules in the in the environment in order to be able to hear, which is why if you're in outer space, you're not likely to hear anything because the molecules are spread out so far apart that there's not much chance of one bumping into another.
That would be the whole vacuum thing.
That would be, yes, the vacuum thing. Yeah, yes, it's the hoover element of the equation. As I like to say.
Yeah, I'm going to leave the science stuff to other folks.
All right, Well, I of course wrote an article about can humans here in space? Spoiler alert they can't. So the idea behind a regular guitar, I mean, the reason why guitars have a hollow body, why many stringed instruments have a hollowed body, is so that creates a natural amplification chamber. Yeah, without it, you wouldn't hear very much.
And the size and shape of that chamber, you know, has a lot of effect on the way a guitar sounds. Right, That's why some electric guitars maintain the hollow body while others go for a solid body. Right, So you know, they both have their own merits and yeah.
And early on in the experiments in electrifying guitars, many of the innovators tried to alter existing guitars, like hollow body guitars, but there was a problem with that in that you would often get distortion based upon the natural amplification from the hollow body and the electrical implication you're getting from the electric guitar.
What also depends on how you are trying to electrify your guitar too, because.
If you're just hugging up a couple of jumper cables to your guitar, that's probably not the best way.
Not quite what I meant. Oh, okay, because I know that in early, early electric guitars, they didn't always plug in in the same place, and they didn't always try to pick up the sound from the same place.
Wait, you used a word there, pick up. Oh.
Yes, it's not just a truck.
No, it's not. It's an important part of the electric guitar.
Yes, because in early guitars they tried to pick up the vibrations, the the sound vibrations up of you know, upwards, away from the guitar body and toward the neck right and even at the end of the guitar.
Yes, and now it's at the other end, the bass of the guitar. That's where you're gonna find the pickups. Now a pickup here, we've better explain, I guess the basis of an electric guitar, Like, what makes the electric guitar work?
I'd like to point out that electric guitars aren't, well, at least not in most cases themselves electric.
They're passive exactly. We're getting back to our old friend, the electro magnet here.
Yes, I remember our old friend, the electromagnet Yese it got up and left the other day? Does I had to pay for lunch? Never rights, I know what a jerk.
But electromagnets. You may recall from our previous episodes that if you have a if you run an electric current through a coiled copper wire usually coiled around an iron core. Not necessarily, but it can be, that can create a magnetic field. So electricity congenerate a magnetic field, and if you alter a magnetic field, you can induce electricity. Chris and I will be back to talk more about electric
guitars after this quick break. So, with an electric guitar, you have a pickup at the base usually of the guitar, that is a magnet that has a coil around the magnet, and that means there's a magnetic field magnet. That's what magnets produce, right, So when you strum a string, the frequency the vibration of that that string create distorts the magnetic field by destroying the magnetic field, oscillating it. Essentially, you create an electric current. The electric current runs through
the little coil that's around the magnet. And then if you don't have your guitar plugged into anything, it doesn't go anywhere, right, and you won't really hear anything if it's a solid body electric guitar anyway, but.
You will, but you'd have to be very very close to it. You won't hear much.
Yeah, it'll sound pretty weak, and because there's nothing to really amplify the sound. Now, if you have it plugged into an amp, that little electric signal will go to the amp which has a couple of different elements to it that can boost the signal and then convert it back into sound. And that's the sound you hear when you strum the strings on electric guitar.
Now, for an electric guitar too, I mean assuming that we're not talking about an acoustic electric guitar in which you're basically attempting to amplify the sound from the electric guitar. If you're talking about an electric guitar like, for example, a Lass Paul, then the pick are directly underneath the strings where you actually play, where you actually strum or pick the strings, and that enables them to be very
close to the original vibration. And in some cases the pickups are designed to move closer to or farther away from the string as you need to adjust them so that you can, pardon the pun for once fine tune your sound, you can sort of modify things to as you need to to get the sound you're trying to get right. No, that's not always the case. I mean, some of them are very very simple, where there is a single bar magnet that is used as a pickup.
But you'll notice too that some guitars use one set of pickups while other guitars use several different sets of pickups. And you can actually you'll see switches on the guitar body that you know enables you to turn one set on or one set off, or modify the sound to to you know, make changes to your sound without having to sit there and you know, rewire the whole darn thing.
Yeah. Essentially, you have controls that allow you to filter out certain frequencies, and so by choosing which frequencies you want and which ones you don't want, you can have your guitar sound in you know, many different ways. You can have that really you know, kind of crunchy rock sound that you hear from alternative rock bands, or you can have that more sort of twangy sound from you know, a country western or even like the sort of the
surf rock sound of a guitar. A lot of that is just through filtering out which frequencies you want to go to the app and which ones you don't. So it's kind of cool that with one instrument you can get so many different sounds out of, you know, just by tweaking a knob or two.
Yeah. And one of the really cool things about an electric guitar, as far as I mean just from a scientific standpoint, although apparently I'm not leaving the science to other people, is that you can make so many modifications.
I mean, the having it wired like that gives you a lot of control over the sound, and it actually enables you to share the sound and control of your sound with another piece of your instrument puzzle, which is the amplifier, because once you plug it in, the amplifier becomes part of the electric guitar as the entire instrument.
In some cases, you're it's just simply going to amplify, But in a lot of cases, especially for rock musicians, there are amplifiers you can buy that have a lot of the equipment built in that allows you to modify the sound. You can add reverberation, for example, or distortion, which is very very popular depending on the kind of
music you're playing. And then of course there are effects pedals, some of which actually I know some people who have quite a few effects pedals, and basically what these are doing enables they enable you to make slight changes to the way those vibrations are are distributed across the electrical current from between the guitar and the amplifier, and then you know, from there to whatever else I guess technically the speaker, but if you are in some cases playing
say an arena show, you might have a microphone stuck up next to your actual guitar amp and then from there it just going through the PA system out to the crowd. So there's a lot of wiring and.
You rockstars live lives I can only dream of.
Yeah, I've had to haul around a lot of that gear so thankfully not usually the PA, but.
I've just looked at that gear. Yeah, it's heavy, a lot of it. What I think is cool about electric guitars is it does allow you to do things like have a guitar that has a solid body. I mean again, if it weren't for the electrical amplification, then a solid body guitar would be pretty much useless because you would have to be sitting just a couple inches away to be able to hear anything that was coming out of
it in the first place. And Les Paul's is widely credited with creating the first real solid body electric guitar, which he called the log It was It is it is. It was made by made out of a slab of wood, a solid block, and it actually could come apart in pieces. I've seen pictures of it. It was pretty impressive. And granted he refined that design slightly, that was not the design that Gibson picked up when they started to market the guitars. Later on. Yeah, and the electric guitar has
really revolutionized music. I mean that's not an exaggeration by any stretch of the imagination. By pairing an electric guitar with an amp and playing a note, it's possible for you to get a vibration off the speaker that continues to vibrate the string, and you get a perpetual note, a note that will last forever, or until the power runs out, or until the power runs out, until your audience decides they've had enough of this and they're gonna go home.
He just gonna play that one note right time.
This is like the most boring, grateful dead concert ever. He's jamming on one note and that's it.
Well, you know whatever, float trippoot. Yeah, I think I could have managed that. I bet there's a one.
Performance artist out there somewhere who's done this, and oh sure that. I'm sure there's more than one.
But yes, yes, I'm pretty sure.
You know. More power to you if that brings the grant money in good luck.
But if you've wondered, if you've watched a rock band play and then watched another rock band right after them, you go, why, you know, why does it matter? What? Guitars they're using, you know, other than maybe a six swing string versus a twelve string, or you know, a regular guitar versus saan alto or a bass guitar I'm sorry, tenor versus a bass guitar. You might go, okay, well, I get it. One's a little bigger than the other.
One has a couple more strings, So you know, why are there you know, what's the difference in a stratocaster versus a last Paul? Well, it all, it sort of all comes down to the things we were talking about before, the number of pickups, what kinds of pickups there are on it, whether or not it's a hollow or solid body, the kind of wood it's made out of, or other
material that it may be made out of. And you know, even Gibson changed things a couple of years ago when it offered an Ethernet guitar because suddenly the connection is no longer analog, which is basically it's a you know, one quarter inch phono plug on either end. You plug one side in your guitar, one side in your end. Well,
Gibson changed that by incorporating an Ethernet connection. Well, that changes the sound even more, it gives you an opportunity to play a really clean digital signal, which a lot of purists really don't like the idea of, you know, everything adds a little bit of change to it. So and that's why some people prefer vintage guitars over brand new guitars. They say, well, you know, that was made out of this kind of wood back in sixty five. It's made out this kind of would. Now it's just
not the same. And they may look the same to you or me, but that's not the same.
And you saw one of those digital guitars over at CES one year, didn't you.
Yes, I did. I thought it was a little weird, not because there's anything necessarily wrong with it, but I thought, well, you know, I wonder if this is the kind of thing that's going to change the way people play guitar. And I don't know that it has significantly. I haven't seen a lot of people with them. As a matter of fact, I've seen nobody in person with them. But it was sort of the same kind of thing that
you saw in the nineteen eighties with electronic drums. They were all the rage back in the day because you could play all kinds of sounds on them. And now the purists I think have sort of maybe not one out because they still make electronic drums, but they have certainly taken the electronic drum market back. And I think that acoustic are not acoustic, but analog guitars. Electric guitars are still predominantly the most popular.
Yeah, I'm just waiting for the key tar to really really make an impact, right, Chris Pollett and I have a little bit more to say about electric guitars, but before we can continue shredding, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors.
There was a guitar website called guitar geek dot com and basically it hasn't been updated in a while, but it allows you to look at the rigs that everybody has set ups. You can see what kind of guitar that famous artist plays, along with the effects pedals they might use and what kind of amplifier they might use.
And it's really kind of cool because you learn things about certain guitar players like Dave Davies of The Kinks, who liked to slit his speaker in his amplifier cabinet so that it provide just the right distortion sound and suddenly it's no longer about the guitar or the effects pedals, but whether or not the speaker as a hole in it.
Nice. Yeah, I'd like to see how how Queen got that amazing sound at the end with the guitar solo of We Will Rock You, because that's still, to this day my favorite guitar solo ever. Oh really, yeah, no serious, it really is. So here's a little trivia for you guys. We were talking about the oscillations of the string causing a change in the magnetic field, and that is what creates the electrical current that is based off of Faraday's law. Oh,
so there you go. If you ever are watching a musician rock out on stage, you can turn to the person next to you and say, this is an excellent demonstration of Faraday's law, which is guaranteed to get you the ladies.
Yeah. Yeah, not actually guaranteed. Your may some restrictions apply.
Yeah, it worked on my wife, but she's taken so.
Okay, then, well are you are you all rocked out? Yeah? I'm kind of rocked out for the moment.
Well, then I guess that takes us straight to a listener mail. Oh yeah, rock on this listener. Mail comes from Louis and or Lewis. Louis or Lewis, I don't know an email. You can write me and let me know. Tell hey me again? So you think I know how to pronounce his name by now finally got my modem working again, so time to email you. In the video game podcast The New One, you said that the PS three had a cell based processor. What does this mean?
Also from what you were saying, it seemed that in the US Xbox three sixties are more expensive than the Wii. Is this true?
Here?
In New Zealand, a twenty gigabyte Xbox three sixties three hundred dollars, whereas a Wii costs almost four hundred and fifty. And I'm a bit confused. Well, Louis, let's talk a little bit about the cell based processor. It's a specific kind of microprocessor architecture, right, It's based off of the
cell broadband engine architecture. It's just SELL for short. And the idea here is that each cell can handle a certain amount of calculations per second, and the PS three has I believe seven of these cells, so each cell is capable of handling a massive amount of information. The problem is you have to be able to design games that take advantage of this. They're very good at handling
parallel problems. So in other words, you've got a you know, one of them's handling graphics, another might be handling physics engine, another might be handling sound something like that, as opposed to all of them working together on one big problem. So if you can divide it up, if you can divide up duties for each cell, it really takes advantage of the hardware. Otherwise you've just got a massively powerful
machine that you can't really take advantage of. But you know, if you designed the game the right way, that makes that system one the most powerful system on the market right now, bar none, PS three would be the most powerful. But again you have to design the software to match the hardware's capabilities. Now, as for the pricing, well back when the game consoles first came out and they didn't all come out at the same time, we should we
should make that point. But the core system, the Xbox three sixty core system was two hundred ninety nine dollars and the Xbox three sixty the main system. Because the core system was the no frills version the main system was three ninety nine. PS three came out with two
different models as well. At that time, there was a twenty gigabyte version and that was four hundred and ninety nine dollars, but then there was the sixty gigabyte version that was five hundred and ninety nine dollars ouch pretty expensive Nial states right in the US, and the Wii when it came out two hundred and forty nine dollars, so it was cheaper by fifty bucks than the next
least expensive console. I should also add many people have written in to point this out, and I think we mentioned it in an earlier podcast as well, but those first PS three models were backwards compatible. You could play PS two games on them. It was only after they moved to the PS three eighty gigabyte version, and even some of the early ones of those were backwards compatible, but eventually they took that compatibility out of the PS three and since then it has not been there.
Yeah, and some of those older models are are much more prized by PS three fans than the newer models, right because of that backwards compatibility.
Yeah, because it means one less machine that you have to have hooked up to your system if you want to play all your games. And when we were recording that podcast, we were really concentrating on the systems that were available on the market as of the recording of
that podcast, right. And while you can find the sixty gigabyte PS three's and you know, things like Craigslist or eBay or whatever, in general, your local game store, unless they're selling used consoles, they're not going to have one of those in stock because they've been out for a while. So that's really why we weren't talking about those and why we said that the PS three was not backwards compatible. It wasn't because we didn't know about these earlier models.
It's because you can't really get those in your average store. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of Tech Stuff Tech Stuff Shreds on the Electric Guitar Man. It sure was nice hearing Chris Bollhead's voice again. I really enjoyed having someone to chat with because we would do our research independently. I don't know how many people know this, but Chris and I would go off on our a own little way and research a topic and have a lot to talk about. We wouldn't even necessarily have a
real outline. We might have a personal outline for ourselves, but it would just be a conversation and we would have our talk about the topic kind of unfold. That way probably wasn't the most efficient way. It certainly didn't stop us from going off on tangents, but it was a great approach to having a natural conversation about a topic. And it sure is a very different thing than for me to prepare an episode to present to y'all on my own, because it's just me right there makes no
sense for me to be super extemporaneous. If I were, episodes would never end kind of like this one. This is going on a lot longer than it needs to, So we're gonna wrap this up. Like I said, later this week, we'll have an episode about stage lighting that I'm still working on now. I'm looking forward to getting that to you on Wednesday. I hope you are all well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech
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