My Dissertation

This week on The Pick should've been my review of the EPIC Magneto Design Labs pickups I recently received, however due to a variety of reasons I have had to postpone that review for a week or two, the main reason being the bulk of my life at the moment which is my dissertation, so I thought rather than having a week of no posts I'd chat about that!

The general theme of my dissertation is computer generated music - music which is composed with little or no intervention from a human. I'll be writing about different systems which do this, then evaluating the music that is produced. As well as writing about this, I'm also attempting to build a few of my own music generating systems.

The first type of system I've been researching and attempting to build myself is based around the use of genetic algorithms. In general, these work by saving the musical data in a 'genome' which can later be altered. Darwintunes.org uses Darwin's Survival of the Fittest to alter the genomes, and works in a way which emulates population evolution - sounds crazy but the results it gets are really interesting - definitely check it out.

My genetic algorithm system is similar to Biles' GenJam as it will emulate the way a jazz improvisor learns to improvise. It does this with the help of a human 'mentor' who tells the system which of it's performed generated phrases are good and which are bad. These are then mutated in a variety of ways and hopefully improved. The improved phrases are then saved according to the chord they are played over, and can later be called upon when the system is given a chord sequence to improvise over.

Hopefully you've enjoyed this little taster into what I've been doing recently! Throughout the busy-ness I will aim to continue to post regular content on here as much as is humanly possible.

On another note, I might be in the market for some custom moulded in ear monitors, any suggestions? I usually just play electric guitar, but also sing and play acoustic occasionally, so I would prefer them to be pretty versatile. Recommendations would be great!

If you enjoy reading The Pick and want to see more variety and more regular posts, please do consider donating or sponsoring. For more info check out the Sponsorship page, but benefits of contributing include the ability to suggest what kind of post or product review your contribution will go towards and your name or company advertisement in the blog, plus it enables me to continue to put time and effort into producing content!

Magneto Design Lab Pickups Review - The Installation

This week on The Pick I'm checking out a couple of pickups from Magneto Design Labs (MDL). This is a very exciting first for The Pick, and what a great two pickups to start with! The pickups I'm checking out today are the Power90 humbucker sized P90 style pickup and the Tru-Tone '59 late '50s style humbucker. 

Starting at the very beginning, these pickups arrived in a very attractive box and were packaged very well. Having been shipped to the UK from North Carolina in the US I was pleased to see these pickups were in perfect condition when they arrived thanks to the ample packaging material. 

I had decided when talking to Lee from MDL that I would try to install these pickups myself - with very little soldering experience and having never changed pickups before I was slightly daunted by the task ahead, but Lee was very helpful and provided me with pickup-appropriate circuit diagrams which I used throughout the process. Because I was installing the pickups in my Epiphone Les Paul, Lee also suggested that I write the Volume and Tone pots "50s style" by moving the capacitor so it connects the middle lug of the volume pot to the left lug of the tone pot, however for the time being I've kept the volume and tone wiring as it was.

Removing the stock Epiphone pickups was very simple and took very little time after locating the correct cables to unsolder. I then disconnected the mounting rings from the Epiphone pickups and used the supplied screws and springs to attach them to my new MDL pickups. Both pickups fit nicely into the Epiphone mounting rings and now sit nicely in the Les Paul's arched top. The supplied mounting ring screws were a nice touch as they are aged in a similar way to the pickups themselves, adding to the overall aesthetic.

To attach the cables of the MDL pickups you must unwind some of the outer wire mesh and solder that to ground. This part of the installation could've been easier, as when I attempted to unwind enough of the wire mesh to give an amateur solderer (myself!) enough room to work with, the thin wire strands felt very delicate and frail. Once I had unwound enough of the outer mesh, I was left with two layers of cloth - one black, one white - which easily pulled back exposing plenty of the inside wire core to solder to the volume pot. It took a couple of attempts to correctly solder each wire to the appropriate place and get a secure connection, however this is a reflection of my soldering ability rather than the quality of the product!

Once the pickups were installed it was time to put them to the test. To find out about how they sound and see a video demonstration, check back in to The Pick at the same time next week!

If you enjoy reading The Pick and want to see more variety and more regular posts, please do consider donating or sponsoring. For more info check out the Sponsorship page, but benefits of contributing include the ability to suggest what kind of post or product review your contribution will go towards and your name or company advertisement in the blog, plus it enables me to continue to put time and effort into producing content!

Vibrato - Pure Data Part 4

This week on The Pick we're taking a look at building vibrato effects in Pure Data. In the late 1940s Gibson began building vibrato circuits into their electric instrument amplifiers, and hardware vibratos of the 1980s are still highly sought after today, but by building our own audio effects we can tweak and develop them without being limited by parameters suggested by digital effects developers and hopefully create a useable effect!

Vibrato is a slow, often subtle audio effect which uses pitch shifting in a similar way to the subtle string bending many instrumentalists use to give movement to melodies. It’s sound is often used for creating the shimmering, swirling sound heard with a Rhodes piano or Hammond organ and was widely used throughout the psychedelic 60s.

The patch below uses a low frequency oscillator to alter the pitch of the input audio. You can effect the depth of the LFO, the frequency and the amount of wet signal mixed with the through dry signal. I’ve written some suggested boundaries for each number slider, but experiment with other limits to maybe create some original effects!

If you enjoy reading The Pick and want to see more variety and more regular posts, please do consider donating or sponsoring. For more info check out the Sponsorship page, but benefits of contributing include the ability to suggest what kind of post or product review your contribution will go towards and your name or company advertisement in the blog, plus it enables me to continue to put time and effort into producing content!

Phaser - Pure Data Part 3

Building on what we looked at in the last two weeks, this week's patch is a bit more complex. Whilst they sound somewhat similar, phasers are built quite differently to flangers, as can be seen in the patch below.

Used on songs such as Van Halen's Eruption, phaser effects can be used to give motion and movement to instrument tones, and can be found on keyboards and hammond organs as well as electric guitar, creating an effect reminiscent of a Leslie rotating sound.

In this patch the swooping sound of the phaser is created from two cosine waves 1/2π out of phase. When combined with the dry guitar sound you get that familiar swoosh. On the patch below I've suggested some parameters to work between, but try some variations yourself, experiment and see what you can come up with.

If you enjoy reading The Pick and want to see more variety and more regular posts, please do consider donating or sponsoring. For more info check out the Sponsorship page, but benefits of contributing include the ability to suggest what kind of post or product review your contribution will go towards and your name or company advertisement in the blog, plus it enables me to continue to put time and effort into producing content!

Flanger - Pure Data Part 2

This is part two of this series on creating audio effects using Pure Data. If you haven't yet, check out last weeks tutorial on creating chorus effects, then come back to complete this one. This week we'll be turning our chorus effect into a flanger.

Famous for rock guitar riffs like Barracuda by Heart, flanger is a swooshing guitar effect some people liken to a strong sounding phaser, however they are built differently.

The flanger effect differs from chorus due to it's use of a feedback loop and shorter delay times of up to 10ms, rather than around 10-40ms for chorus. For two very different sounding effects they are built very similarly. 

Below is a pure data patch for flanger. You'll notice that it is very similar to the patch from last week's post, demonstrating the small technical differences between chorus and flanger. Why not give it a go and see what kind of effects you can create!

Hint: By increasing the delay time you decrease the pitch of the effect, and decreasing the delay time increases the pitch.


If you enjoy reading The Pick and want to see more variety and more regular posts, please do consider donating or sponsoring. For more info check out the Sponsorship page, but benefits of contributing include the ability to suggest what kind of post or product review your contribution will go towards and your name or company advertisement in the blog, plus it enables me to continue to put time and effort into producing content!

10,000 Views?!

Wow! Today The Pick surpassed 10,000 views.

I just wanted to take a few minutes to thank everyone who has read The Pick in the last year - thank you for sticking with me as I work on this project and I hope that you've found it useful and entertaining. 

Also a huge thank you to all the companies who make great products for us musicians and especially to those who send out samples for me to test out and write about. If these companies weren't hugely generous I would've run out of things to review and/or spare cash not long into this project, and I hope that by featuring them on The Pick more people have found the right products for them.

Thanks again, and here's to the next 10,000!

James