First Embedded Anti-Theft Device For Musical Instruments To Be Introduced AT NAMM 2017

GearSecure, a newly launched company from Los Angeles, California, will introduce at NAMM 2017 patented technology designed to be the first embedded anti-theft device for musical instruments and other assorted gear.

The technology provides a bridge between RFID and GPS technology providing help in instant recovery of lost or stolen gear. Demonstrations and inquiries can be made by visiting Hall D, Booth 2382. The company's stated goal is "the end of lost or stolen."

The company was started by Adam Mandel, one of the producers of the long-running live music show Ultimate Jam Night. Mandel has enlisted the core team of musicians and others that turned Ultimate Jam Night into an internationally known program. That team includes Quiet Riot bassist Chuck Wright; drummer Matt Starr who has played with Ace Frehley and Mr. Big; Walter Ino of Survivor; Ira Black of Attika 7 and Westfield Massacre; and other musicians including Alex Kane of LSD and Antiproduct, and independent artist Brad Jurjens, among others. These musicians will work alongside key manufacturers in the installation of the first industry device designed to be embedded at the point of manufacturing. Additional applications are designed for professional luthiers and installers, tour management, and backline rental companies.

Converse Made a Sneaker With a Wah Guitar Pedal Built Right In

Converse’s Chuck Taylor All Stars and music have always gone hand and… well, foot and shoe. A good pair of Chucks can last a performer through hundreds of stage shows. Now, Converse has debuted a new type of shoe that not only fits the rock and roll lifestyle, but actually serves a purpose beyond looking fly.

Creating Manual Camera Functions Overtly Done From A Steampunk Point Of View

Not just your average camera created within a steampunk state of mind

Found this steampunk style camera on a Russian language site and here is the translation:

"As planned in the flash unit is operated by means of two valves located on it. Chemicals are served in a glass flask in any reaction occurs and the photographer gets a bright light. The light can be extinguished by closing both valves. In fact it is a source of constant light with relatively small resources.

The machine has a removable holder for filters or lenses for macro photography. On top of the viewfinder are two: the main-center and an additional through which you can view on the subject matter through the filter. If you turn the filter holder on the axis, he stands just opposite the additional view finder.

The Shazam Effect Is Ruining The Future of Music

Because of the Shazam Effect, lackeys such as Justin Bieber get too much radio airplay

More often than not we hear from folks and they enjoy telling us about great new bands and or what is wrong with the music industry. Approaching an industry of this scale and speaking that direct about what is wrong, is as easy as telling Californians to not worry, desalination plants are going to save your water problems. It is just not that simple.

On the other hand, lets look at things from the perspective of pure entertainment. Many folks are just passive music fans. If its on the radio and its got a good beat, it is decent entertainment for the car ride from point A to point B. Corporate radio knows this all too well and plays directly to what listeners want and now have algorithms and mountains of data to back up what is the ideal music to be played. Does this challenge our senses or move the collective coolness of the needle towards a band that will shape culture for the future such as the likes of Led Zeppelin? Hardly imaginable these days, yet there has been a scientific study all about this scenario and its called the Shazam Effect.

Do Technology Company's Have More Creativity Than The Music Industry?

How often have you wanted to smash something computer related?

Not too far in the recent past, making a living as a musician was a bit easier and the audiences paid a bit more attention to a live act, rather than just a guy with a laptop standing on a stage with headphones. In our current time frame, dance clubs are packed elbow to elbow, while many rock, punk and country acts are playing to less and less fans. 

Could this be a paradigm shift in musical taste? Or, maybe fans are just wanting something new and the immediacy that they are used to, from the internet. Could these electronic musicians be tapping into a larger unknown sphere of influence that in actuality is a database of the pre-programmed minds of video game sounds, website dings modem rings? Hmmm.... Maybe the electronic music evolution is just another part of the internet revolution and music that has been performed in a style for decades is just going out of fashion.

The LiveWire From Harley Is As Beautiful As It Is Technologically Proficient

The LiveWire from Harley is as beautiful as it is technologically proficient

Change is coming and battle lines will be drawn over whether or not an electric motorcycle is righteous enough. And to be honest, we couldn't walk further away from such a conversation. Getting greasy on the shop floor is a right of passage, but this two wheeled piece of technology is just begging for a back country road from us...

Harley Davidson Innovates The Live Wire Into A Multicultural and Forward Thinking Machine Of Change

Profile full body photograph of Harley-Davidson’s 2014 battery powered motorcycle, taken on June 5, 2014 at the Harley-Davidson headquarters in Milwaukee, WI.

Innovation is what keeps a company ahead of the curve. For many years now Harley purists assumed that chrome and a loud engine were all that was needed to keep the Milwaukee bred spirit alive. Today is a new day though and Harley as a company wants to expand across cultures and multiple generations. Bravo to their design team and forward thinking engineers for creating one of a hell of a ride.

Bummed That More Folks Aren't Coming In Droves To Your Shows? Get Creative...

Who woulda thunk an old dot matrix printer could be ready to go on tour as an electronic dj

Bummed that more folks aren't coming in droves to your shows? Get creative and find new ways to spread your gospel. We are living in the age of information and at a time when we are overrun with so many great things happening, that some will fall by the wayside from the sheer volume of content origination. 

Getting back to basics and telling a good story will never go away so do yourself a favor and focus on being a true individual. There are enough folks trying to be like Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson or referencing them in every song. The same goes for lyrical content about a perceived demi god making you think about the wrong choices. Take action, stand strong and be your own character in this storyline called life.

 



"Eye of the tiger" on dot matrix printer from MIDIDesaster on Vimeo.

One Of The Great Inventions Of The 20th Century, Gorilla Glass

Certain inventions will always stand head and shoulders above others as they are stand alone items such as the ipod and iphone. Then there are other inventions that allow for a whole new realm of possibility and seem like the gift that keeps on giving. Gorilla Glass was invented by Corning numerous years back and was left dormant as there wasn't the perfect use for it just yet. Luckily for Corning, an industrious fella named Steve Jobs had an idea and now the technological thin material is as ever present as air, thanks to modern touch screen technology.


Link to the article on Wired.com

Molten glass cools to become so gummy it can be cut with scissors. Photo: Max Aguilera-Hellweg

"Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace and set the temperature to 600 degrees Celsius. At some point during the run, a faulty controller let the temperature climb to 900 degrees C. Expecting a melted blob of glass and a ruined furnace, Stookey opened the door to discover that, weirdly, his lithium silicate had transformed into a milky white plate. When he tried to remove it, the sample slipped from the tongs and crashed to the floor. Instead of shattering, it bounced.

The future National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee didn’t know it, but he had just invented the first synthetic glass-ceramic, a material Corning would later dub Pyroceram. Lighter than aluminum, harder than high-carbon steel, and many times stronger than regular soda-lime glass, Pyroceram eventually found its way into everything from missile nose cones to chemistry labs. It could also be used in microwave ovens, and in 1959 Pyroceram debuted as a line of space-age serving dishes: Corningware.

The material was a boon to Corning’s fortunes, and soon the company launched Project Muscle, a massive R&D effort to explore other ways of strengthening glass. A breakthrough came when company scientists tweaked a recently developed method of reinforcing glass that involved dousing it in a bath of hot potassium salt. They discovered that adding aluminum oxide to a given glass composition before the dip would result in remarkable strength and durability. Scientists were soon hurling fortified tumblers off their nine-story facility and bombarding the glass, known internally as 0317, with frozen chickens. It could be bent and twisted to an extraordinary degree before fracturing, and it could withstand 100,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. (Normal glass can weather about 7,000.) In 1962 Corning began marketing the glass as Chemcor and thought it could work for products like phone booths, prison windows, and eyeglasses.

Yet while there was plenty of initial interest, sales were slow. Some companies did place small orders for products like safety eyeglasses. But these were recalled for fear of the potentially explosive way the glass could break. Chemcor seemed like it would make a good car windshield too, and while it did show up in a handful of Javelins, made by American Motors, most manufacturers weren’t convinced that paying more for the new muscle glass was worth it—especially when the laminated stuff they’d been using since the ’30s seemed to work fine.

Corning had invented an expensive upgrade nobody wanted. It didn’t help that crash tests found that “head deceleration was significantly higher” on the windshields—the Chemcor might remain intact, but human skulls would not.

After pitches to Ford Motors and other automakers failed, Project Muscle was shut down and Chemcor was shelved in 1971. It was a solution that would have to wait for the right problem to arise.

When glass is hardened and strengthened it can withstand huge amounts of force from a lever press.
Photo: Max Aguilera-Hellweg

From above, Corning’s headquarters in upstate New York looks like a Space Invaders alien: Designed by architect Kevin Roche in the early ’90s, the structure fans out in staggered blocks. From the ground, though, the tinted windows and extended eaves make the building look more like a glossy, futuristic Japanese palace.

The office of Wendell Weeks, Corning’s CEO, is on the second floor, looking out onto the Chemung River. It was here that Steve Jobs gave the 53-year-old Weeks a seemingly impossible task: Make millions of square feet of ultrathin, ultrastrong glass that didn’t yet exist. Oh, and do it in six months. The story of their collaboration—including Jobs’ attempt to lecture Weeks on the principles of glass and his insistence that such a feat could be accomplished—is well known. How Corning actually pulled it off is not.

Weeks joined Corning in 1983; before assuming the top post in 2005, he oversaw both the company’s television and specialty glass businesses. Talk to him about glass and he describes it as something exotic and beautiful—a material whose potential is just starting to be unlocked by scientists. He’ll gush about its inherent touchability and authenticity, only to segue into a lecture about radio-frequency transparency. “There’s a sort of fundamental truth in the design value of glass,” Weeks says, holding up a clear pebble of the stuff. “It’s like a found object; it’s cool to the touch; it’s smooth but has surface to it. What you’d really want is for this to come alive. That’d be a perfect product.”
Weeks and Jobs shared an appreciation for design. Both men obsessed over details. And both gravitated toward big challenges and ideas. But while Jobs was dictatorial in his management style, Weeks (like many of his predecessors at Corning) tends to encourage a degree of insubordination. “The separation between myself and any of the bench scientists is nonexistent,” he says. “We can work in these small teams in a very relaxed way that’s still hyperintense.”

Indeed, even though it’s a big company—29,000 employees and revenue of $7.9 billion in 2011—Corning still thinks and acts like a small one, something made easier by its relatively remote location, an annual attrition rate that hovers around 1 percent, and a vast institutional memory. (Stookey, now 97, and other legends still roam the halls and labs of Sullivan Park, Corning’s R&D facility.) “We’re all lifers here,” Weeks says, smiling. “We’ve known each other for a long time and succeeded and failed together a number of times.”

One of the first conversations between Weeks and Jobs actually had nothing to do with glass. Corning scientists were toying around with microprojection technologies—specifically, better ways of using synthetic green lasers. The thought was that people wouldn’t want to stare at tiny cell phone screens to watch movies and TV shows, and projection seemed like a natural solution. But when Weeks spoke to Jobs about it, Apple’s chief called the idea dumb. He did mention he was working on something better, though—a device whose entire surface was a display. It was called the iPhone.

Jobs may have dismissed green lasers, but they represented the kind of innovation for innovation’s sake that defines Corning. So strong is this reverence for experimentation that the company regularly invests a healthy 10 percent of its revenue in R&D. And that’s in good times and in bad. When the telecom bubble burst in 2000 and cratering fiber-optic prices sent Corning’s stock from $100 to $1.50 per share by 2002, its CEO at the time reassured scientists that not only was Corning still about research but that R&D would be the path back to prosperity.

“They’re one of the very few technology-based firms that have been able to reinvent themselves on a regular basis,” says Rebecca Henderson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied Corning’s history of innovation. “That’s so easy to say, and it is so hard to do.” Part of that success lies in the company’s ability not only to develop new technologies but to figure out how to make them on a massive scale. Still, even when Corning succeeds at both, it can often take the manufacturer decades to find a suitable—and profitable enough—market for its innovations. As Henderson notes, innovation at Corning is largely about being willing and able to take failed ideas and apply them elsewhere.

Glass starts out as a mixture of very fine powders like limestone, sand, and sodium borate.
Photo: Max Aguilera-Hellweg

The idea to dust off the Chemcor samples actually cropped up in 2005, before Apple had even entered the picture. Motorola had recently released the Razr V3, a flip phone that featured a glass screen in lieu of the typical high-impact plastic. Corning formed a small group to examine whether an 0317-like glass could be revived and applied to devices like cell phones and watches. The old Chemcor samples were as thick as 4 millimeters. But maybe they could be made thinner. After some market research, executives believed the company could even earn a little money off this specialty product. The project was codenamed Gorilla Glass.

By the time the call from Jobs came in February 2007, these initial forays hadn’t gotten very far. Apple was suddenly demanding massive amounts of a 1.3-mm, chemically strengthened glass—something that had never been created, much less manufactured, before. Could Chemcor, which had never been mass-produced, be married to a process that would yield such scale? Could a glass tailored for applications like car windshields be made ultrathin and still retain its strength? Would the chemical strengthening process even work effectively on such a glass? No one knew. So Weeks did what any CEO with a penchant for risk-taking would do. He said yes.

For a material that’s so familiar as to be practically invisible, modern industrial glass is formidably complex. Standard soda-lime glass works fine for bottles and lightbulbs but is terrible for other applications, because it can shatter into sharp pieces. Borosilicate glass like Pyrex may be great at resisting thermal shock, but it takes a lot of energy to melt it. At the same time, there are really only two ways to produce flat glass on a large scale, something called fusion draw and the float glass process, in which molten glass is poured onto a bed of molten tin. One challenge a glass company faces is matching a composition, with all its desired traits, to the manufacturing process. It’s one thing to devise a formula. It’s another to manufacture a product out of it.

 

Corning is working on new flexible glass formulations that will ship on spools.
Photo: Max Aguilera-Hellweg

Regardless of composition, the main ingredient in almost all glass is silicon dioxide (aka sand). Because it has such a high melting point (1,720 degrees C), other chemicals, like sodium oxide, are used to lower the melting temperature of the mixture, making it easier to work with and cheaper to produce. Many of these chemicals also happen to imbue glass with specific properties, such as resistance to x-rays, tolerance for high temperatures, or the ability to refract light and disperse colors. Problems arise, though, when the composition is changed; the slightest tweak can result in a drastically different material. Throwing in a dense element like barium or lanthanum, for example, will decrease the melting temperature, but you risk not getting a homogeneous mixture. And maxing out the overall strength of a glass means you’re also making that glass more likely to fracture violently when it does fail. Glass is a material ruled by trade-offs. This is why compositions, particularly those that are fine-tuned for a specific manufacturing process, are fiercely guarded secrets.

One of the pivotal steps in glassmaking is the cooling. In large-scale manufacturing of standard glass, it’s essential for the material to cool gradually and uniformly in order to minimize the internal stresses that would otherwise make it easier to break. This is called annealing. The goal with tempered glass, however, is to add stress between the inner and outer layer of the material. This, paradoxically, can make the glass stronger: Heat a sheet of glass until it softens, then rapidly cool, or quench, its outer surfaces. This outside shell quickly contracts while the inside remains molten. As the center of the glass cools, it tries to contract, pulling on the outer shell. A zone of tension forms in the center, while the outer surfaces are even more tightly compressed. Tempered glass will eventually break if you chip through this toughened outer compressive layer into the zone of tension. But even thermal tempering has its limits. The amount of strengthening you can achieve is dependent on how much the glass contracts upon cooling, and most compositions will shrink only modestly.

The interplay between compression and tension is best demonstrated by something called a Prince Rupert’s drop. Formed by dripping globs of molten glass into ice water, the quickly cooled and compressed heads of these tadpole-shaped droplets can withstand massive amounts of punishment, including repeated hammer blows. The thin glass at the end of the tail is more vulnerable, however, and if you break it the fracture will propagate through the drop at 2,000 miles per hour, releasing the inner tension. Violently. In some cases, a Prince Rupert’s drop can explode with such force that it will actually emit a flash of light.

Chemical strengthening, the method of fortifying glass developed in the ’60s, creates a compressive layer too, through something called ion exchange. Aluminosilicate compositions like Gorilla Glass contain silicon dioxide, aluminum, magnesium, and sodium. When the glass is dipped in a hot bath of molten potassium salt, it heats up and expands. Both sodium and potassium are in the same column on the periodic table of elements, which means they behave similarly. The heat from the bath increases the migration of the sodium ions out of the glass, and the similar potassium ions easily float in and take their place. But because potassium ions are larger than sodium, they get packed into the space more tightly. (Imagine taking a garage full of Fiat 500s and replacing most of them with Chevy Suburbans.) As the glass cools, they get squeezed together in this now-cramped space, and a layer of compressive stress on the surface of the glass is formed. (Corning ensures an even ion exchange by regulating factors like heat and time.)Compared with thermally strengthened glass, the “stuffing” or “crowding” effect in chemically strengthened glass results in higher surface compression (making it up to four times as strong), and it can be done to glass of any thickness or shape.

Engineers at Corning use an array of torture devices to test the limits of its products.
Photo: Max Aguilera-Hellweg

By the end of March, Corning was closing in on its formula. But the company also needed to manufacture it. Inventing a new manufacturing process was out of the question, as that could take years. To meet Apple’s deadline, two of Corning’s compositional scientists, Adam Ellison and Matt Dejneka, were tasked with figuring out how to adapt and troubleshoot a process the company was already using. They needed something capable of spitting out massive quantities of thin, pristine glass in a matter of weeks.

There was really only one choice: fusion draw. In this technique, molten glass is poured from a tank into a trough called an isopipe. The glass overflows on each side, then the two streams rejoin under the isopipe. It’s drawn down at a prescribed rate by rollers to form a continuous sheet. The faster it’s drawn, the thinner the glass.

Corning’s one fusion-capable factory in the US is in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. In early 2007, that plant’s seven 15-foot-tall tanks were going full blast, each churning out more than 1,000 pounds per hour of sold-out LCD glass for TV panels. One tank could meet Apple’s initial request. But first the old Chemcor compositions had to be reformulated. The glass not only needed to be 1.3 mm now, it also had to have better visual characteristics than, say, a pane in a telephone booth. Ellison and his team had six weeks to nail it. To be compatible with the fusion process, the glass also needed to be extra stretchy, like chewing gum, at a fairly low temperature. The problem was, anything you do to increase a glass’s gooeyness also tends to make it substantially more difficult to melt. By simultaneously altering seven individual parts of the composition—including changing the levels of several oxides and adding one new secret ingredient—the compositional scientists found they were able to ramp up the viscosity while also producing a finely tuned glass capable of higher compressive stress and faster ion exchange. The tank started in May 2007. By June, it had produced enough Gorilla Glass to cover seven football fields.

In just five years, Gorilla Glass has gone from a material to an aesthetic—a seamless partition that separates our physical selves from the digital incarnations we carry in our pockets. We touch the outer layer and our body closes the circuit between an electrode beneath the screen and its neighbor, transforming motion into data. It’s now featured on more than 750 products and 33 brands worldwide, including notebooks, tablets, smartphones, and TVs. If you regularly touch, swipe, or caress a gadget, chances are you’ve interacted with Gorilla.

Corning’s revenue from the glass has skyrocketed, from $20 million in 2007 to $700 million in 2011. And there are other uses beyond touchscreens. At this year’s London Design Festival, Eckersley O’Callaghan—the design firm responsible for some of Apple’s most iconic stores—unveiled a serpentine-like glass sculpture made entirely from Gorilla Glass. It may even end up on windshields again: The company is in talks to install it in future sports car models.

Today, two yellow robotic arms grab 5-foot-square panels of Gorilla Glass with special residue-limiting suction cups and place them in wooden crates. From Harrodsburg, these crates are trucked to Louisville and loaded on a westbound train. Once they hit the coast, the sheets get loaded onto freight ships for their eventual date at one of Corning’s “finisher” facilities in China, where they get their molten potassium baths and are cut into touchable rectangles.

Of course, for all its magical properties, a quick scan of the Internet will reveal that Gorilla Glass does fail, sometimes spectacularly so. It breaks when phones are dropped, it spiders if they bend, it cracks when they’re sat on. Gorilla Glass is, after all, glass. Which is why a small team at Corning spends a good portion of the day smashing the hell out of the stuff.

“We call this a Norwegian hammer,” says Jaymin Amin, pulling a metal cylinder out of a wooden box. The tool is usually wielded by aircraft engineers to test the sturdiness of a plane’s aluminum fuselage. But Amin, who oversees all new glass development in the Gorilla family, pulls back the spring-loaded impact hammer and releases 2 joules of impact energy onto a 1-mm-thick piece of glass, enough to put a big dent in a block of wood. Nothing happens.

The success of Gorilla Glass presents some unique challenges for Corning. This is the first time the company has faced the demands of such rapid iteration: Each time a new version of the glass is released, the way it performs in the field has to be monitored for reliability and robustness. To that end, Amin’s team collects hundreds of shattered Gorilla Glass phones. “Almost all breakage, whether it’s big or small, begins at one spot,” says senior research scientist Kevin Reiman, pointing to a nearly invisible chip on an HTC Wildfire, one of a handful of crunched phones on the table in front of him. Once you actually locate that spot, you can start to measure the crack to get an idea of how the tension was applied to the glass; if you can reproduce a break, you can study how it propagated and attempt to prevent it, either compositionally or through chemical strengthening.

Armed with this information, the rest of the group jumps in to re-create that precise kind of failure over and over. They use lever presses; drop testers with granite, concrete, and asphalt surfaces; free gravity ball drops; and various industrial-looking torture devices armed with an arsenal of diamond tips. There’s even a high-speed camera capable of filming at 1 million frames per second to study flexure and flaw propagation.

All this destruction and controlled mayhem has paid off. Compared with the first version of the glass, Gorilla Glass 2 is 20 percent stronger (a third version is due out early next year). The Corning composition scientists have accomplished this by pushing the compressive stress to its limit—they were being conservative with the first version of Gorilla—while managing to avoid the explosive breakage that can come with that increase. Still, glass is a brittle material. And while brittle materials tend to be extremely strong under compression, they’re also extremely weak under tension: If you bend them, they can break. The key to Gorilla Glass is that the compression layer keeps cracks from propagating through the material and catastrophically letting tension take over. Drop a phone once and the screen may not fracture, but you may cause enough damage (even a microscopic nick) to critically sap its subsequent strength. The next drop, even if it isn’t as severe, may be fatal. It’s one of the inevitable consequences of working with a material that is all about trade-offs, all about trying to create a perfectly imperceptible material.

Back at the Harrodsburg plant, a man wearing a black Gorilla Glass T-shirt is guiding a 100-micron-thick sheet of glass (about the thickness of aluminum foil) through a series of rollers. The machine looks like a printing press, and appropriately, the glass that comes off it bends and flexes like a giant glimmering sheet of transparent paper. This remarkably thin, rollable material is called Willow. Unlike Gorilla Glass, which is meant to be used as armor, Willow is more like a raincoat. It’s durable and light, and it has a lot of potential. Corning imagines it will facilitate flexible smartphone designs and uber-thin, roll-up OLED displays. An energy company could also use Willow for flexible solar cells. Corning even envisions ebooks with glass pages.

Eventually, Willow will ship out on huge spools, like movie reels, each holding up to 500 feet of glass. That is, once someone places an order. For now, rolls of glass sit on the Harrodsburg factory floor, a solution waiting for the right problem to arise. Bryan Gardiner (bgardiner@gmail.com) also writes about anatomical models made of borosilicate in this issue."

A Happy Accident Revolutionized Guitar Sound, From The Tennesseean

Unbreakable cell phone glass was born out of an accident in the labs at Corning Glass. Another of the great modern day inventions in music, the distortion sound was born out of a transformer dying from too much current in an amp. Happy accidents occur all the time, so it is just a matter of sometimes slowing down and processing the events around us, which could ultimately become influential in new and profound way.

Link to original post on the Tennessean

"The distorted sound of rock ’n’ roll guitar aggression was born in Nashville, in 1960. By mistake.

“I’m pretty sure what happened was the primary transformer opened up,” says Glen Snoddy, the 91-year-old retired audio engineer who worked on producer Owen Bradley’s three-channel recording console in the summer of ’60, when the console malfunctioned and caused session great Grady Martin’s guitar sound to go from clean to bludgeoning during the recording of Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry.”

Snoddy explains what happened by invoking tech-talk about tube amplifiers and insufficient wiring. But whatever happened inside that console, what happened on tape was a singular guitar sound that jarred, invigorated and launched “Don’t Worry” to fame: It become a No. 1 country hit and reached No. 3 on the pop chart.

Other recording artists began coming to Bradley’s Quonset Hut studio in hopes of replicating that sound. But the sound born when the transformer went on the fritz died when the transformer ceased to work at all.

“Nancy Sinatra came to town and wanted to use that sound, and I had to tell her people that we didn’t have it anymore because the amplifier completely quit,” Snoddy says. “So I had to get busy and conjure up some way to make it happen.”

Snoddy built a guitar pedal, with a button guitarists could press with the tap of a foot to change tone from clean to filthy. Then he took that pedal to Chicago and arranged an audience with Gibson president Maurice Berlin.

“I don’t play guitar, but they had a fellow there who did,” Snoddy says. “I took the box, plugged it in, and Mr. Berlin said, ‘Hey, we want that.’ Gibson applied for a patent and sold the box. For seven years, I got royalties off of it. They didn’t sell very well at the beginning.”

The Maestro Fuzz-Tone FZ-1 didn’t fly off the shelves upon its initial release, in 1962. But in August 1965, the Rolling Stones released “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” a song that featured Keith Richards playing a signature hook on the fuzz box. “Satisfaction” soon ruled charts in America and the U.K., and Snoddy’s box and subsequent copy jobs became a part of most electric guitarists’ arsenal.

Snoddy did much more in his career in music. Raised in Shelbyville, he learned about radio and recording in the Army and wound up at WSM radio around 1951. He ran live sound for the “Grand Ole Opry” and the Ernest Tubb Record Shop’s “Midnite Jamboree” and grew to love the voices of Marty Robbins and Tennessee Ernie Ford. After Snoddy worked for a time at WSM television, Bradley brought him in to work at his Quonset Hut, on an impressive sound board.

The original Fuzz-Tone distortion pedal

“It was a great console,” Snoddy says. “Until one of the pre-amps went out and caused us to have the fuzz-tone.”

Snoddy also recorded Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” mastered records for Columbia Records and was an executive there after Bradley sold the Hut to Columbia.

“I hired Kris Kristofferson,” he says. “I hired him to clean up the studio. What did I know about songwriting? Not much.”

In 1968, Snoddy opened Woodland Sound Studios at 1011 Woodland St. in East Nashville. He built the studio, which became the spot for now-classic recordings by Loretta Lynn, Jimmy Buffett and many more, including the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” album. He also built Junction Recording Studio for Kitty Wells, and he served as a trustee for NARAS, the organization that puts on the Grammy Awards. But it is his fuzz-tone guitar sound that is an everyday part of thousands of musicians’ and listeners’ lives.

“I’ve heard people saying, ‘We’ve been trying to make audio purer and undefiled, and then some so-and-so comes up with a way to distort it,’” Snoddy says. “That so-and-so was me.”
Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com."

Electrical schematics on how the fuzz-tone operates

$25 Gun Created With Cheap 3D Printer Fires Nine Shots

3D printing is slowly making its way into the mass consumer market and of course with that type of proliferation, all types of new products will be made. Did you ever think guns would be part of those new products? Maybe not, but then again mankind has always been inventing weapons as long as technology continues to advance. I am huge into the concept of 3D printing and this article is a damn great read about a single file that was downloaded over a hundred thousand times for a 3D printed gun.

Check out original post on Forbes

The Lulz Liberator, a working handgun printed on a $1,725 LulzBot 3D printer w/ $25 in plastic. (Credit: Michael Guslick)

"When high tech gunsmith group Defense Distributed test-fired the world’s first fully 3D-printed firearm earlier this month, some critics dismissed the demonstration as expensive and impractical, arguing it could only be done with a high-end industrial 3D printer and that the plastic weapon wouldn’t last more than a single shot. Now a couple of hobbyists have proven them wrong on both counts.

One evening late last week, a Wisconsin engineer who calls himself “Joe” test-fired a new version of that handgun printed on a $1,725 Lulzbot A0-101 consumer-grade 3D printer, far cheaper than the one used by Defense Distributed. Joe, who asked that I not reveal his full name, loaded the weapon with .380 caliber rounds and fired it nine times, using a string to pull its trigger for safety.
The weapon survived all nine shots over the course of an evening, as you can see in the YouTube video below. (The clip was filmed by Michael Guslick, a fellow Wisconsin engineer who helped Joe with his tests and who is known for printing one of the first working lower receivers for AR-15 semi-automatic rifles.)



Joe’s proof-of-concept could raise the stakes another notch in the growing controversy over 3D printed guns, an idea that threatens to circumvent gun control and let anyone download and create a lethal weapon in their garage as easily as they download and print a Word document. The first successfully fired 3D-printed gun that Defense Distributed revealed to Forbes earlier this month, dubbed the Liberator, was printed on an $8,000 secondhand Stratasys Dimension SST printer, a refrigerator-sized industrial machine. In testing, that prototype has generally only been fired once per printed barrel. The gun printed by Joe, which he’s nicknamed the “Lulz Liberator,” was printed over 48 hours with just $25 of plastic on a desktop machine affordable to many consumers, and was fired far more times. “People think this takes an $8,000 machine and that it blows up on the first shot. I want to dispel that,” says Joe. “This does work, and I want that to be known.”

Eight of Joe’s test-fires were performed using a single barrel before swapping it out for a new one on the ninth. After all those shots, the weapon’s main components remained intact–even the spiraled rifling inside of the barrel’s bore. “The only reason we stopped firing is because the sun went down,” he says.

Just how the Lulz Liberator survived those explosions isn’t exactly clear. Joe claims that the plastic he used, the generic Polylac PA-747 ABS fed into most consumer 3D printers, is actually stronger than the more expensive ABS plastic used in a Stratasys printer. In fact, before using a Lulzbot-printed barrel, he and Guslick tested one made on Guslick’s Stratasys printer. That barrel exploded on firing, though Joe blames the problem in part on its having been printed with a smaller chamber, the space at the back of the barrel into which the round is inserted.

Joe’s printed gun contains a few more pieces of metal hardware than the original Liberator. Rather than print plastic pins to hold the hammer in the body, for instance, he used hardware store screws. Like Defense Distributed’s gun, the Lulz Liberator also uses a metal nail for a firing pin, and includes a chunk of non-functional steel designed to make it detectable with a metal detector so that it complies with the Undetectable Firearms Act. The rifling that Joe added to the barrel is designed to skirt the National Firearms Act, which regulates improvised weapons and those with smooth-bored barrels.

Still, Joe’s cheap homemade gun isn’t without its bugs. Over the course of its test firing, Joe and Guslick say it misfired several times, and some of its screws and its firing pin had to be replaced. After each firing, the ammo cartridges expanded enough that they had to be pounded out with a hammer. “Other than that, it’s pretty much confirming that yes, Defense Distributed is correct that this functions,” says Guslick. “And it’s possible to make one on a much lower cost printer.”

The Lulz Liberator's barrel after eight shots.

It’s not yet clear if or when Joe or Guslick plans to release their modified blueprint for the Liberator online. That kind of publication may be legally tricky: When Defense Distributed put its CAD files online earlier this month the State Department responded with a letter demanding that it take the files down until they could be reviewed for export control violations. But that didn’t stop the Liberator files from being downloaded 100,000 times in their first two days online and then spreading further on filesharing websites like the Pirate Bay.

When Defense Distributed founder and anarchist Cody Wilson set out to create the world’s first 3D-printed gun last year, he told me at the time that his focus was on making guns as widely accessible as possible via the Internet, a move he believed would demonstrate governments’ inability to control digital objects. He planned to eventually adapt his model to be printable on a sub-$1,000 printer known as a RepRap. “Anywhere there’s a computer and an Internet connection, there would be the promise of a gun,” Wilson said at the time.

Joe’s experiment brings that idea of a universally-available gun with uncensorable online blueprints one step closer to reality. “I’m trying to do the same thing Cody wants to do. I’m not an anarchist, but I don’t like the idea that the government is telling us ‘You can’t have that,’” he says. “I agree with Cody’s idea that this is a perfect fusion of the first and second amendments.”

Of course, there’s a certain thrill of pioneering a new gun design, too, Joe admits. “I may be the first person in the history of mankind to fire a bullet through a plastic rifled barrel. It’s an interesting feeling,” he says. “I feel like Samuel Colt.”

On May 3, high tech gunsmithing group Defense Distributed gave Forbes a first look at the world's first fully 3D-printed gun, what it called the "Liberator."

These are the gun's sixteen pieces, including plastic spiral springs used in its hammer mechanism and its one non-printed part, a common hardware store nail used as the firing pin.

The CAD file for the gun's body shown on the screen of a Defense Distributed volunteer.

The Stratasys printhead lays down fine layers of ABS plastic to create components like the trigger spring being printed here.

Skaters Are The Future - The Lightest Electric Vehicle Is A Skateboard

Yes, we are damn stoked on the idea of an electric cruiser board. How often on those long pushes after hours of skating are ya worn out and just waiting for that first bit of downhill when you can just cruise. If you are a skater, this mindset is easy to get into. Unfortunately I don't get to commute on my board to work any more as the office is mere yards away, but the thought of having this board to cruise through traffic just made my damn day. Although I do quite miss holding onto bumpers to skitch across town. Go Skate!

Link to original article on GrindTV.com

Yes you can now Bomb Uphill! This skateboard has the juice to carry ya up the streets.

"A tiny company in Palo Alto, California, founded by some Stanford University students has the potential to change that way we travel.

Boosted Boards has introduced a prototype of what it's calling "the lightest electric vehicle that's ever been made"--a longboard electric skateboard that the company hopes will easily and quickly transport commuters from wherever their bus or train stops to wherever it is they actually want to be.

"The last mile of transportation is this huge problem that hasn't been solved yet," Boosted Boards co-founder Sanjay Dastoor said in the company's promotional video below. "Once you get off of a public transit system, whether it's a bus or a train or anything else, how do you get along that last mile to your destination? What Boosted Boards does is gives you a really portable vehicle that you can use in conjunction with public transit."

So far, the company is still working on prototypes, which weigh 12 to 15 pounds, can climb hills with grades as steep as 15 percent, go as fast as 20 mph, and last for six miles without being recharged.

The board's throttle and braking are all controlled with a little hand-held remote that's worn on the thumb. And, unlike other electric skateboards, there's room to grip underneath if you're looking to do any fancy tricks. The braking system is also regenerative, charging the battery a bit with every stop. If you do drain the battery and don't want to wait two hours to recharge, the board will still work like a regular skateboard, offering just a touch more resistance.

It appears as if the small company has a lot of support. It's partnered with longboard skateboard maker Loaded Boards and is consulting with a former director of engineering at electric vehicle maker Tesla Motors; Dastoor says he hopes the consultant will help the company avoid some of the common mistakes that young hardware companies make when they bring a product to market.

Nevertheless, Dastoor says that making a product like an electric longboard skateboard is extremely expensive, which is why the company has asked for pledges via online pledging system Kickstarter. So far, the company has raised more than $180,000, with 80 people (and counting) pledging the $1,199 required to receive a board by next June."

How Spotify Works: Pay The Majors, Use P2P Technology

We have been professing our love about Spotify for a few months now but if you have been interested in checking out the service and wondering just how they operate, read the article below.The amount of choices on the service leave us scratching out brain thinkin' on new songs to listen to and its with the plethora of offerings that we find the most enjoyment. Hell if you want to dive into Chaupin or Bach or move into country or metal, its all a few clicks away.

Link to original article over on NPR.org 

Ken Parks, head of Spotify's New York office: "With a streaming service like Spotify that gives you access to everything in the world instantaneously, those distinctions between ownership and access tend to disappear."

If you've ever tried listening to music on a web site, you've probably had the experience of waiting ... and waiting ... for a song to start. The cloud music service Spotify thinks it's found a way around to get music to your computer faster; employing some of the same technology the music industry has been fighting against for years.

One of the first things you notice about Spotify is how quickly it starts playing the song you want to hear — even if it's not already stored on your computer. There's no wait for buffering or downloading. Spotify feels, in a word, instant.

John Pavley, Spotify's VP of engineering, says, "We're set up so that we can deliver the music with a meantime average of 285 milliseconds. Which is, like, super-fast."

That number he mentioned — 285 milliseconds — may sound arbitrary. But Charlie Hellman, director of product development for Spotify, says it's not. According to Hellman, "The human perception of instant — if you hit a button that's tangible in the world — is something like 250 milliseconds. By bringing the time to play on our service down to about 285 milliseconds, the perception is that you already have the file on your computer — that it's instant."

Spotify launched in Europe three years ago, and in the U.S. this past August. The basic idea behind the company isn't brand new. Music streaming services — sites where you pay a monthly fee for access to zillions of songs — have been around for a decade. But they've never broken through to a mass market.

 

Eliot Van Buskirk, who writes about music technology for Wired and Evolver.fm, says Spotify might. "To an extent, Spotify is basically like other services we've had," Van Buskirk says. "But the difference is, it has, I think, reduced the friction for people trying this stuff out. And that was one of the first things I noticed: it's just impossibly fast."

Spotify hopes to use that speed to lure consumers to the free, advertising-supported version of its service — then convince them to pay a monthly fee to use Spotify on their phones and mobile devices. Its target audience is the millions of people who continue to download music for free from peer-to-peer networks.

"The problem with the environment when Spotify launched the service over three years ago is that the illegal alternatives were better, simply better than the legal ones," says Ken Parks, head of Spotify's New York office.

Parks says Spotify is trying to build a service in which creators get paid, but the user's experience doesn't suffer. "With a streaming service like Spotify that gives you access to everything in the world instantaneously," says Parks, "those distinctions between ownership and access tend to disappear."

To make this happen, Spotify borrows a few tricks from the peer-to-peer networks. Instead of downloading a single song file from its own server to you, Spotify searches for copies of the song wherever it can find them, including the computers of other Spotify users.

"Behind the scenes while the music is playing, we're grabbing it from wherever we can," says Pavley. "You can't interact with the P2P network, it's just a little facility that we use to move things along very quickly."

Before he came to Spotify Pavley was actually VP of engineering for Limewire, a popular peer-to-peer network. Unlike the P2Ps it's trying to replace, Spotify actually has licensing deals with the major record labels. And in September the company announced a deal with Facebook. Van Buskirk says that allows Facebook users to automatically share the songs they're listening to via Spotify.

"It gets closer and closer to that original Napster feeling," he says. "'What do my friends have? Can I have that?' And now it's like, 'Yes, you can.' And there's a whole mechanism for finding out what they have that you're already using anyway."

But Van Buskirk says Spotify's deals with the major record labels didn't come cheap. Spotify says it has more than 2 million paying users worldwide — although the company declined to discuss how many of them are in the U.S. Van Buskirk, and others, think the company will have to sign up a lot more if it's going to make a profit.

She Rides Android App

Never the fellas in She Rides fool ya, they may sleep never yet rage forever and still have time to create an Android App. If you need a new gadget for your phone, go on click the link to keep up to date with one of the hottest up and coming swaggerific party bands touring today.

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