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Goddamn Toots had a voice. I didn't realize he passed away last year

Hi, pedal, I'm dad.*

*not actually a dad, but a great fan of dad jokes

Picked a good pound and a half of raspberries on my run yesterday. Took a plastic bag with me and stopped at a few different spots along my usual route. Yum!



Made a raspberry sour with some tonight, and Lexa and I have been snacking on them. (She was surprised to find that she does like raspberries when they actually taste like berries.) Planning on making some little tarts with about half of them.

We've also managed to actually pick some blueberries from our bushes this year!

FFS it's not fine print, it's just The Print, and the sale price is harder to read than the other price.

In fact, are you sure that the prices listed aren't just backwards, like it's just a display error on the website?

Well, the short answer is "all of them."

Typically guitar compressors are a feedback compressor. A feedback compressor takes the input signal after amplification and compressor to generate a control signal and adjust the gain of the signal. (Feedforward takes the input signal before amplification and compression, meaning that the dynamic control of the final signal does not depend on the performance of the compressor.)

Such a compressor consists of two main blocks: An amplifier and the control voltage.

The amplifier is typically not anything special, but it is usually designed to be clean even if the signal isn't being compressed, and there will be some sort of device among the amplifier's parts that can control the gain. Typically it's a variable resistor of some sort, like a transistor or a light-dependent resistor, but there are other methods of changing the gain (for instance, if your amplifier is a FET or a tube, you can change the voltage on the input pin to produce different levels of gain).

Every method of activating the variable element will involve DC. The audio signal is AC, so you need to rectify it. This is done with a diode; one diode is half-wave rectification, two is full-wave. Half wave means that every crest of the wave cycle is a burst of DC, full-wave means every peak and trough are a burst of DC, so it's smoother. There's a compressor after the rectification that acts as a reservoir to smooth out the DC bursts by storing up charge and discharging it slowly. There will also usually be a resistor in parallel with the compressor to control the timing of this bleedoff, and the time can be calculated with normal RC filter equations. A second resistor -- even if it's hidden -- will be forming a low-pass filter with the reservoir compressor for the attack time. (Just for funsies, you can see the exact same practices of smoothing out DC in the power section of every pedal.) The rectified DC signal is then fed into something that will control the variable gain element, such as lighting up an LED or wiggling the gate of a FET.

I know this is a lot of technical information, so my suggestion is to grab a schematic of a low-parts-count compressor and trace the signal to see if you can find each of the parts I mentioned. In particular look for the rectifier circuit, and a variable resistance element attached to the audio amplifier.

I'm still all locked up on the last line "It's painted, not a wrap".  I have no idea how that's possible.

Actually I looked again more closely and I was wrong about that! It looks like it's a really thin wrap, but some people had said that all their higher end shells were painted (and I am pretty sure all the kits they made for Yamaha were painted), so I had assumed that this kit must be. I'm looking at the bass drum hoops and if I run my finger along where the edge happens there is a really thin bump, like paper thin.

This is actually a good thing, I won't keep having a heart palpitation every time I bump one.

I've got a couple songs kicking around that never got a proper recording, I think I'll fire up the ole DAW pretty soon for one of those. I've got a pair of KM84 DIY kits on the way from a group buy over on GroupDIY, too!

WowJon. That looks really nice. I didn't know you were that serious into drums. And the fact that you can play them, truly impressive. I bought a set a few years ago and discovered I can't play drums.

Part of it's that our recording and practicing situation has gotten more complicated. The engineer I work with, quite justifiably, wants to be able to buy groceries, so he's getting part time work with a "real" job. These aren't only for me to play. The reason I got a kit originally was that our drummer was kind of bouncing around in apartments (he and his wife are separated but not getting divorced) so I wanted a kit set up at my house for him to play at practices and to record with in a pinch. Then I figured I should learn how to play them, and then I decided that I ought to get good enough to make demos so I practiced a lot, and then I decided that I wanted the option to have a kit that sounds like what we want on the recordings in case we can't get studio time with the person I prefer.

This is a lot of rationalization but it's not *just* rationalizing ...

So this happened over the holiday weekend and arrived today.



Sakae Trilogy. The kit's sort of a hybrid of 60s Ludwig/Yamaha/Gretch aspects, with super thin (and really light) maple shells.

Sakae made Yamaha's high-end drums since the 60s and were around since 1925. They went bankrupt last year, got bought by Korg, and their production is being moved to Taiwan. It's heartbreaking, honestly. I got probably the last 22/12/14 kit for sale anywhere and picked up a 10" that's arriving tomorrow from another shop. Tried my damnedest to find the matching snare, but the only ones for sale are on evilbay from Japan for $700+, which isn't happening. I might get one of the other other colors for that but I'm not in a hurry to buy it. I figured it was now or never to get something that's basically one of my dream instruments. And while the Natal I got last year sounds plenty good when I tune it up and records pretty decently, but it's a little too modern sounding to me. This has an older sound but I don't have to deal with all the problems of actually buying an old instrument.

I've got it all tuned up and it honestly sounds awesome, but one thing I didn't expect was for it to physically *feel* different. Like with the Natal the low frequencies weren't there and there was basically no shell resonance. These are the same size for the toms, but I can physically feel the sound in my legs when I'm playing, and I don't even have to be playing that hard.

Close-up of the finish. It's painted, not a wrap, and it looks seriously stunning in person.  [edit: I was wrong about this being a painted finish, this might be the only kit they've ever done that's a wrap]

I am an open-minded, but skeptical carnivore cooking some Beyond Meat for the very first time today (hamburgers and hot Italian sausage).  I'm not hoping for an identical-to-meat experience, but I am hoping for something delicious.  Fingers crossed.

Update:  Rather than post a detailed review, I'll just say that I wouldn't eat it again.  There is a smell that I couldn't enjoy. 

Hopefully this doesn't put you off the idea of vegetarian beef entirely.

I prefer Impossible burger by quite a bit for both texture and taste -- and have friends who don't like it at all, though I'm not totally sure but they might not have made it themselves.

good moogily foogily!

You're unlike to find a tutorial on "reading a schematic" because there are too many ways a circuit can be put together to even begin making such a tutorial. You can glean something from reading circuit analyses on places like GeoFx and ElectroSmash, but I honestly don't know if the information is generalizable if you see something that wasn't covered in them.

This is about as close as I can get to a tutorial for reading a schematic for an audio circuit:

1. Get a chart with schematic symbols.
2. Print the schematic, or bring it up in a program like Paint that will let you mark it up.
3. Pick a color and note it as "audio path." Start at the input for the audio signal, which will be marked on the schematic. Your goal is, like a maze, to follow the audio to the output.
4. When you come to a symbol you don't recognize, stop, identify the part type, and go read the Wikipedia page on that part type.
5. When you come to a fork in the road, so to speak, your goal is to identify what kind of circuit is formed by the cluster of components.
    Everything useful is a voltage divider. You can have a resistor voltage divider, which will send some portion of the signal in one direction and some portion in another. Take a typical volume control. Look at where the signal starts, and look at where it can go. What would a volume pot look like if it were just resistors? You can have a resistor-capacitor voltage divider, which will impede the signal based on frequency. You can calculate what frequencies are cut if you want, or just identify in broad strokes what is happening (e.g. are high frequencies being cut, or low frequencies, or both?), but you need to recognize them because they're common. Transistors are also a voltage divider -- the -istor part is from resistor -- but they are able to amplify the voltage or current of a signal depending on their usage. You can look up basic transistor circuits to see something with only a couple parts to learn how they work. Op amps are made up of transistors and you can even look at their circuit by looking up the datasheet for the part.
6. Do the same process with the supply voltage -- you can identify the power filtering, and when the voltage is limited or perhaps divided (as is often the case when supplying the half voltage for a dual op amp).

Learning circuits that way is a process, and it will take a while to analyze complicated ones. Start with simple circuits (like the ones labeled "noob" in the Madbean store) and learn to recognize blocks of circuits, this will reduce the number of parts you need to examine when you open a new circuit. Many parts are also analogous to others -- different types of transistors might have different symbols and they might have different pinouts in the real world, but their schematics are drawn the same way; heck, they're often drawn the same way when they're tubes.

The other thing you should do is experiment. Make an audio probe, grab the schematic for the pedal, and just stick the probe somewhere in the circuit while playing a guitar chord. This might be useful if you're not sure whether something is audio or not, but it's definitely useful for understanding what happens to the guitar signal at any given point in the circuit. It's also an extremely effective troubleshooting tool, because if you look at the schematic and have some inkling that "hey my guitar signal shouldn't go missing here" then you've probably found a problem. And breadboarding circuits is a great way to understand them from the ground up.

I was looking back through my videos the other day, and the concert I streamed in December had a copyright claim. I was pretty surprised because I was pretty sure everything I did in that concert was traditional or original.

It turned out that the copyright claim was for Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More," a song that has been public domain since before the 20th century.

So after disputing it (which will take 30 days, and which if BMI decides to just arbitrarily say "no we own this" -- they aren't required to provide proof I believe), I did some reading, and apparently YouTube's content ID is actually too stupid to tell the difference between two different performances of the same work. So BMI can upload hundreds of recordings of classical or folk works and essentially claim them all.

The process is opaque, because YouTube understandably doesn't want people figuring out how to bypass their system and actually steal copyrighted material, but it's obviously broken in many ways. And since I have some background in machine learning I can take a guess how this works: The content ID takes a recording and strips it to is most salient features, which is going to be the melody. (Hence they can say "This video uses this song's melody.") Which is why they can't even label which particular recording I'm alleged to be violating the copyright of. (I assume that BMI is not, in fact, actually claiming to hold the copyright on a Stephen Foster *song*.)

I'm lucky if I get a hundred views on a video, but apparently this has caused classical musicians no end of grief, because they get can get muted for playing Beethoven.

I just kind of can't believe how stupid this all is, though. There should be some different method for whether someone is using the melody of a work that is under copyright and whether the work is actually a specific recording, but YouTube is happy to just funnel billions of dollars for BMI to pocket. Who the hell on BMI's roster would even get whatever minuscule amount of advertising is generated for that song? That's what bugs me the most. Like you want to incorrectly say "This is the Ma/Meyer/O'Connor version" I might say, "Okay, I like them, they can have the penny a year this might generate," but right now I'm just assuming that some executive at BMI pockets it.

This also feels like theft from the commons. There should be some sort of penalty for imposing ad revenue on something that is public domain against the wishes of the performing artist. I hope the EFF manages a lawsuit against YouTube at some point about this, because there are artists out there that are actually monetarily harmed by it. https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online

Oh! I forgot to mention: There's no option in YouTube to say "This video does contain copyrighted material, but the material that's under copyright is not what's been claimed." So if you cover a song and play one that's in public domain, and only the public domain one gets claimed, you can't tell them that they got it wrong, so this is obviously not in any way meant to ensure that the actual artists get their money.

If they spend $1000 on one it's because that is the most economically sound decision. Realistically though Alan just pulled that number out of thin air. A space hammer probably cost a lot more than a grand.

It's a perennial myth, but it's based on a real thing. The circumstances and cost get repurposed on the internet.

https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/

since they aren't going to spend like $1000 on a hammer.

The U.S. Government is statutorily required to buy something off the shelf if it can, and it can and does get sued if it doesn't buy an off the shelf product that meets its needs.

Bu tif you go to a manufacturer and tell them that their off the shelf hammer is not good enough and you need three hammers with these exact specifications that are durable enough to do something in particular, they're going to cost $1000 each because you're paying a room full of engineers to make something bespoke for you. This happens a lot with military equipment: It doesn't exist, so you have to pay someone to make it, but you also won't let them sell it to anyone else, so you pay for their R&D as well.

NASA is not motivated not by profit but the desire to continue exploration. Its justification for the next mission is the success of the prior. Private industry has decades of experience trying to skirt safety, environmental, and every other expectation they can to please their shareholders. I don't want the kind of folks who hire the Pinkertons to spy on their workers or get a couple million dollars in exchange for failure in charge of the safety and success of pure scientific exploration whose achievements become part of the public good.

At a minimum you could switch:

1. The input from the stomp switch to be connected to the jack instead.
2. The output from the stomp switch to be connected to the jack.
3. The ground lug of the volume from ground to a lug of the stomp switch that connects to ground (on most wirings, I think the center lug works for this).

This will allow you to lift the volume pot ground, which should be good enough for what you want. You could lose a tiny bit of volume depending on the input impedance of the next thing in line. You could minimize that with a very high input impedance buffer if you need to.