Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

Nice article for engineers to understand something that most guitar players will intuitively know.

One of the great things about a hi-gain setup like Hendrix's is how the feedback loop will inject an element of controlled chaos into the sound. It allows for emergent fluctuations in timbre that Hendrix can wrangle, but never fully control. It's the squealing, chaotic element in something like his 'Star Spangled Banner'. It's a positive feedback loop that can run away from the player and create all kinds of unexpected elements.

The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.

A great place to hear artful feedback would be the intro to Prince's 'Computer Blue'. It's the squealing "birdsong" at the beginning and ending of the record. You can hear it particularly well if you search for 'Computer Blue - Hallway Speech Version' with the extended intro.

Strange article. Even though I do like music and engineering.

>Electromagnetic pickups—(...)—fixed the loudness problem. But they left a new one: the envelope

Was it really a problem to be solved? Good tube amplifiers already existed back then. Clean guiar tone was not something frowned upon.

>Hendrix’s mission was (...)

>His solution was (...)

I don't think Hendrix was on a 'mission' to solve engineering puzzles at all. He was just experimenting, as an artist.

Interesting factoid: modern guitar effects typically have their input jacks on the right-hand side, and output jacks on the left. In this article's guitar rig diagram, the jacks are reversed, but this is accurate: back then, for whatever reason the jacks were reversed on each of these pedals. Modern reissues of the round-enclosure Fuzz Face pedals preserve this pattern despite the reversal of industry trends.

> Electric guitars attack hard, decay fast, and don’t sustain like bowed strings or organs.

Since the 1980s, we have had the "Sustainiac": an active circuit installed in the electric guitar along with a "reverse pickup" which is energized in order to excite vibration in the strings.

With this device, at the flip of a switch, you get indefinite sustain on any note on the neck, at any volume, distortion or not --- even if the electric guitar is not plugged into an amplifier at all, and just heard acoustically.

The best implementations of this have a three way harmonic switch. You can choose between excite the fretted (or open) note itself (fundamenta a.k.a first harmonic), an octave above it (second harmonic) or a higher harmonic still.

You can be sustaning the given note, and then at the flip of a switch, it will fade over to the higher harmonic.

YouTube videos of this in action are worth checking out.

Here is one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZwPPGsxY6g

I strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created.

All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.

See: https://www.scribd.com/document/55134776/48787070-Bob-Ostert...

With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.

There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup).

Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre.

Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.

This is one of the few articles where I noticed a bunch of LLM-isms and still read to the end because it was interesting.

For a better example of the guitar as a synth like feedback device listen to robert fripps solo on heroes by bowie. He used markings on the studio floor to achieve the desired tone.

I've often marveled at the success many guitar players had with experimental electronics - Hendrix, EVH, Les Paul, Brian May, Jack White, and Tom Scholz (special case, of course) are just a few examples.

If you can track it down, Hendrix's home recordings are a gem.

https://jimihendrixrecordguide.com/home-recordings/

(edit: syntax)

Incredible article, as a lifelong Hendrix fan, nicely done.

Why is that pic labelled with the wrong names? Pretty sure that isn't Mitch and Noel.

There is art in engineering that we cannot deny.

While some try to make it as exact science, it is not, there are things you still cannot put a number on and it works ...

This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry.

DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class).

The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers.

And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Animats!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.

This is a terrible article. In the first subplot, there is no explanation of what v(b1) and v(c2) are. The -8 on the on y axis (amplitude) looks like an upside down 8.

Further down there is a sentence: "First, the Fuzz Face is a two-transistor feedback amplifier that turns a gentle sinusoid signal into an almost binary “fuzzy” output." But the figure does not match this - there is no "gentle sinusoid" wave shown on the first fuzz face plot.

The original title: "Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardy Explained."

> and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer.

So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.

Nice article, but that the signal chain in the top image doesn't match the signal chain described in the text annoys me more than it should.

Anyone doing something artistically great is engineering in some way. The Renaissance painter, the ableton producer. It all involves mastery of tools.

Fascinating

"A groove engineer baby"

Hendrix reportedly discovered feedback by walking away from a cranked amp. The guitar just kept sustaining on its own. What followed was years of empirical system identification: learning how body position, pickup selection, and guitar-to-amp distance affected feedback character. No transfer function, just iteration. That's a valid engineering methodology.

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Jimi on the radio is my shorthand for bad economic times. Happened in 2007 and he's playing on the airwaves now

And God is a DJ.

Crazy example of when everything is AI generated, even the code referenced in git repo (refer to commit 3d733ca), and actually interesting and "new" in a way...