Ever since I got my new iPhone with video capabilities a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting to do this: upload a video from my phone to YouTube and then immediately post the video to Panopticist using Movable Type’s mobile interface. I’m sitting in the upper tier at Giants Stadium, where AC/DC has just begun its set. It’s my first stadium show since I saw Pink Floyd at the Hoosierdome in 1987. It’s 9:30pm. Here’s a clip from their first song:

Well, crap, it appears to be impossible to copy and paste a YouTube embed code on an iPhone—the code won’t select. So here’s a direct link to the video on YouTube—I’ll fix this later:

http://bit.ly/4wlAz

UPDATE, Saturday morning: I’m not the first person to discover that YouTube’s embed codes aren’t selectable on an iPhone. As this guy points out, it’s because the iPhone doesn’t allow you to select form-field text that isn’t editable—and YouTube’s embed codes aren’t editable on YouTube. Luckily, there’s a workaround: On tools4noobs.com, you can paste in the URL of a YouTube video and it’ll spit out a valid XHTML embed code that you can then copy. So, here’s another video from last night—it’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” in its entirety. The sound quality is really bad—I wasn’t surprised to discover that the iPhone’s microphone can’t handle high volumes.

I love technology. And I also love to rock. Viva the Young brothers! It was a great show.

This awesome clip shows a barely pubescent Jimmy Page playing skiffle on a British TV show in the late ’50s. Text in the clip says “1957,” which would mean Page is 13 years old here, but Wikipedia asserts that Page didn’t start playing guitar until he was 14. So let’s guess that this is from 1958, and Page is 14. Whatever his age, this is a fantastic artifact. But where’s his violin bow?

The host is a guy named Huw Weldon.

Related entry: Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot.

Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious YouTube videos in which he lifted concert footage of various guitar heroes and overdubbed his own intentionally awful playing. The bad musicianship was funny enough, but the verisimilitude made it even funnier: Ojala was great at matching each player’s hand movements and timing, and he sprinkled lukewarm applause and other sound effects throughout. The videos were like alternate-universe versions of rock-god cliches.

A month or two ago, YouTube yanked the videos and suspended Ojala’s YouTube account, apparently due to copyright complaints from several of the guitarists. Many of the videos have now resurfaced on YouTube, and because I never got around to posting them the first time, here’s one of the best. Eric Clapton does jazz:

More: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Vai, Slash, Eddie Van Halen, Metallica, Jake E. Lee with Ozzy Osbourne. Also, Yngwie Malmsteen, complete with symphony orchestra!

Inspired by Ojala, someone else contributed this Oscar Peterson-Joe Pass train wreck:

I began playing guitar in 1984, and I’ve gone through long periods where I’ve played hours and hours every week. I’ve hardly played at all in the last six months or a year; I’ve been busy with other things. But for several years beginning in mid-1998, I spent much of my free time writing and recording music in my apartment. Thanks to the inexpensive digital-recording technologies (audio sequencers, software synthesizers, drum-loop editors) that were just then becoming available, I started working with electronic textures and elaborate song structures. Most of my music from this period involves electric and acoustic guitars combined with looped beats, atmospheric synths, and historical voice samples from people like Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and J. Edgar Hoover. (I don’t sing, so the samples were partly a way to add human voices to my recordings.) I was listening a lot to this guy and these guys at the time, and their influence on some of those tunes is pretty evident.

I finished about an album’s worth of tracks during that phase. Here are a couple of them (they’ve now been added to the other tracks on my music page):

“Zero Sum,” from 1999, is one of the more elaborate tracks from that period. I used this and this to create the swooping octave shifts in the first solo, about halfway through the track; I used this (again) and this for the growly, synthlike solo in the progtastic final section.

“Trained Assassin,” from 2001, is sort of a futuristic spy theme. My then-girlfriend lent her voice for the whispered sample at the beginning. Once again, the solo is this combined with this.

In late 2001, I got my hands on one of these awesome gadgets and a couple of these awesome gadgets. Before long, I moved away from doing intricate, highly composed studio recordings and began doing extemporaneous live looping routed through analog filters and other effects. A few tracks from that period can be found on my music page.

A Vancouver music store is selling a custom guitar with a pot-leaf-shaped body. Check out the abalone weed-leaf inlay on the first fret and the joint inlay on the 12th fret:

Judging from the picture, that thing must weigh a ton. Its eventual owner—assuming someone actually buys it—will have to smoke a lot of weed just to deal with the debilitating back pain it will cause.

[Thanks to my Vancouver friend Dominic Ali for the tip!]

My pal Clive Thompson, a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Details, and other mags, has an excellent piece in the latest Wired about “the ‘fab revolution’—the advent of cheap, easy-to-use tools for crafting physical objects, such as laser cutters and 3D milling machines,” as Clive puts it on his first-rate science-and-technology blog, Collision Detection. “Essentially, I argue that the physical world is about to become as flexible as information. Just as computers and the Internet made bits infinitely malleable, precision-guided fab tools will make atoms easy to tweak.”

To immerse himself in these new technologies, Clive used them to create the body of a one-of-a-kind electric guitar. He enlisted the services of eMachineshop, a New Jersey-based company whose website and proprietary software allow customers to design a wide range of physical objects—everything from furniture and toys to sporting equipment and medical devices—that are then manufactured by eMachineshop and sent to the customer.

The first graphic below is Clive’s design as it existed it in the software; the second is Clive rocking out at home with his new guitar.

Zachary Vex is a music engineer and electronics fetishist whose unique effects pedals and tiny amps have earned him the adulation of discerning music-gear fanatics around the world. His little company, the Minneapolis-based Z. Vex, is best known for its hand-assembled and hand-painted effects pedals, many of which are designed to produce beautifully sick low-fi sounds. A year or two ago Z. Vex expanded into the world of amplifiers with the Nano Head, the world’s smallest tube guitar amp, which fits in the palm of your hand. When coupled with a speaker cabinet, the Nano Head is capable of some excellent AC/DC-style crunch.

Now Z. Vex has announced its latest product: the iMP AMP, a stereo vacuum-tube power amplifier “intended for studio use, or with small sound sources such as iPods, mini-disc/cd players and laptops to power passive monitors. Perfect for your office or recording environment—you can put the iMP AMP right on your desk with bookshelf speakers and have a mini tube hi-fi setup for your iPod.”

Unless you have lots of disposable income, you probably won’t be buying an iMP AMP anytime soon: The retail price is $525. But I’m sure it sounds great, and the retro-futuristic design is beautiful. It almost looks like a discarded prop from the set of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

Here are some more details from the e-mail Zachary Vex sent out last week:

It’s a hi-fidelity stereo vacuum tube power amplifier designed to power passive speakers (like old-fashioned bookshelf speakers or studio monitors like Yamaha NS-10s or JBL L100s, or even high-end audiophile speakers.) It’s one watt per side, with RCA input connectors, barrier-strip output speaker terminals, and adjustable sensitivity so the iMP is compatible with any standard level, from +4dB (studio level) to -20dB (consumer gear like the iPod.) It’s slightly smaller than the Nano head because it doesn’t have a fan. […] Its frequency response is nothing short of amazing, at +0dB/-2dB from 10 Hz to 22kHz.

I’m really thrilled with this amp. I use it at my desk, where it takes up very little space and is plenty loud to fill my office with sound. I have another one driving my old JBLs at my lab bench, where we listen to all of the CDs we receive from players using our products! There’s one more in my living room with a Clearaudio Basic phono preamp feeding it, driving my Monitor Audio Golds. It makes my old Zep records sound just like 1971, man.

My favorite Z. Vex pedal is the Seek Wah, which functions like an array of sequencer-triggered wah-wah pedals. If you have no idea what that might mean, or you just want to see the Seek Wah in action, there is a video demo on the Z. Vex site, complete with charmingly geeky commentary from Zachary Vex himself. It’s an amazingly cool gadget.

In 1985, when I was a sophomore at Bloomington High School South in Bloomington, Indiana, my English teacher gave us one of those assignments that all students dread: an oral report. I was 16 then, with long, Allman Brothers-style hair and a potentially tinnitus-causing obsession with playing loud rock guitar. Sometimes I’d drive home at lunch, five minutes each way, just to play my guitar at bone-crushing volume for 15 minutes before heading back to my boring classes.

My English teacher’s assignment was an oral report on a book of our choice. I had no trouble selecting a book, because I had just read the definitive work on one of my favorite topics: Led Zeppelin. Stephen Davis’s cheesy Led Zep biography, Hammer of the Gods, had just been published, and I probably read it front to back the day it came out. (I still have my copy, and it’s a first edition!)

To make my report more entertaining—and, possibly, to deflect some of my anxiety about having to speak in front of my classmates, when I might accidentally get, I don’t know, a boner or something—I showed up to school that day with a boombox and a cassette of Led Zeppelin II cued to the first track. When it was my turn to stand before the class, I walked to the front of the room, pressed play on the boombox, and delivered my report to the sounds of “Whole Lotta Love.” I even paused my reading during the guitar solo so everyone could listen to it. Was I a dork? Yes, yes, I was. Did I like to get the Led out? Yes I said yes I did Yes.

My report was a big hit with the class. I still have my hard copy of it, all creased and faded and dog-eared. A couple of times in the last few years I’ve re-created that English-class performance in front of audiences here in New York, complete with the “Whole Lotta Love” accompaniment. The first performance was at one of the great John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book Lectures; the second was at Lindsay Robertson’s inaugural Ritalin Reading in March 2004.

I’ll post the text of the report after the jump.

The picture below was taken in late 1986, during auditions for my school’s battle of the bands. My group was a power trio, and I was the singer and guitarist. We did three songs at that battle of the bands: “Scuttle Buttin’” and “Lovestruck Baby” by Stevie Ray Vaughan (my hero) and “Red House” by Jimi Hendrix. Guess what: We won the damn thing, and there was actually some decent competition. I have this performance on videotape, and it is fun to watch. Don’t ask me to tell you the name of that band, because I won’t tell you. It’s too embarrassing. Anyway, don’t I look like a ROCK STAR? Check out the Led Zep shirt I’m wearing.

A few friends who’ve seen this picture tell me that my haircut is a mullet, but I have to disagree. The sides aren’t short enough for it to qualify as a mullet. Am I right, people? I am so right.

(Here is what I look like now, and here is what some of my guitar playing sounds like now.)

[Continue reading "Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot"...]

In June 2004, a woman named MiRi “Sonyk-Rok” Park won the 2004 U.S. Air Guitar Championship with a rendition of Eddie Van Halen’s riffing in “Hot for Teacher.” A week or two later, she performed her rendition on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. The Air Guitar U.S.A. website (which I discovered through a Flavorpill link to Aireoke) has video of Park’s Conan appearance, and it’s a travesty: Though the cascade of notes in the intro is one of the more famous examples of Eddie’s pioneering two-handed-tapping technique, and in fact is impossible to play any other way, Park keeps her right hand down at her right hip the whole time, as if she’s playing her invisible guitar the standard way. I suppose an air guitar performance is meant to be an interpretation, not a literal recreation of all the relevant techniques, but this is a disgrace!!! Are there no standards in the world of professional air guitar? Is there no honor? Would someone interpreting Murray Perahia at the Air Piano U.S.A. Championship get away with performing using feet on the keyboard instead of hands? I seriously doubt it!!!