Posts

Peguinland 25

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In early 2015, in what turned out to be the last article for about 10 years, I wrote: “I started Electric Penguinland as a series of notes-to-self, to write up things that were difficult to discover online.” From 2011 to 2015 (often with quite long gaps) there was a theme, around Linux and music (particularly guitars), and it ran out. I’d got things set up to suit me, there was no point getting more equipment or building even more guitars while I was still trying to learn to play. (Before that 2015 post I’d put up a teaser photo for a second build I did in 2014). In 2016 I broke my wrist and, by the time I was able to comfortably play guitar again, I’d gone backwards enough that relearning everything was just too frustrating. I still mess about sometimes, but I’d moved on to other things. For mostly the same reasons I drifted out of involvement with Fedora Jam, it was no longer something I needed. Meanwhile, Penguinland got dusty. Sometimes a comment might turn up from someone it h
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Peaceful tuning, Pacifica 112

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Hello again! It's been over a year since my last post (Pure Drumming) . I started Electric Penguinland as a series of notes-to-self, to write up things that were difficult to discover online. I'm glad people have found the odd thing I've posted useful, so I'm picking up with the article that I was planning to start last year with: replacing the tuners on a Yamaha Pacifica.
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2015

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 Electric Penguinland Will Return...
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Pure drumming

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All too often I find ways to distract myself when I've intended to do some guitar practice. Recently I thought it would be nice to create some drum tracks to play with. "No problem!" You say, "Use Hydrogen ." This is a start, but what if you don't know much about drumming and find clicking beats on a track comes out a bit flat? The first thing to come to mind was to try some MIDI pads, but that seemed like overkill, especially when something with buttons on it was much closer to hand—my Xbox 360 controller.
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MathJax posts

My posts on the string bend calculator used MathJax to display the equations used. But I ended up struggling a while to get them to work on mobile devices. The problem is this: typically MathJax loading needs to go into the document head, but that means editing your blog template.
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Making the pitch - tuning

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Guitar pitch pipes, Wikimedia If you play guitar then you need to tune it from time to time, unless you're deeply in to experimental music.
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Bending with Dojo part 1: Maths rock

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One of the distinctive sounds of the guitar is bending notes, pushing or pulling the string sideways across the fretboard to raise its pitch. Santana's Samba Pa Ti and Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond have classic examples, but whether you're listening to BB King or Noel Gallagher it'll show up from time to time. But guitar strings are steel, they can't stretch that much can they? Some people have trouble believing this and think there must be 'give' somewhere else, but a guitar string is thin and long and really can stretch, so I thought I'd put together a string bend calculator to show how. Using it should be self explanatory, this series of posts is about what's happening under the hood.
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