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.
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.
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.
