Monday 25 August 2008

Repairing the Rhodes

Acquiring a Rhodes piano (not mine, but I desperately wanted it to work to record) gave me the opportunity recently to do something I've kind of had on my mind for a few years now.

I wanted to fix it. The last time I seriously used it, I had to be tactical about the chord inversions I used to lay down the grooves, as some of the keys didn't sound.

This is no way to play a musical instrument, of course, and so I was driven to find out what the problem was and work out how to fix it.

I knew that the mechanism itself was fine, because lifting the lid revealed hammers which were mobile and smooth, hitting the tines squarely and firmly. So, the problem had to be either with the tines (the metal rods which vibrate when struck by the hammers and whose motion is converted into an acoustic signal by pickups) or with the pickups themselves.

Moving a tine assembly to a note which did not work revealed that the tine didn't work in this position, thereby proving that the pickup was to blame and not the tine.

Fitting them was a little tricky, but I now have a Rhodes with the main part of the scale perfectly intact. There are a few keys which still don't work but I never really heard the top octave or so of a Rhodes being skilfully played before, so I've left them alone. I have spare pickups if I ever decide to use these notes.

Of course, this is just one part of the process of getting everything sorted out properly. Pickups in place, I now wanted to 'voice' it, this being the process of getting the notes to sound the way I wanted them to.

You may know the closing bars of Donald Fagen's 'New Frontier' from his 1981 album 'Nightfly'. If you haven't heard it, buy it. It is some of the best produced and played Rhodes piano I've ever heard.

Next on the agenda, new hammer tips for the whole range of keys. I think this is the way to go for that consistent sound as some of the keys sound loads better and it's not down to pickups.

I'm working (gradually) on a music website, but that might be even further away than a well-tuned Rhodes.

But watch this space..!

Tuesday 19 August 2008

America King of the Hill in Beijing

The Americans have been doing really well in the Olympics. At the time of writing, they're top of the medal table.

Yes, that's right. Have a look here. They are top of the league. Well above China. Despite picking up more bronze medals than any other country, that is.

Now I don't want to demean the efforts of any Bronze winning athletes out there but if an athlete is honest with themselves, they will know that such medals aren't really what winning is all about. It's a nice gesture and it is something to be proud of, worthy of the hard work they must undoubtedly have put in.

However, promoting an image of their country based on people who came second or third is evidently and historically irreconcilable with Fox's s representation of the greatest nation on earth. In the real medal table, of course, China reigns supreme with America and England coming in second and third.

But America being second will not do, so long as there is some way for Fox to fix the tables to make it appear otherwise.

So, it falls to Fox to manipulate the facts to suit their delusions of national grandeur. I'm sure that intelligent Americans will only cynically acknowledge Fox's attempts to represent their country this way and realise that it would be better to count only the actual wins, while of course praising the efforts of the rest of the field.

If Fox were to be honest with themselves and dared to apply this mentality truthfully, boldly and with no exceptions, would they count America as a winner if they picked up a silver in the war on terror?

Wednesday 6 August 2008

Why is Wikipedia not automated?

That might sound odd.

But I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to have Wikipedia spider itself with a view to turning more words in its articles blue. If someone puts a page up about a given subject, say the Waterloo Monument, would it not make sense to have Wikipedia—in its spare time, when it's not serving articles—to linkify articles that have the words 'Waterloo Monument' in them.

I think it's a good thing of course to have it human-edited, because machines don't yet have the common sense that seems to avoid the George W. Bushes of this world. But give it time.

In fact, would having a self-modifying database such as Wikipedia be maybe the first step towards a computer intelligence? If Wikipedia is supposed to be a neutral repository, there should be no cases of corporate competition or litigation. Most of the pages I've read have [citation needed] or [This section does not meet Wikipedia's guidelines for neutrality] and other such human generated directives.

Surely, if these directives are followed (and there is no reason why they shouldn't be. The world is editing it, after all) would it make sense to leave the editing to the humans and the linking to Wikipedia's future algorithms?