But would you have refused to buy that guitar if it looked a little more different than a Fender Stratocaster?
You clearly aren't bothered by it having a different headstock shape, Suhr could and probably will just change the body shape a little bit and it would be fine.
Ibanez sells tons of guitars like this. They're double cutaway guitars that are kind of similar to the Stratocaster shape, but they are uniquely different and still loved.
The weirdest thing is someone who hates Fender and won't buy a Fender but simultaneously demands that their guitar looks so close to a Fender that it would be in danger of infringing.
This is completely true, and there's a good reason.
Almost everything anyone has tried to do to modernize electric guitars in a non-compatible way has had big downsides.
Almost any guitar with a pre-amp or whatever built into it that would allow it to use a cable like an XLR cable ends up needing batteries in the guitar, which then introduce a maintenance/failure point. And very often efforts to introduce this stuff haven't sounded great.
The only place this has kind of changed is super high gain guitars for metal. They are more likely to use active pickups, they'll have a battery, but they still use standard cabling for compatibility.
Anything that is modernized ends up being more expensive and harder to work on yourself. A basic guitar like a Strat or Tele has incredibly simple electronics and is super easy for any guitar player to learn to fix themselves, and most of the parts inside are super cheap. And it all just works really well.
And the audience never cares, they care about the notes you choose to play and the message the musician cares to get across.
I play guitar, I own a Fender guitar and a Fender amp, along with another non-fender amp and 2 other non Fender guitars.
I'm just super sick of hearing about this story. Guitar players online are way too worked up about this. Fender is being annoying, but there is no way I'm getting rid of my Fender guitar or amp over this, and there is no way any of this would stop me from buying another one.
The Fender shapes just don't need to be copied at all. I live near a famous boutique type shop. They may have some boutique guitars that rip off the shapes of Fenders, it's been tolerated, but they have a lot of guitars that don't rip off Fender shapes and many of them are really great guitars.
Too many players are acting like the sky is falling if Fender wins with any of this stuff. The sky is not going to fall. We'll go back to the way things used to be where Fender body shapes weren't ripped off so often and it will be fine.
I think some of the doom and gloom is also because too many players are super obsessed with buying more and more guitars all the time. It's all about what is the next purchase as opposed to just enjoying the guitar they have.
I guess I'm showing my age but having read stuff like Michel Abrash's books years ago this article was a bit underwhelming.
Like no one who wrote any code back in the 80s or 90s even for a homebrew game was skipping this stuff, it was in almost every book and tutorial. Stuff like bit shifting was extremely common and a lot of games would have had design choices that were informed by coding challenges. Lots and lots of code had data structures aligned on byte/word boundaries or had data massaged to fit into the limits of hardware in order to make reads happen in a certain # of cycles, etc.. certainly almost all console games had lots and lots of fascinating design choices like this.
This game may have been exceptionally well optimized but it feels like if the original code is not in the public domain these weren't the best examples.
When he started writing about their being a clean sheet re-implementation I thought there was going to be a benchmark comparison of the modern rewrite vs the original on old hardware or something, that would have been interesting.
Thankfully or not I'm just barely young enough that I never had to write anything professional in assembly, though if I had gone into games maybe I would have.
The only problem with Chromebooks and the whole Google educational toolchain is it ruins school!
My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.
Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.
A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound.
If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects.
There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered).
E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.
There are certainly guitarists who can play simultaneous melodies.
If you're limiting to a 6 string guitar the distance between the two melodies would be limited compared to a piano but guitars don't have to be limited to 6 strings.
Classical guitar is full of this kind of thing.
Having taken piano lessons but being more into guitar I think the thing is almost all people who play piano are introduced to this and it is a core concept in far more piano music than guitar music. But it is not impossible on guitar, and many works for piano that get adapted to guitar require the player to do so.
E.x. there are plenty of players who have studied and played the Well Tempered Clavier on guitar.
The whole thing about people being defensive is interesting. I love techno, but anyone who has learned other styles of music recognizes the repetitiveness and quirks of a lot of techno and some other electronic genres.
They do a great job with changing their timbre and tones but often ignore a bunch of other factors that make music interesting. Whether that is the rarity of time signatures other than 4/4, the way certain rhythms are locked into certain genres, the choices of keys used, the limited or missing chords, etc.. at some point you start hearing two electronic songs that sound totally different at a superficial level and you realize they're incredibly derivative of each other.
LOL. Las Vegas water prices are ridiculously low for the paltry amount of water they have. It's hard to get people to not waste the water when the price is artificially kept low.
Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.
I still have an expensive Canon dedicated slide/film scanner from 20 years ago.
IIRC at some point their value started going up as they became rare.
Mine did something like 50MP scans of 35mm film/slides. The quality was more than enough.
But it was painfully slow.
This thing is not 100x faster, so I think it's still painfully slow. If it takes 5 minutes to do a roll of 24 that still means someone with hundreds of rolls needs to have a lot of time on their hands.
Not sure I can actually figure out software to get my old one to work FWIW, but I don't think I care to deal with it, I have a big enough mess dealing with the ~200k digital photos that are already on disk.
Another reason that this matters (which is artificial) is that at least in the US so many car owners are on "permanent car payments".
They never pay off their cars and trade them in on another one and just keep making payments without really ever owning a car outright. And increasingly as prices have gone up they are trading cars in that they are underwater on, rolling old debt into the next loan!
If you're in this category of insane financial ignorance trying to appear rich but actually being "car poor" of course this resale is a huge problem. But for anyone who buys a car outright or pays off their loan and then drives the car for many years it's not a problem at all whether you bought new or took advantage of the massive depreciation and bought a lightly used one for a great price.
The Fahrenheit scale is European, not American. It was created in Poland well before the United States broke off from Great Britain. We're just slow to change.
People will grumble switching from Slack to Teams but it won't actually mess up the business.
Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.
We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..
You clearly aren't bothered by it having a different headstock shape, Suhr could and probably will just change the body shape a little bit and it would be fine.
Ibanez sells tons of guitars like this. They're double cutaway guitars that are kind of similar to the Stratocaster shape, but they are uniquely different and still loved.
The weirdest thing is someone who hates Fender and won't buy a Fender but simultaneously demands that their guitar looks so close to a Fender that it would be in danger of infringing.