social.noyu.me

i gave in to temptation, i returned to my bullshit and am now firmly Back On It

i pressed the button and bought the fucking rock band 3 squier stratocaster. the only strat with a single hexaphonic pickup, electrically conductive segmented frets and midi din output. the Cyborg

‪the folks behind the rock band series, harmonix, were truly insane. they tried to make rock band into a guitar teaching tool. and they somehow fucking convinced fender to make a guitar with an integrated midi system in order to achieve that. one that ISN'T based on pitch tracking‬

‪i'm just so fascinated by this thing and there's nothing else like it. what other guitar can plug directly into my roland sc-7, uses low-tech low-latency electromechanical tracking, transmits accelerometer tilt as pitch bend and has face buttons for sending a midi program change‬

‪cyborg really is the correct word to describe it… just like my other favourite tomboyish anime girl, this guitar is a hybrid with wires in places a guitar is not meant to have wires, an ethical conundrum; she cannot be uncyborged without killing her, she must be loved‬

oh right while it is a single-pickup strat (lmao) i wonder if it could be modded to have a middle pickup without interfering with the midi system………

ahhh the main circuit board is hiding behind where a middle pickup would be. perhaps not impossible but certainly a more involved modification

i have reached the stage of autisming about this thing that i now start to understand the design decisions

i really need to push myself to write and produce blog posts or videos about stuff, there's so many journeys i'd love to take people on

@hikari doooooo it

@hikari also, you in particular probably *do* need to figure out some combination of CSS and/or JS to reproduce the "microblog threading" pacing of writing -- now that we've been doing writing a lot more intentionally, it *is* a distinct style from more traditional long-form writing (either personal blogs or technical deep-dives)

@hikari maybe worth a youtube video then?

@shift_reset haha great minds think alike https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01JNBN9KFT4H96GD5CQANDS2H4 (i composed this before seeing your reply)

@hikari
Oh you would enjoy Latour's works on cyborgs

@hikari Harmonix was flying *way* too close to the sun in the RB3 era but at least they left us these fascinating wings after they fell lmao

@hikari lmao well I hope you enjoy it!

@hikari I gotta admit if I hadn’t actually had one it likely would have been a weird ass white whale for me too

@hikari I think I probably don’t even own the fucking midi translator box that makes it talk to RB3 anymore lol, so while I bought strings for it recently because I don’t *own* another electric guitar, I haven’t had the motivation to actually put them on haha. (I play acoustic regularly and recently bought a *fantastic* little Washburn but occasionally I get an electric itch)