{"id":2110,"date":"2009-06-10T21:26:14","date_gmt":"2009-06-11T04:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/wordpress\/?p=2110"},"modified":"2009-06-10T21:28:23","modified_gmt":"2009-06-11T04:28:23","slug":"nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/uncategorized\/nostalgia","title":{"rendered":"nostalgia.."},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I’ve been reading about assorted musical instrument technologies that were old before I was born. I can’t remember how I got started, but the best find this time was the optigan<\/a>, a 70’s era sample-playback organ that worked by storing the music optically on a disk – sort of like analog film soundtrack, only laid out like a record. Truly funny. I also got interested in the Mellotron – and reading about same – and the Hammond B3. (My ultimate studio would probably have a B3 sitting right next to a Yamaha C7 baby grand. Since I can’t afford either one, I use electronic versions instead). I learned lots of fun things about the innards of the B3 at the Hammond Wiki<\/a>, including that most B3s (apparently the instruments I’ve played were atypical) have a startup sequence involving holding down a start switch until the tonewheel assembly gets up to speed, and then switching over to the run switch to let the synchronous motor take over. By the way, I still think that Boston’s ‘Walk On’ album is the final word in awesomeness when it comes to the B3. And by the way, yay mechanical tone generators!<\/p>\n

I also read about the Ondes Martenot<\/a>, a rather impressive little synthesizer for it’s day – I especially like their idea of using different speaker configurations with unusual things in front of them (gongs, sympathetic resonators) to change the character of the tone. I drooled a bit over the mighty Wurlitzer theater organ (they just don’t have enough places where a amataur can try these things out!), got a good laugh out of the Wurlitzer side man<\/a>. (I’ve got to meet this Pea Hix character, if only I can convince him I’m cool enough to be worth hanging out with ;-)), and just generally enjoyed a nice bout of nostalgia for electric instruments that were old before I was born.<\/p>\n

Those of you who follow this blog regularly will remember my nostalgia-fests over The Set<\/a>, a old TV repairman’s successful endeavor to restore the first-ever NTSC TV receiver to operation, and of course my ongoing fascination (some day I’m probably going to buy one) with the CED Videodisc format<\/a>. For those of you who missed out on that last one, it’s a example of geekery gone wrong at it’s finist – it was a competitor to the VCR that stored video on a disk that was read by a mechanical (or quasi-mechanical, since ideally the pickup never touched the grooves) playback head.<\/p>\n

I also, along the way, discovered 8 track heaven<\/A>, which among other things lists bands that are still releasing their works on 8-track tape. As in those clunky cartridges with a continuous loop tape inside. Oddly tempting, that..<\/p>\n

I wonder what interesting bits of nostalgia I’ll come across next? Anyway, thanks to the authors of all those sites for keeping little bits of our geek history alive.<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah.. I remember one thing I wanted to whine about: Geocities is shutting down, AOL hometown already has. AOL hometown – what AOL did with the free web pages hosted by all the ISPs that it absorbed in the early 90s – had many thousands of fascinating pages. All gone. AOL pulled the plug with less than a month’s notice. Jason Scott from textfiles.com did a good job of describing the carnage<\/a> and also suggesting a solution<\/a> that may help prevent future carnage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I’ve been reading about assorted musical instrument technologies that were old before I was born. I can’t remember how I got started, but the best find this time was the optigan, a 70’s era sample-playback organ that worked by storing the music optically on a disk – sort of like analog film soundtrack, only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}