WindWorks Design/Blog

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=287_1263926554 - Digital Guitar Uses no Frets, Strings
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The Misa Digital Guitar, an open source, Linux-powered MIDI controller, brings shredding to the 21st century by dumping traditional guitar strings for buttons and a futuristic touch screen.

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Our good friend Bob Norton of Norton Music has a beautiful new nickel plated tenor sax.  Check it out at:  http://www.nortonmusic.com/macsax.html.  It’s a MacSax.

The following was all set to publish when we discovered that TechTubeValves has gone out of business.  How sad.  We just had the rebirth of Mullard, in the old original Mullard factory, and now they are gone, along with the cool video.  Sorry they didn’t last long enough for us to get this posted.

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A friend of mine, Joe B., shared the following with me – a film that shows in incredible detail the manufacture of Mullard vacuum tubes.  Ths film is a bit long, and the first 10min or so just talk about factory sites and growth of the industry.  But the really interesting part is the very careful step-by-step filming of the manufacturing process.  I loved this, because always great seeing mechanical assembly machines from the golden age of manufacturing.  I had never seen a tube being made before – just the results after I dropped one!  So I hope you can spare 30min and enjoy this film as much as I did.
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Link no longer works, but provided as a reference:

http://www.techtubevalves.com/about_us/film_reels.php
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From the Tom Baldwin Stage Lighting Tech Pages, I really like the pinout diagrams for various products that use XLR connectors.  These pages cover 3-pin, 4-pin, and 5-pin XLR, as well as other popular connectors.  Neat stuff.

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Stage Lighting Tech Pages

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Connector Pinout Page

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Many people ask us about the music we play.  Nearly everyone at WindWorks Design plays a musical instrument. Two on the staff have been playing Elizabethan and Baroque music for over 10 years now, under the name Bard’s Baroque.

What about others at WindWorks Design?  Check out the biography page .

Jay Walker:   “Once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to it’s original shape”.

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Image from http://www.wired.com.

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from everyone here at WindWorks Design and WindSynth.net.   May your holidays be bright, and may we all have a terrific 2010.

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Need to mic a piano? There are many good techniques published in various magazines, books, and on the web.  My favorite is described nicely in this excellent article from Sound on Sound titled: Piano Principles.

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Also consider the Helpinstill piano pickup.  This is a trio of pickups built like a guitar pickup – a coil and magnet that senses the string vibrations directly instead of acoustically.  This eliminates feedback and microphone bleed.  On the downside, it also eliminates some of the body resonances and timbre from the specific piano, which is the true richness of any great grand piano.  But if you use the Helpinstill piano pickup combined with acoustic mics, you can have the best of both worlds.  Electric pickups to capture the primary piano sound, and the acoustic mics for the nuances of the piano’s acoustics.

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The Helinstill pickukp brings the three sensors together into a single local mixer box that allows you balance the three sensors.  Then you have only one XLR input going to your console, in addition to any acoustic mics.

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Here’s a blues musician we just discovered, Bob Murphy, who writes and records his own music.  The guitar is great, the songs are great, but it’s the harmonica parts that really stood out.  We recommend you give a listen:  www.soundclick.com/bobmurphy.  My favorite harmonica part is the intro to the song “Love is Over Blues” from www.coundclick.com/erinmurphy.  There’s a huge harmonica bend right in the beginning that’s truly outstanding.  Great performance!

Here’s a simple table of ampacity ratings for common wire gauges.  This is for lengths of twenty-five feet or less, typical extension cord construction.

10 AWG  :  30 Amps

12 AWG  :  20 Amps

14 AWG  :  15 Amps

16 AWG : 13 Amps

18 AWG :  10 Amps

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