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GM Arts – Music Guitar Science

This site is offered in the hope that readers will better understand electric guitar technology, leading to creative use of your musical tools. Of course, only practice will improve your musical vocabulary and articulation….

GM Arts – Music Guitar Science

“Hello World! I live in Adelaide, South Australia, and my interests are electric guitar, playing live music, writing MIDI sequences, programming in Visual Basic, dabbling in electronics, with a casual interest in popular science. I have some years of experience in these fields, and use these Web pages to share my knowledge freely. ..”

GM Arts - Music Guitar Science

Electric Guitar

Most musical instruments and their amplification systems, such as those used for public address (PA), recording and hi-fi are designed to reproduce sound as accurately as possible. Electric guitar and its amplification is completely different: every item in the guitar signal chain is designed to modify the raw guitar signal in some way.

  • Guitar Amplifiers – valves vs transistors, some overdrive circuit ideas.
  • Guitar Pickups – get the most out of them alone and in combination,
  • MIDI Music – A guide on MIDI messages, circuit for a PC-MIDI interface.

Related Resources –

  • Pickup Winder Web Page
  • Overdrive schematics – partial designs
  • Pickup wiring and switching ideas
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Coprolite Homebrew Computer Construction

The first microcontroller I became fascinated with was the 8048 (and 8748). This site has a lot of info on the 8048 and Z80, including an 8048 Development System.

Coprolite Homebrew Computer Construction

“The roadside attraction of this site is the Z-80 Homebrew Computer. This was a project that I started in 1980. I moved many, many times between 1983 and 1996, and the project often was shut up in a trunk. In some cases I lost (or gave away) most of my equipment and parts.”

Coprolite Homebrew Computer Construction

“The first PC that I interfaced the homebrew computer to was a Toshiba 8086 laptop. This was back when it was just on a breadboard during the summer of ’91. This was also when I built the front panel. These days, I use a uClibc GIAGD system, but there are a lot of old XTs and even newer systems that can be put to good use to control random projects like this. ”

“I use a book called 80×86 IBM PC and Compatible Computers: Assembly Language, Design, and Interfacing Volume I and II by Muhammad Ali Mazidi and Janice Gillispie Mazidi for the nitty gritty stuff on the printer ports, which is where I found the above very cool debug test. It has many details on the design and Interfacing of PCs. Another good book is Parallel Port Complete by Jan Axelson.”

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Fritzing is Product Design or EDA in Simplicity

“Fritzing is an EDA – Electronic Design Automation software with a low entry barrier, suited for the needs of designers and artists. It uses the metaphor of the breadboard..”

Fritzing is Product Design or EDA in Simplicity

“in the spirit of Processing and Arduino, developing a tool that allows users to document their Arduino and other electronic-based prototypes, and to create a PCB layout for manufacturing.”

Fritzing Starter Kit to start learning Arduino

What do you get? The ultimate beginners book teaches you everything you need to know through a series of practical–yet playful–exercises. And that playfulness is the key! There is a paper robot who can turn his head; a fortune teller who is (of course) never wrong (no guarantee on that); a dinosaur who relays the news on your Twitter stream and a pong game on a big LED matrix display.

Fritzing Starter Kit to start learning Arduino

Fritzing’s goal is to provide easy tools for documenting and sharing physical computing projects, producing layouts for Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) and teaching electronics.